Making Sense of the North Korea’s Suryeong System

Studies of comparative politics on dictatorships and transitions provide heuristic yardsticks for understanding the Suryeong system and the behaviors of its major supporters. Among the models of comparative autocracies, the Suryeong system can be best conceptualized as a totalitarian socialist dynasty. It has been firmly consolidated and now displays enormous durability despite the crisis-driven marketization and loosening of its socio-cultural grip on the population. In the Kim Jong-un era, there has neither been instability in the autocratic regime nor symptoms of relaxing repression under North Korea’s miserable economic conditions. Underlying this stasis is the persistence of the Suryeong system, the very core of the North Korean autocracy. Since the Suryeong system is so formidably entrenched, even the Suryeong himself cannot revise it without undermining the very foundation of his rule itself. An attempt to revise it will undermine the legitimacy of the Baekdu descendants’ rule and create enormous institutional pandemonium. Kim Jong-un and the hard-liners’ obsession with developing nuclear and missile programs at the cost of anything whatsoever including the economic welfare of people should be judged as a rational one in terms of their political survival and monopoly of power. All this means is that the expectation for North Korea’s denuclearization and opening as well as a softening of totalitarian repression is simply unrealistic in the foreseeable future.