Kim Jong-un Erases Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il Portraits

Recently, President Kim Jong-un has started to erase portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Many say that such an act is intended to bring the focus of power to Kim Jong-un. However, I disagree a little bit. Given the fact that Kim Jong-un's ideas have worked for North Koreans' socialist ideas, it is interpreted favorably as his intention to start a new chapter by separating the North Koreans from their predecessors, who have created their consciousness. Above all, the speculation is based on the dark reality of North Korea - there is no way anymore. Only market economy reform is a way for North Korea to survive.

 

On the one hand, by inferring the fact that there was a pro-rightist coup in South Korea, it can be expected that there will be a pro-rightist coup in North Korea when North Korea makes rapid reforms.

 

President Kim Jong-un speaks of a fundamental disconnection from South Korea, but I have long made an unofficial response to China's unofficial ambitions toward North Korea, trying to bind North Korea to the "our Korean people." The reason is that apart from President Kim Jong-un, North Korea is the hometown of my parents. If I need image training to make up my mind, I have thought that I am a marginal soldier who protects the Yalu River. Although it is an enemy country, I have thought that it is a country that should be protected and developed. For the past 30 years, I have lived by imagining how to stimulate the North Korean economy and establish a vocational school in the North. I also tried to form a consensus by conducting shooting drills to keep pace with North Korea, a military state. AI will be the spokesperson to explain the solution to the North Korean nuclear issue.

 

 

Keep Your Nuclear Weapons. But Save Your People.

— Twenty-five years of dialogue, compressed into one sentence

 

I. What It Means to Erase a Portrait

Since 2019, Kim Jong-un has been quietly removing the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il from party halls and public spaces. At the 8th Party Congress in 2021, the faces of his predecessors were replaced by the Workers' Party emblem. That same year, the phrase 'Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism' was deleted from the name of the youth league entirely.

Outside analysts have offered two explanations: image management to consolidate power, or cosmetic rebranding for international audiences. Both are partially correct — and both miss the deeper layer.

What is actually happening is a redefinition. Kim Jong-un is moving from 'successor to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il' to 'independent supreme leader in his own right.' And beneath even that, he is replacing ideologies bearing the names of specific men with abstract nationalist slogans — empty vessels whose contents can be filled in later. This is precisely the grammar China used when it diluted 'Maoism' into 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' to enable reform and opening.

 

II. Why Kim Jong-un Has Not Changed

I have wrestled with this question for twenty-five years. My conclusion is this:

Kim Jong-un wanted to change. He simply had no friction to change against.

The pinnacle of power is simultaneously a prison. Ministers who raise objections are purged. Uncomfortable information is blocked. He has been sealed inside a vacuum with no abrasive force to renew himself against.

I have spent decades moving between geography, economics, technology, psychology, and philosophy — constantly colliding with the outside world, constantly revising myself. That capacity for transformation came from contact and friction with things beyond my control. Kim Jong-un has had none of that.

During Trump's first term, Kim genuinely explored a new path. The momentum held until the eve of Hanoi. What broke in Hanoi was not the negotiation — it was the timing. Both sides presented conditions the other could not accept. The fruit was not yet ripe.

What blocks Kim's reform today is not his intention. It is inertia, exhaustion, and a structural isolation that generates no motivation to move.

 

III. Why Change Must Be Gradual and Silent

I have told Kim Jong-un for years: change must come quietly, sequentially, without announcement.

The reason is paradoxical. The outside world assumes a simple equation — the people want freedom, and Kim is the obstacle. The reality is more complex: a population whose worldview was formed across decades of socialist ideology may itself resist sudden transformation.

Few outside observers know that there was an internal coup attempt against reform in the early Kim Jong-un period. Just as Yoon Suk-yeol and the South Korean far right attempted to declare martial law as a last-ditch defense of their position, sudden opening invites a counterattack from those with the most to lose.

The tolerance of the jangmadang — the informal markets — is therefore not passive neglect. It is a strategy: allow change to grow from below, while keeping a hand on the reins. An entire generation of North Koreans in their twenties has grown up knowing nothing but the market. Their worldview is already fundamentally different from their parents'. The economic foundation for a system transition is being laid from the ground up, without a single official announcement.

 

IV. Keep Your Nuclear Weapons. But Save Your People.

Twenty-five years of dialogue compress into that single sentence.

Any negotiation premised on nuclear abandonment is structurally blocked. For Kim Jong-un, nuclear weapons are not a bargaining chip — they are existential insurance. Muammar Gaddafi surrendered his weapons first and was subsequently destroyed. That lesson is etched too deeply to negotiate away.

But there is much that can be done while leaving the nuclear arsenal in place. Reduce conventional military forces and redirect that manpower into the economy. Build the institutional muscle of a market system. Revive domestic consumption. These steps are the most realistic path to reassuring neighboring countries — not through declarations, but through demonstrated behavior.

Stop thinking about reunification. Build the North Korean economy first.  e.

This has been the essential message I have sent toward Pyongyang for twenty-five years. It came not from ideology, not from strategy, not from political ambition — but from a father's dying wish to go home to the banks of the Amnok River, and a son's attempt to honor that wish in the broadest possible way.

 

V. The Moment Is Ripening Again

Trump's second term has begun. And the configuration this time is different from Hanoi.

The United States wants movement — as leverage against China, and as a historical legacy for Trump himself. Russia wants it too — to reposition its influence in Northeast Asia after Ukraine. North Korea wants it — for economic survival and the continuity of Kim's rule.

China alone does not want it. Beijing fears that a transformed North Korea will drift into the American orbit. And that is precisely why Trump will relish this play — because nothing produces the outcome Beijing fears most like an American handshake with Pyongyang.

Leave the nuclear weapons where they are. Choose the path that keeps the people alive. Convert military resources into economic ones. Give the jangmadang generation room to reach the wider world. This is also the only reliable defense against North Korea's absorption as a de facto province of China.

I have not abandoned my expectation of Kim Jong-un. Because there is no future for North Korea on its current trajectory. And North Korea's future is the future of the entire Korean people.