Kim Jong-un has promoted his sister to the equivalent of a cabinet position in the latest sign of her rise within the hierarchy of the dictatorship of North Korea.
Kim Yo-jong has become a department director in the central committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, and has been reinstated as an alternate member of the politburo during the party congress, state media reported.
It is not clear which department she will lead. She has been serving as deputy director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department (PAD), and often acts as a spokeswoman for her brother, with a penchant for vituperative language.
Kim Jong-un with his sister in 2018
KOREA SUMMIT PRESS POOL/GETTY IMAGES
The appointment confirms her continuing importance to Kim as perhaps his closest and most trusted adviser. However, the congress has been notable for the absence of the supreme leader’s daughter, Ju-ae, who is being groomed as his successor, according to South Korean intelligence assessments.
The congress, which appears to have continued for a seventh day on Wednesday, is held every few years to outline the future of national policy and to appoint key personnel. This time, 23 of the 39 members of the “executive presidium” of the congress are new to their posts, in keeping with Kim’s habit of regularly reshuffles and purges.
“The reshuffle is not simply about generational replacement,” said Yang Moo-jin, of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. He told The Korea Times: “It reflects personnel decisions based on Kim Jong-un’s own standards of loyalty, with allegiance to the leader serving as a key criterion.”
None are more loyal than Yo-jong, 38. She began to emerge publicly a year after her brother, who is 42, succeeded her late father in 2011. Within two years of her working with the PAD, the regime’s rhetoric took on a crudity that was startling even by Pyongyang standards.
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Articles appeared in which Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s first female president, was denounced as “a dirty old prostitute … glued to her American master’s stinky groin”. There were also racist comments about President Obama.
The articles were unsigned but many observers saw in them the fingerprints of Yo-jong and her propensity for invective more extreme than her brother’s.
She has issued more than 30 statements in her name, many of them detailed denunciations of the South Korean leadership. “Well before their malicious criticism registers in my ear,” she once said, “I smell their stinky breath emanating from their bawling traps.”
Giving a speech in 2022
KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY/KOREA NEWS SERVICE VIA AP
In his opening speech on Thursday, Kim Jong-un said the five years since the last congress had been a “proud period” featuring progress in politics, the economy, national defence, culture and international relations.
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But he did not boast of his nuclear arsenal or refer directly to the United States or South Korea, a possible hint of willingness to engage diplomatically after a long period of chill.
Kim at the congress on Sunday
EPA
North Korea’s economy grew by 3.7 per cent in 2024, after a dip caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to South Korean estimates.
“Everything has changed fundamentally for the past five years,” Kim told the congress. “In the next ten to 20 years, our party will celebrate its 90th and 100th anniversaries. If we steadily advance national development and improve the people’s welfare, we can transform the entire country and ensure a prosperous life for all citizens.”