North Korea under Kim Chong-il: Power, Politics, and Prospects for Change by Ken E. Gause (review)

Kim Jong Un’s (Kim Chŏngŭn) purge of his own uncle Chang Sŏngt’aek pushed the question of family politics and factional struggle in P’yŏngyang back onto center stage. The execution seems to have marked a transition from the process of succession to consolidation, but the true extent of Kim Jong Un’s control and abilities as a leader remains hard to decipher. In this context, Ken Gause’s rigorous study of politics during the Kim Jong Il era (Kim Chŏngil), from Kim Il-Sung’s (Kim Ilsŏng) death in 1994 until the year of Kim Jong Il’s own death in 2011, is an illuminating addition to the literature on contemporary Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) political history.

Gause is interested in how Stalinist techniques of bureaucratic despotism combine with dynastic methods of family rule to create the domestic political context for DPRK policymaking. The strength of his analysis is his identification of linkages between elite politics and shifts in economic policy and foreign relations. Along the way, Gause sheds light on the fundamental tension in North Korean strategy between those who prioritize security, which can ensure regime safety but only at the bare minimum level of national survival, versus those pushing for economic development, which offers a more promising future but brings risks inherent in the process of reform and opening. Betraying an analyst’s fondness for detail, especially regarding changes to the nomenklatura, Gause sometimes loses the forest for the trees. Moreover, he offers no major methodological or interpretive innovation. That said, North Korea under Kim Chong-il ranks on the short-list of superb English-language studies of the Kim Jong Il regime that have emerged in the past few years, alongside Heonik Kwon and Byung-ho Chung, Jae-Cheon Lim, Patrick McEachern, Yongho Kim, and others.

For better or worse, almost every researcher on North Korea relies on other varieties of communism, be they Soviet, East European, Chinese, or Southeast Asian, to fill in holes and help provide an overarching framework. Gause comes to the DPRK via a background in Soviet studies and cites Harvard doyen of Cold War kremlinology Merle Fainsod as his intellectual inspiration. In that tradition, North Korea under Kim Chong-il features fascinating examples of how even the dullest state media publications can be mined for insights into backroom leadership struggles. Many North Korean analysts who bring a Soviet lens naturally expect the sudden collapse of the DPRK. To his credit, Gause resists that temptation and provides a balanced picture of the strengths and weaknesses of the regime. He avoids ideology and moralism and offers instead a hardheaded reconstruction of how North Korean politics seem to work in descriptive rather than normative terms. He is never polemical, and the rare, if not only, moment where he advances a suggestion is in the final paragraph of the book where he encourages efforts to draw North Korea out of isolation.

There are no big surprises in the basic narrative provided for the Kim Jong Il era. The story began with Kim Il-Sung’s death, a traumatic post–Cold War moment, and Kim Jong Il’s decision to rely upon the military as guarantor of regime survival and his own succession. Kim Jong Il experimented with economic reforms and launched a foreign relations charm offensive in the 1998–2002 period, but hardliners and isolationists undercut those efforts where they could and a full-scale retrenchment was underway on both the economic and security fronts by 2005.

There is rich detail on personnel reshuffling and Kim family politics. Gause’s attention to the vicissitudes of the career of Chang Sŏngt’aek is especially edifying. Gause describes a complex factional struggle between Jang and Ko Yŏnghŭi, mother of Kim Jong Un, and her allies in the powerful Organization and Guidance Department...