Why Has the Kim Dynasty Been Able to Survive Into a Fourth Generation?

Han Lianchao (韩联潮)

Published in Huaxia Wenzhai (华夏文摘), July 5, 2026

Reading Professor Cai Xia’s (蔡霞) discussion of North Korea led me to reconsider a question: Why has the Kim dynasty been able to survive to this day? Alongside it lies another question: Why has the Chinese Communist Party’s party-state dictatorship endured for so long? Why does it continue to show such remarkable resilience even after famine, poverty, corruption, and countless political disasters?

Over the years, I have read a great deal of research on totalitarianism. I have also returned to this question again and again, but I have never found a completely satisfactory answer.

Many people explain the survival of totalitarian rule in terms of violence, repression, and propaganda. But if that were the whole answer, many dictatorships in history should have collapsed long ago. Violence can force people to obey, but it is difficult to make generation after generation continue to believe. Propaganda can create illusions, but it cannot resist reality forever.

The real question is this: Why does a political monstrosity built on lies and fear not merely refuse to die, but continue to reproduce itself in isolation, like cancer cells?

In my view, North Korea offers an unusually revealing case.

The Kim dynasty controls more than the machinery of the state. It has developed a systematic technology for exploiting human weakness, psychological needs, and social relationships. It has Koreanized and religiousized Communist ideology, turning political power seized through naked violence into a form of counterfeit divine authority. With the help of modern organizational systems and surveillance technology, it has gradually constructed a complete totalitarian-theocratic ecosystem.

North Korea deserves study not only because it is one of the most closed countries in the world. It also deserves study because the basic mechanisms that sustain totalitarian rule appear there in their most extreme and clearest form.

To understand North Korea is not merely to understand North Korea. As I see it, its totalitarian-theocratic ecosystem rests on several main pillars.

In a cult, the leader is a god, a prophet, and the embodiment of unquestionable truth. The leaders of the Kim dynasty have likewise been wrapped in mythology, most notably through the idea of the “Mount Paektu bloodline” (白头山血统). The head of the Kim family is presented not only as the political ruler, but also as a “benevolent father” and “the savior of humankind.” His words are law and truth. He is said to be all-knowing and all-powerful. In official accounts, even his birth is accompanied by celestial signs, such as a double rainbow and a sacred star over Mount Paektu.

This deification of an ordinary mortal was readily accepted by a North Korean population already steeped in superstition and ignorance. Since the Second World War, the Kim family has been portrayed as the savior of the nation and the sacred heir of the revolution. This has transformed the most dangerous problem facing any dictatorship—the succession of power—into something close to a tradition of dynastic inheritance. It has therefore resolved, to a considerable degree, the succession crises that commonly trouble authoritarian systems.

I remember that in the mid-1980s, China had only recently emerged from the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution and had begun its program of reform and opening. The country was going through an intellectual thaw. After witnessing the collapse of China’s own leader-worship campaign, people were returning to common sense. They generally regarded North Korea’s continuing and grotesquely excessive personality cult as a joke.

Yet when North Korean students in Beijing were mocked by Chinese people, they defended their system in all seriousness: “Our wise leader is different from yours. Our wise leader does not make mistakes.”

The statement sounded absurd, but it revealed the depth of the Kim dynasty’s indoctrination.

One of its methods has been to write Juche ideology (主体思想) and the absolute authority of the leader into the Constitution, thereby completing the deification of the Kim family. Everyday education, media propaganda, and public activities all revolve around unconditional loyalty to the leader. At the deepest level, the system deprives people of independent thought and the will to resist, turning the great majority of North Koreans into faithful followers of the Kim dynasty.

Cults disguise their control of believers as a form of love. The Kim dynasty uses the machinery of the state to manufacture lies about “love” and “benevolence.” It conducts a nationwide campaign of love-bombing and presents public resources as personal gifts from the leader.

From kindergarten onward, people are taught that “every happy part of life has been bestowed by the leader.” Candy, toys, school uniforms, and other benefits given to children on birthdays and holidays are described as “gifts from the benevolent fatherly leader.” People must thank the leader before eating. They must thank the leader when they receive housing. Whatever they are given, they are expected to thank the leader.

