Signs Point to Fourth-Generation Succession as Kim Jong Un Elevates His Daughter

SEOUL, South Korea — Ever since late 2022, North Korean state media has steadily broadcast images of leader Kim Jong Un alongside his young daughter at weapons tests and military parades. To defectors living in South Korea, those carefully staged public appearances signal something unmistakable: the authoritarian regime is laying the groundwork to hand power to a fourth generation of the Kim dynasty. Kim Yumi, 32, fled North Korea three years ago and now lives in Seoul. Watching state television broadcasts of the young girl before escaping left her deeply unsettled about her family’s future under an unbroken autocratic line. “My husband and I didn’t want our children to live under a fourth-generation dictatorship. As parents, we thought the best thing we could do for our children was to give them freedom,” said Kim Yumi, who now runs a YouTube channel focused on North Korea. Nominally founded as a socialist republic in 1948, North Korea operates as a dynastic monarchy. State founder Kim Il Sung passed leadership to his son Kim Jong Il in 1994, who in turn was succeeded by Kim Jong Un in 2011. Neither transfer met open public resistance inside the tightly controlled state.

High-Level Protocol and Public Staging

State media descriptions have elevated the young girl, reportedly named Kim Ju Ae, calling her Kim’s “most beloved” and “respected” child. Official media has showcased photos where she stands directly in front of her father, as well as imagery depicting an elderly military general kneeling before her. That level of deference matches the treatment once shown to the current ruler before he took power, according to Tae Yongho, a former minister at North Korea’s Embassy in London who defected to South Korea in 2016. “During her visits to missile launch sites and factories, the way senior North Korean officials treat Kim Ju Ae involves protocols reserved for a successor, not the ones simply for a daughter of Kim Jong Un,” said Tae Yongho. “They are repeating the same protocol and treatment they provided for Kim Jong Un,” when he shadowed his own father. Whoever eventually takes command will inherit a nuclear-armed nation of 26 million people living under pervasive surveillance and economic deprivation, cut off almost entirely from the outside world.

Dynastic Power versus Gender Norms

In North Korea’s male-dominated political structure, women rarely reach the top ranks. According to South Korea’s Unification Ministry, only one of the 17 department directors in the ruling Workers’ Party is female: Kim Jong Un’s influential younger sister, Kim Yo Jong. That dynamic leaves some North Koreans skeptical of a female ruler. Kim Jeong-Ah, a former North Korean army officer who defected to South Korea in 2009, reported resistance among her contacts back home. “My contacts in North Korea say it would be nonsensical to revere that little girl as their supreme leader,” she said. Others argue the family line overrides conventional social norms. Lee Si-young, a defector who heads the Seoul-based Free North Korea Radio station, noted that while some older contacts dislike the prospect of a female leader, members of the ruling family “are like gods reigning over humans so gender really doesn’t matter.”

Any future transfer of power is expected to proceed with little open pushback from the public or the ruling class. Oh Gyeong-seob, an analyst at Seoul’s Korea Institute for National Unification, noted that hereditary power transfers have become fully institutionalized within the political elite. Ahn Chan-il, a defector and scholar who heads the World Institute for North Korean Studies in Seoul, agreed that ordinary citizens will passively accept another family transfer as a given. Yet for most North Koreans, survival takes precedence over political speculation. As Kim Yumi noted, seeking information about the ruling household carries extreme risk, leaving ordinary people to pay little attention to the private lives of the Kim family because doing so could put them in immediate danger.