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Party-Military Relations in DPR of Korea
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About this book
About this book
In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim Il Sung was the supreme leader from the country’s founding in 1948 until his son Kim Jong Il took over the post in 1994. Kim Jong Il was then succeeded by his son, Kim Jong Un, in 2011. One of the reasons for this stable pseudo-dynastic system is that each supreme leader and the ruling party, the Workers’ Party of Korea, have a strong bond with the armed forces. This study seeks to clarify the characteristics of the relations between the WP and the People’s Army in the DPRK.
As a prerequisite for discussing party-military relations, this book examines the social status of the military based on the size of the armed forces and the number of seats in political institutions filled by military personnel. It conducts a survey on the code numbers, attributes, and locations of units in the PA to gain a baseline understanding of political leaders’ interactions with the military. Along with these considerations, the book examines the process of how the armed forces and systems of political control were built during the Kim Il Sung era, how control of the armed forces was reinforced by Kim Jong Il, and what changes in military control have occurred since the beginning of the Kim Jong Un era.
Contents
Perface
Introduction
Sustaining the Political Regime and Roles of the Armed Forces
Chapter 1
Military Strength in the DPRK
Chapter 2
Military Representatives in the Supreme People’s Committee
Chapter 3
Code Numbers of Units in the People’s Army
Chapter 4
Construction of People’s Army and System of Military Control in Kim Il Sung Era
Chapter 5
Reinforced Military Control by Kim Jung Il
Chapter 6
Military Reforms by Kim Jung Un
Preface
Preface
In April 1991, I started my research on socialist Korea at the Institute of Developing Economies. At that time, many writers in Japanese society predicted that the one-party system of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would soon collapse, based on the strong impression left by the fall of Berlin Wall and the subsequent breakdown of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and of the Soviet Union. However, the Workers' Party of Korea overcame challenges to their regime, including conflict with the U.S. over the allegations of nuclear weapons development, the death of the first supreme leader Kim Il Sung, and food and power shortages. To this day, there are no signs that the political system will soon collapse.
In analyzing political and economic affairs on the Korean Peninsula, I realized that the military played a key role in the lasting strength of the political system in the DPRK. Since 1998 I have collected information about the People's Army of Korea from articles such as party and government newspapers, writings of the supreme leader, memoirs of important figures, publications from Pyongyang, and works of exiles published in Seoul and elsewhere. By combining fragmentary information, the relationship between key military officers and the supreme leaders, as well as the relationship between major armed units and the supreme leader gradually emerged. This work was greatly helped by the purchase of newspapers through the current affairs analysis project of the IDE and the collection of many Pyongyang publications at the IDE Library.
In addition, the IDE gave me the opportunity to study in Seoul and Moscow, through which I was able to read materials related to DPRK at the Information Center on North Korea at the Ministry of Unification and the Institute for Far Eastern Studies Library at Kyungnam University, in Seoul, as well as at the Library for Foreign Literatures and Russian State Library in Moscow, which reinforced my analysis work. In 2023 a draft of this book was written as an IDE report of Basic-Comprehensive Research, titled “Party-military Relations in D.P.R. of Korea.”.
This book shows the high social status of the People’s Army, the structure of the supreme leader's control over the military, and the status of the current supreme leader's control of the armed forces. The issues of building civilian paramilitary groups, sending troops overseas, and supporting the construction of regular armed forces in foreign countries are not discussed.
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