This lifelong education in gratitude is, in practice, a systematic effort to instill loyalty and filial devotion to the leader, along with a permanent sense of psychological indebtedness. People are forced to accept the idea that their survival, education, and future all come from the leader’s mercy and generosity, and that loyalty and filial devotion to him are self-evident moral duties.

This belief reverses the most basic understanding of who supports whom. The people are no longer understood to support the leader and the party-state. Instead, the leader and the party-state are said to support the people. Citizens do not create wealth. All wealth is treated as a gift from the leader and the party.

The debt of gratitude ordinarily owed to one’s parents for raising a child is transferred to the leader. Loyalty and filial devotion to him are then made to seem natural and inevitable. A lack of gratitude is equated with betrayal. Questioning or criticizing the leader, the party, or the government is treated as an act of ingratitude. Betrayal and ingratitude are then defined as the most shameful forms of behavior. In this way, the people are transformed into obedient subjects who willingly devote themselves to the leader.

The greatest irony of the Kim dynasty’s politics, however, is that it demands loyalty and gratitude from the population while often practicing the most inhuman forms of struggle within its own ruling circle.

In the mid-1980s, when I was working at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a palace coup took place in North Korea and was kept under the tightest secrecy. Kim Jong Il (金正日), who by then had built up his own power base, tried to seize power before the appointed time. Far from showing gratitude for his father’s support, he detained Kim Il Sung (金日成) and forced him to give up power. Kim Jong Il then sought diplomatic support and endorsement from Beijing. But Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) rejected the attempted coup, and the drama was brought to an end.

Soon after taking power, Kim Jong Un (金正恩) had his uncle by marriage, Jang Song Thaek (张成泽), killed. Jang was widely regarded as North Korea’s second most powerful figure and as the senior official whom Kim Jong Il had left behind to assist his son. His killing continued the family’s bloody struggle for power.

According to South Korean intelligence officials, Kim Jong Un had Jang and two of his aides torn apart by anti-aircraft machine guns before an audience of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of senior officials. Their bodies were then said to have been burned with flamethrowers. This account remains disputed, although Jang’s execution is a matter of fact.

Cults take advantage of the alienation people experience in modern society. They offer what appears to be a warm, equal, and secure “family.” This gives people a sense of belonging, quickly fills a spiritual emptiness, and breaks down the individual’s psychological defenses.

The Kim dynasty disguises the state as one great family and repeatedly teaches that the state is the people and the people are the state. If the state becomes rich and powerful, the individual becomes rich and powerful. If the leader is honored, the people are honored. When a missile rises into the sky, the nation gains dignity.

This sense of identity, belonging, and pride gives people false confidence and psychological reassurance. Even when they live in poverty, go hungry, suffer from cold, and lack freedom, they can still find emotional compensation in grand narratives about “the greatness of the motherland” and “national rejuvenation.”

Once personal value and dignity have been completely taken away, national glory becomes a substitute. This is why so many totalitarian states are especially fond of military parades, rocket launches, nuclear tests, athletic gold medals, and enormous construction projects.

Such spectacles continually reinforce the illusion that a rise in the country’s status is also a rise in the individual’s status, and that the individual should be willing to sacrifice everything for it. North Korea has been very successful in this regard.

To prevent the outside world from exposing its lies, a cult must cut its followers off from reality. Cults isolate believers by forcing them to sever family ties and avoid contact with outsiders. The Kim dynasty uses the machinery of the state to impose both physical and informational isolation through borders, the military, the police, and the law.

It has almost completely cut the population off from the outside world. There is no free internet, no access to foreign newspapers or films, no privately controlled shortwave radio, and little else. Secretly listening to foreign broadcasts or watching South Korean television dramas can be classified as an anti-socialist crime and may even be punished by death.

Only in an information vacuum without any outside point of comparison can the regime preserve its absurd ideology and its claim that “we are the happiest people in the world.”

When a society remains behind an information curtain for a long time, it loses access to outside standards of comparison. When the meanings of freedom, rights, democracy, and happiness are quietly replaced from childhood onward, people find it difficult not only to encounter different views, but even to imagine another way of organizing society.

The most successful form of information control under a totalitarian theocracy does more than prevent people from knowing the truth. It deprives them of the ability to imagine the truth. It does more than make people afraid to seek freedom. It makes them unable to imagine what freedom is.

One of the central methods of thought control used by cults is the promotion of some form of apocalyptic belief, theory of imminent catastrophe, or narrative of social decay.

