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On the 7th, the North Korean media reported on Kim Jong Eun’s attendance at a congress to mark the 67th anniversary of the founding of the Chosun Children’s Union. There, seated right next to the North Korean leader, were students of the Chosun Children’s Union and Mangyongdae Revolutionary School. These are the lucky young people of North Korea.
The thought of having the child of an average citizen personally deliver a bouquet of flowers to the leader of North Korea or sit next to him at a function has always been unimaginable. Such an honor is only ever bestowed upon children of the elite, such as Central Party cadres, who are seen as being of superior breeding.
Even that may not always be enough. To attend events graced by Kim Jong Eun, so-called “No.1 Events,” requires one to be descended from partisans involved in Kim Il Sung’s anti-Japanese imperial struggle, the “Mt. Baekdu Line,” or from persons who studied alongside Kim Jong Il at Kim Il Sung University, the “Mt. Ryongnam Line”. In essence, unassailable Party loyalty is crucial.
Looking at footage of the Chosun Children’s Union event, defectors mused that the student charged with tying the ubiquitous red necktie onto Kim Jong Eun has a particularly “promising future; her life will work out just fine.” A good college is now a certainty, they said, and a high-ranking job seems to be guaranteed.
One defector who was part of the Union of Democratic Women while in North Korea recalled a similar case, explaining, “The woman who was chairperson of the Women’s Union in 2000, Park Sun Hee also had an audience with Kim Il Sung as a young kindergartener, and she was later promoted all the way to the top of the Union.” She went on, “In North Korea, being part of the Kim clan or having even the slightest relation can help ease and improve a person’s life ‘in a heartbeat.’”
“The daughter of a Party official attending middle school in Pyongyang was given the opportunity to give a bouquet to Kim Il Sung; then, after graduation, she became a pilot in the Chosun People’s Army,” another defector remembered. “When Kim Il Sung had asked her, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ she had replied, ‘I want to be a female pilot to protect the skies of our country.’ Shortly afterwards, the Military Manpower Commission contacted her and she became an aviator.”
