08:48
Tieng Anh Vui
JANG SUNG TAEK, the uncle and political guardian to Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s young dictator, had been in disgrace before. By some accounts, he fell out of favour with all three of the country’s hereditary ruling Kims. Purged and banished to a steel mill around 1978, and quietly cast out again in 2003-04, Mr Jang twice returned to big party jobs. This time he is gone for good, executed for “such an unpardonable thrice-cursed treason” as opposing Mr Kim’s succession and planning a coup.
The haste with which the execution was carried out, immediately after the verdict on December 12th, suggests Mr Jang posed a real political threat. So did the rush to erase hundreds of state news reports about him, and Mr Kim’s absence during the purge in his distant summer retreat.
But Park Hyeong-jung, director of the Korea Institute for National Unification, a government think-tank in Seoul, thinks the idea of a threat “basically nonsense”. It is not surprising that the young Mr Kim would rid himself of his regent. Since succeeding his father, Kim Jong Il, the second anniversary of whose death was marked this week, he has shuffled or removed about 100 senior officials. Of the seven men who escorted Kim’s hearse, only two (both in their 80s) remain in power.
For the official press to reveal (or invent) disloyalty such as Mr Jang’s is highly unusual. But whereas a one-off disposal can be concealed, a widespread purge is trickier to hide. The official charge sheet attacked Mr Jang’s “faction” and Mr Park reckons it was also aimed at the 3,000-odd people once under his patronage. A broader purge suits two groups Mr Park thinks abetted his fall: the army; and the Organisation and Guidance Department, a “party within the party” (positions are hereditary too) that long kept the Kims’ relatives, like Mr Jang, in check.
Mr Kim’s right-hand man, Mr Jang was in charge of public security as well as business with China, and controlled some of the state’s biggest trading companies. Power in the regime is a zero-sum game, says Mr Park. State entities compete in resource acquisition and dealmaking to get hold of foreign currency. Mr Jang was accused of making “a little kingdom” of his department, the party’s administrative arm, and saddling the country with huge debts.
The indictment also suggests that he was “too close to the Chinese”, says Adam Cathcart, a historian at the University of Leeds. The charges include selling off resources cheaply and leasing land, including the Rason special economic zone, for 50 years to China. So Mr Jang’s exit is likely to harm cross-border business. He was the chief backer of Rason and two other zones on North Korean islands, leased to China, at the mouth of the Yalu river. Lee Kum-ryong, a defector who works for Free North Korea Radio, says that when he visited the offices of North Korean businessmen in Beijing after Mr Jang’s fall, he was met only by Mr Kim’s goons, come to “arrest” them; the staff had already fled. A widespread and indiscriminate purge could prompt defections, says Mr Cathcart.
In so far as it is possible for a dynastic tyranny in the grip of a reign of terror, North Korea has been keen to convey a business-as-usual image. A senior official claimed that Mr Jang’s removal would not alter economic policy “at all”—indeed, that it would quicken progress. On the day the purge was made public, the state press reported that Chinese investors had signed a contract to build a high-speed railway and highway connecting the two border cities of Sinuiji and Kaesong. And on the day of the execution, North Korea suggested talks with the South on improving the jointly run Kaesong industrial complex.
Though China’s foreign ministry has said the political purge is the North’s own “internal affair”, Shi Yinhong of Renmin University in Beijing believes it is worried: the two countries’ sole functioning joint economic zone, at Rason, is now “threatened”. Two weeks before Mr Jang’s downfall, North Korea announced it would build 13 new economic zones with its own financing and under its sole sovereignty.
The wording of the indictment is fuzzy enough to suggest this is not a total reset of the relationship, says Mr Cathcart, even if Mr Kim replaces the North Korean ambassador to Beijing, who was seen as one of Mr Jang’s men. China remains North Korea’s biggest source of fuel, food—and foreign exchange. The battle in Pyongyang for the fruits of that relationship has not ended with Mr Jang’s death.
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