A cult systematically distorts the outside world and exaggerates its dangers and evils, creating lasting anxiety, fear, and insecurity among its followers. After producing this panic, the cult leader presents himself as the only savior and the embodiment of truth. Followers are made to believe that only by following him can they survive the approaching disaster, find salvation, or even gain eternal life.

The key to this method is not simply the creation of fear. It is the monopoly over the interpretation of reality and the definition of the future.

Once the cult leader becomes the only person capable of explaining the world, his followers gradually lose the ability to judge matters for themselves. Whatever happens in reality, whether a prediction fails or a doctrine contradicts itself, the leader can redefine the facts and revise the explanation. His followers can do little but remain dependent on the answers he provides.

The Kim dynasty understands this method very well. For decades, the North Korean regime has told the population that imperialist powers will never abandon their desire to destroy the country. It portrays the outside world as a jungle filled with hostility, conspiracy, and plunder. The country is kept in a permanent atmosphere of national extinction and life-or-death crisis.

Within this narrative, poverty is not the result of institutional failure. It is caused by an outside blockade. Famine is not a policy disaster. It is the work of hostile forces. Personal suffering is not the responsibility of the rulers. It is the price that must be paid for national rejuvenation.

Every problem is ultimately directed toward the same answer: The country needs a more powerful leader, a stronger military, and harsher controls.

A sense of crisis therefore becomes an inexhaustible political resource. As long as enemies continue to exist and danger always appears imminent, people are more likely to surrender their freedom, endure poverty, and obey authority.

Military-first politics, nuclear development, and various forms of extreme mobilization are then presented as necessary choices for national survival.

For a totalitarian regime, the greatest danger is never the foreign enemy. The greatest danger is that the people may stop being afraid.

Once people discover that the outside world is not as dark as propaganda has claimed, and once they begin to question whether the supposedly permanent crisis is real, cracks appear in the ruler’s monopoly on truth. Myths often begin to collapse through precisely such cracks.

In a closed environment, cult leaders systematically break down the self-respect and independent personality of their followers.

Through long periods of group meditation, public confession and humiliation, intense physical labor, and repeated chanting and indoctrination, they keep believers in a state of extreme physical and psychological exhaustion. In a severely fatigued mind, logical thought and psychological defenses can collapse sharply. The individual becomes highly vulnerable to suggestion and conditioning. After paying a terrible personal price, the believer may begin to rationalize even the most absurd abuse.

The Kim dynasty has expanded these methods into instruments of state policy. It keeps the population trapped in endless ideological study sessions and intensive political campaigns. Under the combined pressure of physical hardship and overwhelming fear, people are driven to seek psychological balance by worshiping those who abuse them.

When faced with famine and extreme poverty, people would suffer a complete collapse of their inner world if they admitted that their suffering was caused by the crimes of the system and the incompetence of the leader.

To escape this unbearable cognitive pain, their psychological defenses move toward an extreme form of Stockholm-syndrome reasoning. They deceive themselves into believing: “Life is this hard because of the American imperialist blockade.” Or they tell themselves: “The wise leader must be enduring humiliation and hardship for the sake of a greater national rejuvenation.”

The Kim dynasty relies on an elaborate state apparatus of violence to control the population. It divides the entire population into three broad classes—core, wavering, and hostile—and then into 51 subcategories. These classifications are used to control nearly every aspect of personal and social life and to carry out highly targeted surveillance.

The regime also maintains systems of constant peer surveillance and collective punishment extending across entire families. Security agencies, including the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of People’s Security, operate throughout the country. Through neighborhood organizations known as people’s units, they maintain an extensive system of mutual surveillance, collective punishment, and informants.

When one person commits an act of “treason” or violates a rule, both immediate and extended family members may be implicated. They are often sent directly to political prison camps.

Not only ordinary people, but also senior officials and military commanders live under the constant threat of purges. The Kim dynasty uses brutal methods to eliminate potential political threats and consolidate its power.

North Korea also maintains several notorious political prison camps, including Camp No. 14 and Camp No. 15. Prisoners, including relatives detained through collective punishment and without due process, are subjected to forced labor and torture in extremely harsh and often fatal conditions.

These camps are used both to punish dissent and to terrorize the whole of society. Their purpose is to ensure absolute obedience to the deified leader.

