North Korea leader’s stock rises with rocket launch

SEOUL — When Kim Jong Un inherited the leadership of North Korea a year ago, he was something of a laughingstock, an overweight rich guy in his 20s with a negligible curriculum vitae and little world experience aside from a stint in a Swiss middle school.

But Kim is defying the naysayers. He has methodically consolidated his grip on power, replacing his late father’s loyalists with his own, and endeared himself to the public with an attractive, well-dressed wife and a more modern public image.

With Wednesday’s successful launch of a long-range rocket, the 29-year-old Kim can also take credit for putting a satellite into orbit, a feat that long eluded his father and remains a challenge for rival South Korea.

The launch, immediately criticized by the U.S. and other countries as provocative and a threat to regional security, damped outside hopes for a weak North Korea that would be more compliant under the untested leader. The regime in Pyongyang maintains that the satellite was launched for peaceful scientific purposes, but critics say it could be a step toward North Korea building an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Without question, the launch has left Kim, the world’s youngest head of state, basking in the most attention he’s seen since he took the helm of the impoverished, isolated country after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, on Dec. 17.

“He’s the man of the moment. On the Korean scoreboard, he’s like Yuri Gagarin, the man who got into space,” said Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, referring to the first manned spaceflight in 1961 by the cosmonaut.

Kim, the youngest son borne by a woman who was more consort than official wife to the late leader, was catapulted from relative obscurity to the head of the succession line after the oldest son, Kim Jong Nam, was arrested trying to enter Japan on a fake passport to visit Disneyland. As a result, the younger Kim had only a few years’ grooming to step into the role of successor.

“Considering how many people said he would have stumbled by now, he has done pretty well and even made a couple of smart moves,” said Robert Carlin, a former CIA and State Department intelligence analyst specializing in North Korea.

Despite the rocket launch, the younger Kim has moved away from his father’s “military first” policy, signaling that he would instead make economic growth his top priority. In his first major policy speech in mid-April, he pledged not to repeat the famine of the 1990s, in which up to 10% of the population perished.

“It is our party’s firmest resolve not to let our citizens go hungry again,” he said.

There was also a rare moment of public candor in April, when an earlier rocket broke apart over the Yellow Sea and North Korea acknowledged the failure, gaining some credibility. “They took a lemon and turned it into lemonade,” said Carlin.

Kim Jong Un has been out in public far more often than his reclusive father, often showing off the broad, dimpled smile that makes him resemble his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, the nation’s founder. And in a break from the secretive past, where the wives, consorts and mistresses of leaders were kept under wraps, Kim often appears with his well-dressed photogenic wife, Ri Sol Ju.

Kim Jong Un has also benefited from quirks of timing. A long-planned makeover of Pyongyang — new apartments, restaurants, an airport terminal and even a “Dophinarium” — was completed this year as part of a celebration timed to the centennial of Kim Il Sung’s birth, giving the young leader credit for what, in fact, was done by his father.

“It is positive that he is young. He studied overseas. He knows how people live overseas. I feel more comfortable with him than with older people,” said a 22-year-old North Korean woman who gave her name as Kim Eun Jeong. She was interviewed in October in the Chinese border city of Dandong, where she was working.

“People are expecting reform from him,” said a 50-year-old woman from Chongjin, who gave her name as Park Jeong Suk. “And we like it that he looks like Kim Il Sung.”

In another public relations coup, Kim invited back to Pyongyang for a public reconciliation a Japanese sushi chef, Kenji Fujimoto, who had been a close family friend and wrote a tell-all memoir about the Kim family. As a result, Fujimoto has become something of an overseas spokesman for the regime, giving frequent interviews about how Kim hopes to improve the living standards of North Koreans.

“That was very clever of him,” said Ra Jong-yil, a former South Korean ambassador to Japan and leading North Korea expert in Seoul.

So far, reforms have materialized slowly. An anticipated overhaul of the agricultural system that would have allowed collective farmers more independence never got off the ground.

Kim has apparently spent some time focused on changing the old guard. He has elevated the ruling Workers’ Party over the military in the power hierarchy. South Korean intelligence reported last month that four top military generals who were very close to Kim Jong Il were either sacked or demoted.

As for palace intrigue, Kim also appears to be reining in his powerful uncle Jang Song Taek, who had been something of a regent during Kim’s first year as leader. Jang is married to Kim Kyong Hui, the younger sister of Kim Jong Il, but she is reported to be ill and possibly dying, which will inevitably reduce Jang’s power.

“Kim Jong Un is a very young leader, but he appears to have secured his position,” said Koh Yoo-hwan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. “And with the success of the launch he has scored many gains, domestically and internationally. He will be able to secure the solidarity of the people, at the same time as he strengthens his position negotiating with the United States.”

With the successful rocket launch, North Korea joins a fairly exclusive club of 10 nations that have succeeded in putting a satellite into orbit with their own technology, an achievement all the more daunting because it has nuclear capability. The launch was all the sweeter in that North Korea misled the international community into thinking that it had been postponed.

Flush with its success, North Korea is unlikely to dismantle its arsenal in response to U.S. demands, when it can negotiate from a standpoint of heightened strength. It might not stop all the jokes about Kim Jong Un (the target of a satire in the Onion newspaper, which recently named him “Sexiest Man Alive”), but the world may have to take him seriously.

The timing of the launch works beautifully for North Korea, coming in the run-up to national elections Dec. 16 in Japan and Dec. 19 in South Korea. The North Koreans had been anxious to complete the launch this year to live up to a propaganda campaign that had emphasized North Korea as a “strong and prosperous” country in 2012.

South Korea, which has an economy more than 20 times the size of North Korea, has tried repeatedly and failed. On Nov. 29, a countdown of South Korea’s Naro-1 rocket was halted 17 minutes before launch because of an electrical glitch.

In Pyongyang, residents were reported to be dancing in the snow-covered streets in celebration Wednesday. North Korean television played martial music, interspersed with footage of the rocket sailing into the air.

barbara.demick@latimes.com

Special correspondent Jung-yoon Choi contributed to this report.