Sung-Yoon Lee The Sister: The Extraordinary Story of Kim Yo Jong, the Most Powerful Woman in North Korea (Pam MacMillan, 2023, xiii + 290 pp, photographs and dynastic tables)
North Korea is one of the most closed and despotic countries in the world. For three generations, since 1945, it has been dominated by a tyrannical dynasty. This compact book brings their story up to date. It is deeply researched and amply referenced. It makes abundantly clear how the regime works and why it is a house of horrors that merits no sympathy of any kind. At the centre of the story told by the author is the long obscure and sinister figure of Kim Jo Yong, younger sister and comrade in tyranny of Kim Jong Un – the man Donald Trump, half a dozen years ago, dubbed ‘Little Rocket Man’.
Why should you read this book? There are several reasons. To begin with, far too many Australians are ignorant of Korea, North and South. Second, North Korea is as rogue a state as they come. It is a true mafia state, which has run a protection racket against South Korea and the outside world for decades, extorting billions and billions of dollars in aid, which it has used only to buttress both its brutal rule and its arsenal. That needs to be absorbed into our common understanding, because we live in an increasingly ominous strategic climate and North Korea is a deeply disturbing actor in the world of 21st century geopolitics.
But you might consider reading it simply because it is an absorbing and dramatic book to read and can be read quickly, since it is clearly and colourfully written and tells a dramatic story as eye-popping as any fiction. A generation ago, about five years on from working as Japan and Koreas desk officer in the Defence Intelligence Organization, I was sitting on a Melbourne tram reading Bruce Cumings’ then newly published general history of Korea since ancient times, Korea’s Place in the Sun (1997), when a young woman sitting opposite me asked politely, ‘Excuse me, but why are you reading that book?’ She was, as it happens, Korean.
‘Why would I not?’ I responded. ‘Well’, she replied, ‘I’ve been in Australia for several years and almost no-one here seems to have any interest in Korea.’ ‘Ah, well’, I offered, ‘I’m interested in everything.’ I made no mention of my previous employment. But I knew she was correct. If you fit that general description, this is a book for you. It’s not an overall history, like Korea’s Place in the Sun. But it is a very good current briefing.
The book brings Kim Yo Jong to life as the scion of one of the most repellent political dynasties in the modern world, but it shows that that dynasty, in recent years, has been fraying. Internal rivalries and disaffection have resulted in a number of defections and several brutal executions or assassinations. The old saying that ‘a House divided against itself cannot stand’ has merit. Unfortunately, so far, this House has withstood every expectation, since the death of its founding patriarch, Kim il Sung, in 1994, that it would either disintegrate or mend its ways.
What The Sister shows is that, though the House may have had its feuds and defections, the fat and unhealthy Kim Jong Un and the slender and ruthless Kim Yo Jong form a team that has played both Seoul and Washington for fools over the years since their late, unlamented father, Kim Jong Il, passed away, in December 2011. She has risen higher and higher in the councils of state, under her brother, and is now heir apparent.
There are several things that Sung-Yoon Lee seeks to impress upon her readers. First, that North Korea is the only one of the world’s nine nuclear states in which there is no check or balance of any kind on the leadership, which continues, at regular intervals, to threaten South Korea, Japan and the United States. Second, that the Kim regime sees its core mission as the reduction of South Korea to its domination, implausible though that is, beginning with the withdrawal of all US forces from the Korean peninsula and from East Asia as a whole. Third, that Kim Yo Jong has been a key player, cool, malicious and vindictive, in the last five years of diplomatic and geopolitical gamesmanship by North Korea to this end.
One of the most telling and unsettling parts of the book, towards the end, is Lee’s dissection of the craven and fruitless appeasement of North Korea by South Korean President Moon Jae In between 2017 and 2022. He and his chief of staff, Im Jong Seok, had both been pro-North Korean agitators back in the 1980s. It is a measure of how democratized South Korea has become since then that it was even possible for them to rise to President and chief of staff in the Blue House forty years later.
But Kim Yo Jong played them sadistically and successfully. Read and be educated. At a time when it is widely urged that we need more women in politics in place of men suffering ‘testosterone poisoning’, this book is a sobering reminder that women, too, can be savage and dangerous.
Paul Monk was head of the Japan and Koreas desk in the Defence Intelligence Organization in the early 1990s, before becoming head of the China desk in 1994. The new edition of his classic text Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China, will be released next month.