People who live for long periods under such extreme violence and fear often begin to identify with their abusers as a way of reducing constant psychological pain. They describe submission as loyalty and fear as love.

This psychological process, combined with cognitive collapse, gives totalitarian rule the appearance of voluntary obedience.

The Kim dynasty has survived to the present not through violence alone. It has developed a series of mechanisms for controlling the population. Through this process, it has constructed and refined a complete totalitarian-theocratic ecosystem.

One of its main components is a vast network of vested interests. Party and government officials, military commanders, security personnel, and privileged groups within the state-controlled economy all have their status, wealth, and personal safety tied closely to the existing system.

Preserving the Kim dynasty is not merely a personal need of the leader. It is also the shared interest of the entire ruling elite.

Long-term totalitarian rule also produces a perverse system of selection. People who think independently, question authority, or insist on principles are more likely to be marginalized or eliminated. Those who obey, display loyalty, and defend the existing order are more likely to receive resources and opportunities for promotion.

After several generations of this selection, along with the self-remaking and collective surrender of the elite, the system gradually develops a personnel structure that helps the totalitarian theocracy reproduce and preserve itself.

Robert Jay Lifton (利夫顿), the noted psychologist who studied methods of brainwashing, demonstrated that a cult is a totalitarian state in miniature, while a totalitarian state is a cult enlarged to the scale of a country.

North Korea is precisely such a totalitarian-theocratic state under the control of a cult organization.

When a cult is merely a private organization, it can destroy hundreds or thousands of families. But when a cult takes control of a state, an army, and nuclear weapons, it can turn tens of millions of citizens into living zombies. It can keep them enslaved for generations amid hunger and fanaticism, while persuading them to serve willingly as cannon fodder.

Such a country is also an enormous time bomb for the free world.

The Kim dynasty’s greatest success lies not only in making people afraid. It has also persuaded them to place their identity, sense of worth, honor, and meaning in life within the mythology created by the Kim cult leader.

When North Koreans believe that the leader’s words are absolute truth, that their happiness comes from his generosity, that the nation, the leader, and the regime cannot be separated, that questioning power means betraying the motherland, and that the outside world is filled with hostility and danger, the Kim dynasty no longer depends entirely on violence.

It begins to depend on the psychological identification of the people themselves.

Such people will not merely refrain from resisting. They will actively defend the chains that bind them.

The Kim dynasty has survived to the present not because it is more ingenious than other dictatorships in history. It has survived because it has carefully combined the central elements of totalitarian-theocratic rule—the deification of the leader, education in gratitude, national identification, information isolation, terror, vested interests, and mechanisms of social selection—into a complete cult ecosystem whose parts support and reinforce one another.

Yet any ecosystem built on lies and isolation, even if it can condition several generations, cannot escape a basic law forever. As generations change and outside information begins to seep in, time will erode the mythology, and reality will eventually break through the lies.

Narratives such as “the leader is always right,” “everything you have was given to you by the party,” and “without the leader, the party and the nation will perish” can be preserved for a time through violence and isolation. But they cannot draw indefinitely on people’s credulity once common sense and reality have fully returned.

The early and frequent public appearances of a prospective fourth-generation successor suggest, in some respects, that the cult leader himself recognizes that the sacred aura of the “Mount Paektu bloodline” is gradually losing its value.

Blood can pass on power, but it cannot automatically pass on authority and prestige. A myth can be reproduced, but its power cannot be preserved forever.

Many totalitarian regimes in history that appeared indestructible once created the illusion that they would never fall. East Germany did so. Romania did so. The Soviet Union did so as well.

The question has never been whether the myth will collapse. The question is that no one can predict when or how it will suddenly cease to work.

What can be said with certainty is that the more tightly the valves of a pressure vessel are sealed, the more violently its energy may be released once a crack appears.

The most important reason to study North Korea may therefore not be to predict how much longer the Kim dynasty can survive. It is to understand how a cult-like totalitarian system is formed, how it operates, and why it can reproduce itself over long periods of time.

We need to understand why it refuses to die after repeated crises and why it can sometimes display a last, feverish burst of vitality. On that basis, we must also find a way to uproot it.

I have always believed that the free world should provide a global internet that is open, free, available without charge, and protected from interference.

Dismantling the information curtain and firewall of the totalitarian theocracy is the most important first step toward breaking apart its entire ecosystem.