North Korean Policy Elites - Defense Technical Information Center

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The North Korean government is neither a monolith nor a “black box.” It is a semiprivatized
amorphous collection of rivaling immobile organizations and stove-piped
bureaucracies that often act at cross purposes and are pressed hard and corrupted by the
individual and group interests of competing clans, and social and political forces vying for power,
prestige, and wealth invested by the Dear Leader. North Korean policy-makers are rational and
very predictable, whether one likes or dislikes their actions.
Kim Jong Il is the absolute monarch presiding over the Byzantine Court on the Taedong
River. This court encompasses at least six immediately related families (1+2+3), all competing
for the emperor’s attention, devotion, and favors, and jockeying for position in the event of post-
Kim Jong Il succession.
Five major political forces, affecting all spheres of the North Korean life - namely the
national security establishment, the old guard, the technocrats, the local vassals, and the
compatriots - approach the “extended family clan” with their own visions for national
development and policy recommendations for the burning issues of the day, and attempt, with
different degrees of success, to penetrate and influence the Kim “family court” in order to ensure
the representation of their corporate interests at the heart of national decision-making at the time
of political succession.
These five “transmission belts” connect the “hub” of the North Korean policymaking
- the Dear Leader and Supreme Commander-in-Chief Kim Jong Il - with the “outer
circle” of the North Korean elites - the brain-feeding tubes at the center and in provinces, who
also constitute the “protective belt,” absorbing external shocks and safe-guarding the regime
from mass discontent.
Party membership serves as an entry ticket into the elite club, but increasingly it is taken
for granted and is no longer sufficient for the new nomenclature. Access to state assets, prestige,
and power, accumulation of private wealth, or government licensing authority is a must to
qualify for the new elite status. Among the members of the same interest-based establishment,
there may exist significant value gaps on the ideological continuums from conservative to liberal
and from moderate to radical. But, different “transmission belts” tend to articulate and aggregate
divergent strategic priorities and policy preferences among the North Korean elites.
IV-S-1