Politics in North and South Korea by Ku Yangmo Lee Inyeop Woo Jongseok & Inyeop Lee & Jongseok Woo

Author:Ku, Yangmo,Lee, Inyeop,Woo, Jongseok & Inyeop Lee & Jongseok Woo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Juche and the power succession

Kim Il-sung’s power struggle in the 1950s occurred in tandem with the fabrication of the Juche ideology. Originally, the political system in Pyongyang merely copied Moscow’s political system and ideology and, therefore, it was built on Marxism-Leninism. The first constitution of 1948 was written in Russian and later translated into Korean. Furthermore, in the early years of state-building in North Korea, the term Suryong (roughly, chieftain) was used to label prominent communist leaders, such as Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. However, after the power struggle and Kim Il-sung’s monopoly of power, Suryong referred only to Kim Il-sung in North Korea. Kim Il-sung’s power struggle and his Juche led to the establishment of a different kind of a communist political and ideological system dissociated from its patrons in Moscow and Beijing. The Juche ideology functioned as the backbone of Kim Il-sung’s personality cult throughout his life, as it controlled the ruling elite and the people alike as the guiding ideology and spirit of the entire nation. Its principles shaped the country’s overall policy lines and provided ideological justification for the hereditary succession of his son and grandson. Although North Koreans claim that Kim Il-sung’s Jucheemerged in the 1930s during his anti-Japanese guerrilla war, the term was first introduced in December 1955 in his speech to the KWP Propaganda and Agitation Department (PAD). In that speech, Kim Il-sung expressed the desire to prevent the de-Stalinization campaign in Moscow from polluting party elites in Pyongyang. At the same time, given that Chinese military forces were still in North Korea, he intended to circumvent Chinese influence through his own ruling ideology. He used Juche on behalf of his power struggle against the Chinese and Soviet factions in Pyongyang.

When Kim Il-sung first mentioned Juche in the 1950s, the ideology did not have a clear logical or doctrinal structure. Rather, it evolved through North Korea’s responses to changing internal and external circumstances thereafter. Domestically, Kim used Juche as his ideological platform to purge his political competitors under the banner of anti-factionalism, especially the factions that had ties to the South Korean communists and the party elites tied to Beijing and Moscow. Externally, Kim’s Juche stressed political and ideological independence from external forces by emphasizing anti-imperialism that commonly referred to the United States and Japan. When the political and ideological split intensified between Moscow and Beijing in the 1960s, North Korea’s Juche adopted a balancing act between the two communist patrons by stressing “self-identity in thinking, independence in politics, self-support in economy and self-reliance in national defense” (Yang 1994, 183). After the Sino-Soviet split dissipated in the early 1970s, Juche began to emphasize constructing a socialist economy in North Korea by mobilizing the masses with slogans, such as the Cheollima Movement, the 70-Day Battle, and the 200-Day Battle. The Cheollima Movement officially began in 1958 in order to mobilize the entire populace to build an advanced socialist economy, something similar to Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). The second Cheollima Movement was introduced in 1998–2004, after Kim Jong-il officially emerged as the successor to his father.

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