By Andrew Jeong

The Kim family has governed North Korea since Soviet leader Joseph Stalin installed clan patriarch Kim Il Sung as head of state after World War II. To consolidate and maintain power through three generations, the ruling Kims have purged, coaxed or murdered rivals and elites, sometimes even within the family. To deter American-led military action and secure the regime's longer-term political survival, they have driven the development of nuclear weapons. The family has led the isolated country for more than seven decades--longer than the Soviet Union existed--and remains unchallenged despite widespread poverty, an appalling human-rights record and the pressure of economic sanctions.

Who is

Kim Jong Un

?

Kim Jong Un is the third leader of North Korea. He gained power in December 2011, upon the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, who had officially ruled since Kim Il Sung's death in 1994. Kim Jong Un was just 27 years old when he took the reins, according to the South Korean government, which puts his birth date at Jan. 8, 1984.

He had spent much of his life out of the spotlight, in family palaces in Pyongyang and a boarding school in Switzerland, before being catapulted into prominence just 14 months earlier, when his ailing father presented him as his heir apparent during a Workers' Party event.

Little at the time was known about the new leader, thought to be Kim Jong Il's third son. North Korea experts believe Kim Jong Un was more ambitious and politically acute than his older brothers, spurring their father--himself a first son--to pick him despite his younger age.

After inheriting power, Kim Jong Un accelerated development of nuclear weapons, testing more missiles and nuclear bombs than his father and grandfather combined. By 2017, North Korea had a missile that weapons experts said had the range to hit Washington, D.C., though the pursuit left the country awash in economic sanctions.

Kim Jong Un became the first North Korean leader to meet a sitting U.S. president when he and then-President Donald Trump held talks in Singapore in June 2018. Over the next year they met twice more, in Vietnam and the Korean demilitarized zone. Still, nuclear talks remain gridlocked.

What do we know about his wife and children?

Pyongyang's state media first mentioned former singer Ri Sol Ju as Kim Jong Un's wife in 2012. South Korea's semiofficial Yonhap News Agency has said the couple married in 2009. Ms. Ri was born in 1989, according to the South Korean government.

They have at least three children, Seoul intelligence officials have said. The first, a son, was born in 2010, according to reports in the South Korean press citing intelligence briefings, and the third was born in February 2017, South Korean intelligence officials have told lawmakers.

Former Chicago Bull Dennis Rodman, who has met Kim Jong Un several times--the future dictator having become a fan of the team in the 1990s, when Michael Jordan led it to six NBA championships--told the British newspaper the Guardian that he held a baby daughter during a visit to North Korea in 2013. Her name was Ju Ae, he said.

Mr. Kim and Ms. Ri have traveled together on official visits inside North Korea and summit trips abroad, including to meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. That is a change from Mr. Kim's father and grandfather, who almost always traveled without their wives. Mr. Kim's aim has been to seem more relatable to ordinary North Koreans, Pyongyang watchers say, and he may also have been reacting to having seen the stress that a life in the shadows caused his own mother. Kim Jong Il had at least three wives, according to Seoul's government, but Kim Jong Un's mother was never accepted by Kim Il Sung. She died in 2004.

Seoul intelligence officials suspect Ms. Ri visited South Korea in 2005, based on photos showing a teenage girl resembling her and documents listing someone by the same name as a member of North Korean delegations. A girl with the same resemblance and name was spotted in inter-Korean meetings in 2003 and 2004. Some South Koreans held up hopes at the beginning of Mr. Kim's rule that his experience in Switzerland and Ms. Ri's interactions with the South would result in a North Korea more open to the outside world--an aspiration that hasn't materialized.

Who are Kim Jong Un's other relatives?

Mr. Kim's closest family members--by birth and affinity--are his older brother and younger sister. Kim Jong Chol, the brother, is three years his senior, according to the Seoul government. He lives a private life in North Korea and, South Korean intelligence officials believe, has formed a rock band that reflects his long fondness for Eric Clapton and the guitar.

In 2015, Kim Jong Chol visited London, where he was escorted by North Korean diplomat Tae Young Ho--who would defect to the South the next year--and bought a $3,200 guitar. Kim Jong Chol referred to himself as a father, Mr. Tae said, suggesting he had at least one child. North Korea watchers say Kim Jong Chol appears uninterested in politics, so unlikely to pose a threat as a rival to his younger brother.

