[imText1]North Korea’s state-run Korea Central News Agency reported official floral tribute to funeral of Wang Ok Hwuan, widow of Choi Yong Gun the former President of Supreme People’s Council, on Wednesday. Choi was a senior partisan member during Japanese invasion and commander of front during the Korean War.
Wang recently passed away in China, and there is a reason that North Korea’s former official head of state’s widow had to live abroad until her death.
Wang, a daughter of Chinese bourgeois, fell in love with the guerilla leader Choi and married to him, who was fighting against the Japanese Imperial Army in Manchuria. After Korea’s liberation in 1945 and establishment of North Korean regime, the couple had lived in Pyongyang.
Choi Yong Gun was one of the high-ranking members of early Korean communists and took positions of Defense Minister and Senior Vice President in 50s.
His career as a communist and partisan fighter was far superior to that of Kim Il Sung; Choi graduated from Sun Yat-sen’s Whampoa Military Academy and taught at the prestigious West Point-like military academy of China in 1926. Then he was dispatched to Manchuria and later to Soviet Union to avoid Japanese pursuit. In Soviet Far East, Choi had worked as a political commissar of the 88th Special Brigade, Red Army’s incubator of future North Korean leaders including Kim Il Sung, until 1945. Choi’s friendship with top Chinese communist leaders such as Zhu De and Zhou En Lai made him a perfect negotiator with Beijing.
Choi’s glorious career as a communist and North Korea’s senior leader all faded away after his death in 1976, due to his will to Wang; he told his wife to go back to China after he died. Choi was disappointed with Kim Il Sung’s decision of son of him being his successor, never found in any other communist states.
Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were outraged by Choi’s last will and since then once prominent communist veteran was completely forgotten in state media and official documents.
The lesson was well-taught; every other fellow partisan comrades of Kim made their last wills to wish Kim Il Sung’s long live and Kim Jong Il’s well-being.
Wang eventually followed her husband will and moved back to China whereas Choi was sentenced to damnatio memoriae in North Korea. Kim Jong Il’s paying tribute to the late Wang Ok Hwuan is interpreted as a mere gesture for the sake of Sino-North Korean relationship, which has been damaged by recent events.
