Kim Jong Il

Kim Jong Il was a passionate cinephile with a personal film library of over 15,000 titles. After joining the Workers' Party Propaganda and Agitation Department in 1966, he became director of the Motion Picture and Arts Division and steered North Korean cinema toward a unified narrative of Kim Il Sung's anti-Japanese struggle. In 1973 he published On the Art of the Cinema, a treatise applying Juche ideology to artistic creation. Its core 'seed theory' sought to ground all creative work in a single ideological foundation. The book became the authoritative text on North Korean filmmaking and also served as a political instrument to establish his cultural authority as heir apparent.

Dissatisfied with the quality of North Korean films, Kim took a more drastic step. In 1978, legendary South Korean director Shin Sang-ok was abducted in Hong Kong, six months after his former wife and star actress Choi Eun-hee had been seized. After three years of imprisonment, the couple was reunited and Kim ordered them to make films that would win international recognition. Shin directed seven films from 1984 to 1985, including An Emissary of No Return and Runaway; Choi won Best Actress at the Moscow International Film Festival for Salt.

The culminating work was Pulgasari (1985), a kaiju film intended as North Korea's answer to Godzilla. A metal-eating monster helps peasants overthrow a tyrannical regime, only to be destroyed when the girl who created it sacrifices herself to stop it from devouring their tools. Many viewers interpreted the film as a veiled political allegory. In 1986, while in Vienna ostensibly to discuss international distribution, Shin and Choi escaped their North Korean handlers and sprinted into the U.S. embassy to request political asylum. During the escape, Choi's secretly recorded tapes became the first audio evidence of Kim Jong Il personally ordering the kidnappings.

When Kim Il Sung died in July 1994, Kim Jong Il had been prepared as successor for nearly twenty years: designated within the party in 1974, and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army since December 1991. What he inherited, however, was the worst crisis in the republic's history. Onto an economy that had lost its fuel, fertilizer, and export markets at a stroke with the collapse of the Soviet bloc came the great floods of 1995 and 1996.

North Korea named the years of food shortage and famine in the mid-to-late 1990s the Arduous March, after the ordeal of the anti-Japanese guerrillas. This period, with a death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands, was the darkest trial the republic had known. After three years of rule under his father's testament, Kim Jong Il was elected General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea in October 1997 and led the state as Chairman of the National Defence Commission under the revised constitution of 1998.

The line he proclaimed was Songun, army-first politics: sustaining the state in crisis with the People's Army as the main force of the revolution. Amid international isolation, sanctions, and the nuclear standoff with the United States, the system survived in defiance of repeated predictions of collapse.

On 13 June 2000, Kim Jong Il stood at the foot of the aircraft steps at Pyongyang's Sunan airport to greet President Kim Dae-jung of the South in person. It was the first time in half a century of division that the leaders of the two Koreas had clasped hands. Three days of talks produced the June 15 Joint Declaration: independent resolution of the unification question, reunions of separated families, and economic and social cooperation.

The declaration was followed by Mount Kumgang tourism, the Kaesong industrial complex, the reconnection of the Gyeongui railway and road, and repeated reunions of separated families. In October 2007 President Roh Moo-hyun walked across the military demarcation line on his way to Pyongyang, and the two leaders agreed in the October 4 Declaration on more concrete cooperation, including pursuit of a declaration ending the Korean War and a special peace and cooperation zone in the West Sea.

Kim Jong Il died on 17 December 2011 aboard his train at the start of a guidance tour. The precedent of inter-Korean summits he established was taken up again in the meetings of 2018. His legacy remains twofold: a leader deeply engaged with cinema and the arts, and a leader who preserved his state through its harshest crisis.

The origins of North Korea's nuclear weapons development stretch back to the Yongbyon reactor in the 1980s, but the decisive phase opened in 1994, the year Kim Jong Il inherited power. In October 1994, three months after Kim Il Sung's death, North Korea and the United States signed the Agreed Framework: the North would freeze its graphite-moderated reactor program and remain in the NPT; in return, the U.S. would provide two light-water reactors and heavy fuel oil.

The agreement collapsed in 2002. When the Bush administration confronted the North over a clandestine uranium enrichment program, Pyongyang declared the Agreed Framework void and expelled IAEA inspectors. In January 2003, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Six-Party Talks, bringing together China, the United States, Japan, Russia, and the two Koreas, followed. But no fundamental settlement was reached.

On 9 October 2006, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test at Punggye-ri in Kilju County, North Hamgyong Province. The yield was estimated at less than one kiloton and some experts judged it a partial failure, but North Korea became the eighth state to openly test a nuclear weapon. A more powerful second test followed in May 2009. The most enduring element of Kim Jong Il's legacy was that, through the Arduous March and international isolation, he made North Korea a de facto nuclear-armed state.