By contrast, Kim Jong Un's sister Kim Yo Jong has become increasingly involved in politics. Born in 1988, according to the Seoul government, she has released public statements since 2020 expressing North Korea's stances toward the U.S. and South Korea. She is a senior member of the ruling Workers' Party, though she was dropped as an alternate member of the Politburo in January 2021.

Kim Jong Un's extended family includes an elderly half-uncle, Kim Pyong Il. Once seen as a potential successor to regime founder Kim Il Sung, he was sent to Eastern Europe as an ambassador after losing out to half-brother Kim Jong Il. He didn't return permanently until 2019, according to Seoul's spy agency, and North Korea experts say that long absence means he is unlikely to have a sufficiently strong political base to challenge Kim Jong Un's rule.

Kim Kyong Hui, aunt of the current leader, is the oldest surviving second-generation Kim. A full sister of former leader Kim Jong Il, she held senior government positions early in her nephew's reign but disappeared from public view after her husband, Jang Song Thaek, was executed in 2013. She re-emerged early last year, appearing beside Kim Jong Un at a Lunar New Year concert in Pyongyang.

If alive, Kim Yong Ju would be the oldest surviving Kim. The Seoul government lists his birth year as 1920, and North Korean state media hasn't reported his death. The younger brother of founder Kim Il Sung, he was part of the government from its early years and participated in the first inter-Korean talks in the 1970s. He held a seat in Pyongyang's rubber-stamp parliament until a few years into Kim Jong Un's rule. For a time during the Cold War, Seoul officials saw him as a potential successor to his older brother, but he has declined in influence since.

What do we know about the Kim Dynasty?

The paternal side of the family traces its roots to Pyongyang, the modern-day capital, going back over a century. North Korean propaganda claims a direct ancestor of Kim Jong Un, Kim Ung U, led an 1866 raid that destroyed the U.S. merchant-marine ship General Sherman after it sailed to Pyongyang without permission. Historians outside the country say they have found no evidence he had a role in the attack.

Kim Hyung Jik, the great-grandfather of Kim Jong Un, attended an American missionary school in Pyongyang from 1911 to 1913, according to the Academy of Korean Studies, a Seoul-based historical society affiliated with the South Korean government. During that time his first son, future leader Kim Il Sung, was born. In 1917, Kim Hyung Jik faced allegations he had conspired to join an armed Christian revolt against the Japanese authorities who ruled Korea from 1910 to 1945, and the family fled to Manchuria.

Kim Il Sung became a communist as a teenager in the 1920s, according to North Korean propaganda, which portrays the Kims as leaders in a guerrilla fight against the Japanese occupiers. Most non-North Korean accounts describe them as having played junior roles to larger and stronger Chinese and Russian units in the anti-Japanese fighting in the 1930s and '40s. Eventually Kim Il Sung joined the Soviet military and became a junior officer, where he impressed Stalin as the man to put in charge in 1945.

In 1950, the North's forces invaded the South, kicking off the Korean War. After it ended in a stalemate with the North flattened, rivals in the government criticized Kim Il Sung for starting an ill-conceived war. Using kangaroo courts, Kim had them executed or purged.

At the same time, the leader earned popular support thanks to agrarian and economic policies credited with sparking a boom--in the late 1950s the economy was growing at an annual rate of 13.7%, according to the South Korean central bank. The North's per capita income exceeded the now-affluent South's until the mid-1960s, the central bank said in 2020.

North Koreans are taught that second leader Kim Jong Il was born on sacred Mount Paektu. The "Mount Paektu bloodline" is considered an absolute requirement for the top leadership. Historians outside North Korea believe he was born in Khabarovsk, Russia, when his father was a Soviet officer.

Where Kim Il Sung was energetic and outgoing, contemporary sources say Kim Jong Il was an introvert--and a playboy and cinephile, to boot. But the North Korean elite came to respect his political acumen as he outmaneuvered his more popular younger half-brother and more experienced uncle to emerge as the heir to his father.

Though Kim Il Sung was nominal ruler until his death in 1994, Kim Jong Il had the de facto role for years before that. He orchestrated terrorist attacks against Seoul in the 1980s, according to North Korean defectors--including a 1983 bombing that nearly killed the South Korean president.

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02-04-21 0653ET