Kim Jong Un chooses teen daughter as heir | Hacker News Reader

Kim Jong Un chooses teen daughter as heir

bbc.com

53 pointsandsoitis33 comments

> News of Ju Ae's existence first emerged through an unlikely source: the American basketball player Dennis Rodman, who revealed to The Guardian newspaper back in 2013 that he "held baby Ju Ae" during a trip to the secretive state.

Man, I had forgotten all about Rodman and his North Korean antics.

This title really needs says Seoul added, as in the original article. NK has made no official announcements.

> South Korea's spy agency told lawmakers on Thursday.

Whether if this is true or not, this speculation isn't "news" unless it is 100% confirmed through various sources. The fact that the South Korea spy agency is the only (unconfirmed) source; there is only quite weak evidence to go with and it remains to be only rumors at this point.

In general, It is completely off-topic here as per the guidelines from [0]

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I watched a documentary a while ago and I think it said that Kim Jong Un's sister plays a big part in maintaining the regime. I wonder if she pulled some strings in this decision to select Kim Ju Ae as heir, perhaps because she's more pliable, or under Kim Yo Jong's thumb. A North Korean patriarchal society probably wouldn't be amenable to a woman telling a male heir what to do.

Maybe she's the mother.

It seems odd he would announce her so early? When did he get announced as the hier to his father?

Also, I know he was Western-educated. Is the plan to send her to school in Europe?

> It seems odd he would announce her so early? When did he get announced as the hier to his father?

In his book Dictator's Handbook [1], de Mesquita explains that transitions from one leader to another is risky because the folks that help keep the leaders in power (e.g., military, and specific persons there-in) may not know if they'll be kept around by the new leader. The new leader may wish to bring in their own people who would be more 'grateful' to them for raising their position.

By indicating things early, everyone can build a 'rapport' with her, and everyone becomes comfortable that the status quo (which everyone at the top is benefiting from) will continue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook

There was no announcement. This is just a conjecture based on Kremlinology (Pyongyangology?) by a South Korean government agency.

They haven't announced anything.

You can send your children abroad if you have never released pictures publicly. His daughter has been in the media so much that it is now impossible for her to be sent abroad discreetely.

Could he if he wanted to? I imagine most places wouldn't take her.

1) To get ahead of any transition drama 2) Because he's sick

That was obvious when he had her walking in front of him months ago leading the charge during some inspections. He doesn't allow anyone to do that.

Considering that the primary source is South Korea's spy agency, I think it's worth taking this news with a grain of salt. When north and south korea release news about each other it is always hard to tell which parts are factual and which parts are propaganda.

That seems plausible. He could have a son who is living elsewhere - just as he himself was brought up outside of North Korea too.

I am very surprised it was not his sister, given her prominent role in recent years on diplomacy, and the Olympics.

How much more of his family has he had executed now?

Since it's the worst dictatorship with nuclear weapons, I guess it's going to take centuries if ever for them to fall

So much suffering there, the stories they get out are absolutely insane

And of course the nighttime lighting sat view says it all about the people vs their oligarchs

> How much more of his family has he had executed now?

Only a couple, they've just been "executed" several times.

Would that make her the first woman to be a communist dictator?

Soong Ch'ing-ling was head of state of China for a while, and Đặng Thị Ngọc Thịnh was president of Vietnam.

Soong Ch'ing-ling was explicitly not Communist as I understand

How progressive!

Well, communist in name only. (I find very little ground for a hereditary monarchy in Marx, or even Lenin.)

It’s a tricky question because she and Kim Jong-un are not dictators by title, it’s the shorthand we and the we use to describe them. Really he is the head of one of the bodies of nominally democratic government that has disproportionate veto power, and there isn’t a mechanism to unseat him.

That makes it a tricky question because it leaves the definition of dictator up to our interpretation. However, there have been female dictators in history that were dictators with less ambiguity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Zetian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_the_Great

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Perón

The question of communism is also largely one of interpretation. If you ask someone who sees communism in a good light, there has never been a true communist state. If you ask anyone else, there isn’t a distinction between communism and repressive dictatorship.

> It’s a tricky question because she and Kim Jong-un are not dictators by title, it’s the shorthand we and the we use to describe them.

This can't be the standard for whether we call someone a dictator. Similarly Stalin held no government title through the 1930s. Would you say it's hard to say whether he was a dictator because he was officially just a party secretary?

My favorite version of this was Deng Xiaoping who by the end of his rule had only one title - Honorary Chairman of the Chinese Contract Bridge Association.

Warning: this is in my mental list of "things to good to check" so it may or may not be true.

I phrased my comment in hopes of avoiding an argument about definitions. It seems like a tedious quibble.

Check out the three dictators I linked. That’s interesting!

The way you phrased it reads very much like you started an argument about definitions.

I think requiring the title of dictator is not how the term is being used these days, on our side of the late Roman republic. It's more of a duck-typing situation now.

I think it's safe to assume the original comment meant it that way.

Never trust news about the DPRK from South Korean spy agencies. It's only a matter of months before it's proven to be nonsense. They're the ones always saying crap like "North Koreans push their trains by hand" or "Kim Jong Un claims to have invented the hamburger." Only the most brainwashed westerners buy it, but it's enough to keep the DPRK hate at a simmer.

Who knows what is true here. But, IF we assume this is true, then it would also mean he has no male heir per se. Which brings us back to the first part ... whether that is true. When Kim was young, he lived in Europe, in particular Switzerland, so perhaps some offspring also live semi under cover.

Would that be true? Perhaps he chose his daughter because she is his eldest heir or because of merit compared to his other children.

This is a hilariously naive take! We have power-hungry leaders in much more visible environments that are nowhere near the dictatorship that NK is, and they don't show any loyalty whatsoever to tradition or pursuit of meritocracy.

Right, it's completely up to Kim personally, so why would he care about the tradition of having a male heir?

Kim Jong Un was his father's fifth child, and he has an older brother.

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