Can the North Korean regime survive Kim Jong Il?

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken E. Gause
Keyword(s):  
The North ◽  
Kim Jong Il ◽  
North Korean Regime

Hybrid in Form, Socialist in Content: The Formal Politics of Chŏlga in the North Korean Revolutionary Opera Sea of Blood

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-445
Author(s):  
STEPHEN JOHNSON
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
The North ◽  
Kim Jong Il ◽  
Analytical Standards ◽  
Korean Nation

AbstractKim Jong Il considered the 1971 premiere of the opera Sea of Blood a watershed moment in opera history. He lauded its innovative use of chŏlga (‘stanzaic song’) rather than aria and recitative. By Western analytical standards, however, chŏlga is simple and predictable, so scholars have thus far glossed over its conventions and their signification. This article instead argues that chŏlga conventions exhibit cultural hybridity and that Kim leveraged such hybridity to advocate a modern, popular, and national sound for North Korea. I begin by outlining hybrid characteristics of colonial-era popular music that chŏlga inherited. I then explore Kim's engagement with such trends in his speeches on chŏlga and demonstrate that cultural hybridity was central to his understanding of sonic modernity. Finally, I analyse a scene from Sea of Blood that pits chŏlga against other music genres, leading to a symbolic victory for the form and for the Korean nation.

Contextualizing Revolutionary Operas

2020 ◽  
pp. 135-158
Author(s):  
Keith Howard
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Kim Il Sung ◽  
The North ◽  
Chinese Model ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Kim Jong Il ◽  
Korean Nationalism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Collective Creation ◽  
The Impact

Chapter 5 is the second of three chapters on “revolutionary operas.” It explores how revolutionary operas reflect and are distinct from parallel genres in the Soviet Union, as well as how they may have been influenced by Chinese model works. It shows how ideology, including Soviet socialist realism and North Korean nationalism, and also collective creation and “seed theory,” is embedded in operas. It discusses the involvement of the North Korean leadership, and in particular Kim Jong Il, in opera creation, and explores the impact of comments made by the leadership after the premieres of the first three operas. The chapter asks what was known about opera in Korea before 1945, offering a discussion of the traditional genre of p’ansori, its twentieth-century ch’anggŭk staged equivalent, and how these two genres—and specific musicians associated with them who moved from Seoul to Pyongyang and continued their careers there into the 1960s—fared. These older forms were effectively stopped dead when Kim Il Sung remarked that they were reminiscent of a time when people traveled by donkey and wore horsehair hats, and, after the five revolutionary operas, they were replaced by “people’s operas” in the new, revolutionary opera mold.

The juche H-bomb? North Korea, nuclear weapons and regime-state survival

2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 1051-1068
Author(s):  
Edward Howell
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
North Korea ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Rogue States ◽  
The North ◽  
North Korean Defectors ◽  
Domestic Level ◽  
North Korean Regime ◽  
State Survival

Abstract Existing scholarship on North Korea's nuclear programme remains overwhelmingly centred around questions of containment or engagement with the North Korean regime-state, amid international calls for denuclearization. Yet, scholarship has rarely interrogated the precise value of nuclear weapons to the regime-state. This article develops a new theoretical framework of nuclear ideology to explore the puzzle of the survival of North Korea. This framework aims to show how the North Korean nuclear programme is deeply entrenched within the state ideology of juche, as one device for continued regime-state survival. Through interviews with elite North Korean defectors and textual analysis of North Korean and international sources, I show that North Korea's nuclear ideology has been constructed according to different frames of meaning, targeting referent actors of international ‘enemy’ powers and domestic audiences. This article concludes that nuclear ideology functions primarily as a tool to arouse domestic legitimacy for the North Korean regime-state, by targeting elite actors within the highly stratified domestic population. From an international perspective, perception of North Korea's survival remains tied largely to the regime-state's physical possession of nuclear weapons. This article has extremely timely theoretical and policy implications given the current ‘dialogue’ between US and North Korean leaders. First, it opens up fruitful avenues of inquiry surrounding questions of the legitimacy of rogue states within international relations. Secondly, this article calls for a more robust understanding of the domestic-level politics of North Korea, in order to understand the regime-state's foreign policy decisions vis-à-vis its nuclear programme.

Coercion or Engagement? A Quantitative Test of the Effect of Regional Actors on North Korean Behaviour 1990–2000

2007 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme A. M. Davies
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Korean Peninsula ◽  
Small Error ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Kim Il Sung ◽  
The North ◽  
Behavioural Patterns ◽  
Kim Jong Il ◽  
The Us

The Korean peninsula is one of the most dangerous places on the planet. Decisions relating to the peninsula are for high stakes, and one small error can potentially result in an enormously destructive war. This article seeks to assess whether strategies of engagement or coercion can improve the chances of North Korea co-operating with either the US or South Korea. Using Vector Autoregression (VAR) techniques I assess the behavioural patterns of the North Korean regime in response to the actions of the states involved in the six-party talks between 1990 and 2000. The article finds that there were dramatic differences between the negotiating strategies employed by both Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in their dealings with both the US and South Korea. The results suggest that, in being able to manipulate US foreign policy, the North Koreans are punching well above their weight and that the chances of a meaningful settlement with the regime of Kim Jong Il are very small.

scholarly journals The Rise and Fall of the Ŭnhasu Orchestra

2018 ◽  
pp. 63-96
Author(s):  
Pekka Korhonen ◽  
Werner Koidl
Keyword(s):  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Korean Society ◽  
Korean Art ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The North ◽  
Kim Jong Il ◽  
Internet Publishing ◽  
Core Class ◽  
Shed Light

The Ŭnhasu Orchestra was a major North Korean ensemble in 2009–2013. It was established by Kim Jong Il (Kim Chŏng’il, 김정일) and was composed of young musicians and singers of both genders, several of them having studied in foreign higher educational institutions in countries like Austria, Italy, Russia and China. Its members represented the core class of the North Korean society. It was ostensibly meant to display the high quality of North Korean art and engage at this level also in international cultural diplomacy, both in terms of physical visits, and in terms of DVD and internet publishing. In addition to domestic concerts, the Ŭnhasu Orchestra performed with visiting Russian artists, and gave a concert in Paris in 2012. The Ŭnhasu Orchestra exemplifies also the problems with regime transition in North Korea. It was so closely tied with the Kim Jong Il regime that the change at the end of 2011 to the Kim Jong Un (Kim Chŏng’un, 김정은) regime did not proceed altogether smoothly. In August 2013 it was disbanded rather abruptly, causing an international uproar, and signalling the beginning of a wave of other purges leading up to the highest leadership levels. The article attempts to shed light on the nature of the Orchestra as a North Korean cultural phenomenon and the reasons for its sudden ending, trying to dispel some of the disinformation surrounding the event.

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