Name: The woman behind the North Korean throne
Uploaded: 2024-08-19T16:45:16.000Z
Duration: 14 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It's February 9th, 2018, and a plane is approaching Seoul, South Korea, with a mysterious passenger on board.

Basic passive voice

Because of a 70-year-old war, the Korean Peninsula is divided between a flourishing democracy in the South and a brutal, secretive dictatorship in the North.

Three men have ruled it, but neither they nor any member of their family has stepped foot in the South since 1950.

The sister of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has become the first member of her family to visit South Korea since the 1950-53 Korean War.

On the surface, she entered South Korea to attend the Winter Olympic Games.

But in reality, she had a much more sinister mission.

They know how to tantalize and how to attract attention.

Kim Yo-jong's sudden appearance upended decades of assumptions about the Kim dynasty, and poses completely new questions.

Could this woman be next in line to rule North Korea?

North Korea claims to be the perfect socialist state, ruled by a party elected by its people.

But in reality, it's a totalitarian dictatorship built on a cult of personality around one family.

As you probably already know, that family is the Kim family.

And to understand them and this part of the story, I'm going to build a family tree.

Okay, so this is the Kim family, but not all members are created equal.

The supreme leader wields the ultimate authority.

First, that was the founder, Kim Il-sung.

They alone decide the fates of the other members, whether it's to promote them to high positions or order their execution.

The Kim leaders have also enforced a strict separation of the roles of men and women, both within their family and outside it.

North Korea is a very conservative country.

The view on its women still remains in the 20th century.

Soojin Chun is a journalist who recently wrote a book about women in North Korea.

Kim Il-sung was saying that we need to promote the human rights of women and we need to see more women figures.

But actually, that happened to be only words.

Because when you see the top tier of the North Korean elite in Kim Il-sung's era, everybody is male.

Kim Il-sung called his wife the mother of Korea and used her to display what he believed were the proper roles of Korean women.

The next leader, Kim Jong-il, shared the same attitudes.

But his son, Kim Jong-un, appears to be different.

He frequently brings his wife to high-level meetings.

He installed North Korea's first female foreign minister.

And he's made another woman the second most powerful person in the country.

Kim Yo-jong, vice-president of the Central Committee for Women's Rights, is here with us.

I actually found this story using a tool that I've been using more and more and it's called Ground News.

And they're the sponsor for this month's video.

Ground News is a website and an app that's designed to give news consumers a more data-driven and transparent way to consume the news.

It has access to over 50,000 news sources from across the political spectrum and has developed a suite of tools to give you a more complete vision of every news story.

Okay, so there's a lot of news breaking recently about North Korea.

So I went here to the North Korea page and news broke that it says

North Korea tested an underwater nuclear attack drone.

So what Ground News does is it collects all the articles that are being published about this story and gives you a bunch of tools to see kind of the big picture.

That's a lot, so that's a pretty good sign.

It also breaks down on the political spectrum where these stories are coming from.

These are sources on the left, the right, and the center.

Ground News uses data from three independent journals and monitoring sites.

There's also factuality and ownership of these sources right here on the side.

It lets you filter the headlines by left, center, and right.

So you can see exactly how each side of the political spectrum is framing this story.

Now I've been using Ground News for a while.

So one of my favorite tools is the blind spot tool up here.

This will show you what kind of stories you're not seeing based on your own ideology.

So if you're on the left, these are the stories that are only being covered on the right.

Things you probably won't see in your news feed.

And if you're on the right, these are stories that you might not be seeing because the left is the only one covering it.

It's a really useful tool to get kind of a bird's eye view of the news.

Compare coverage and stay informed on breaking news by subscribing through my link.

Using that link will get you 40% off the Vantage subscription, which is $5 a month for unlimited access to all these features.

Clicking that link is the best way to support two independent news organizations,

I can't thank them enough for their support.

Kim Yo-jong is Kim Jong-un's younger sister.

Most of the world learned about her when their father, Kim Jong-il, died.

When Kim Jong-un took power, he promoted her to lead the Propaganda and Agitation Department, where she was in charge of keeping North Koreans properly indoctrinated in the Kim's ideology and completely loyal to her brother.

Even though Kim Yo-jong's official title ranks her below many other officials, her relationship to her brother gives her power over all of them.

And we know that thanks to some clues in North Korean media.

State-run media of North Korea is very meticulously calculated.

Sometimes we see Kim Yo-jong standing next to her brother, Kim Jong-un, and she's just totally carefree.

And nobody except for Kim Yo-jong can be that carefree, standing next to Kim Jong-un.

A more obvious sign is this 2019 photo on Mount Paektu.

This is where, according to mythology, the Korean people and culture originated.

In order to claim their legitimacy as rulers, every Kim leader has appeared in propaganda on Mount Paektu.

Kim Jong-un is pictured there all the time.

But in this photo, Kim Yo-jong is there next to him.

It is a huge message from the regime to the people, that, OK, she is the royal family, and not everybody can ride that horse with that emblem.

That star emblem is only on the siblings' horses because it represents the Mount Paektu dynasty, a.k.a. the Kim family.

This photo is meant to be a reminder to the people that she has royal blood and can rightfully rule North Korea if something were to happen to her brother.

I've asked the same question to hundreds of experts, and they are all very skeptical.

If Kim Jong-un dies today, she will be the interim heiress.

She is a number two who actually never dreams of being number one, but actually is very well aware that she is the number two of the regime.