Could a woman rule North Korea? Kim Jong Un’s daughter could be next in line

In 2022, North Korea’s “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong Un, appeared at a missile launch with a girl of around 10 years old. Her name has never been confirmed, although it may be Kim Ju Ae, the child of Kim and his wife Ri Sol Ju. This “respected daughter”, as she is known in North Korea, accompanied her father on his recent visit to China, prompting analysts to wonder whether she is the designated heir to the hermit kingdom. 

Things might not be quite so simple. There is a school of thought that Kim Ju Ae is being used to distract from the existence of a male heir, perhaps one who is studying abroad under an alias. And, as observers of North Korean politics can attest, much can rapidly change after long periods of apparent stability. Even if Kim is planning a handover, it might not go as planned.

Yet the prominence of this 12- or 13-year-old girl is itself remarkable, for this is a country where choreography is central to the Kim dynasty’s cult of personality. Kim wants the North Korean public, and the world, to be aware of his daughter, and to see her as part of his demigod lineage. And in the event that she succeeds her father, whose health is suspect, Kim Ju Ae will become the world’s only female autocrat. While there are no parallels to her rule today, there have been female autocrats going back all the way to first-dynasty Egypt 5000 years ago. We can look at them to give us an idea of how Kim Ju Ae, as the newest member of this select group, might choose to rule.

As she will already know, North Korean society is highly patriarchal. In this it is no different to Korean society across history. The last woman to rule any part of the Korean peninsula, Queen Jinseong of Silla, abdicated in 897 AD, making it more than one thousand years since a woman has held direct power there. In the region as a whole, female rule has never been common. Japan’s last reigning empress lived in the 18th century, with female succession banned at the end of the 19th. China’s ineffectual male emperors were puppeteered by Dowager Empress Cixi in the late nineteenth and early 20th century, but the country’s only female head of state, Wu Zetian, died in 705. 

Fear of an established leader, such as Kim Jong Un, can make it appear that a non-standard succession has been agreed, but in a society as male-dominated as North Korea, there are very likely grave concerns about a female ruler. This skepticism, though, will be well-disguised. Kim Ju Ae, like many female rulers,  might not find out about it until the moment her father dies. Matilda, for instance, was the only surviving legitimate child of Henry I of England, and was readily accepted as heir by noblemen who swore fealty at her father’s court. But when Henry died, in 1135, these oath-takers abandoned Matilda in favor of a male cousin. Similarly, the teenaged Tamar was given a well-attended coronation to rule as junior king alongside her father in Georgia in 1178, But when he died, six years later, she Tamar faced rebellion. More recently, the accession of Maria Theresa to the Habsburg Empire in 1740 directly led to the devastating War of the Austrian Succession. North Korea is, of course, a nuclear state, making the stakes all the higher.

One way that Kim Ju Ae can seek to safeguard her position will be already familiar to her. North Korea’s leaders always establish a cult of personality, something that Ju Ae will undoubtedly look to do. With this goal in mind, she must first show reverence towards her predecessors, even as she subtly stresses her likeness to them. Kim Jong-Un will probably join his father and grandfather in the pantheon of “eternal leaders of Korea”. His daughter will therefore become one of many female rulers who have found it expedient to stress their links to famous male members of their dynasties. Margrete I of Denmark and Norway, who was so powerful that she conquered Sweden in 1389, still considered it politic to refer to herself as “King Valdemar’s daughter” long after her father’s death, making an overt link to her kingdoms’ last effective male ruler. It is a technique that has been used many times. The acknowledged heiress to the Aztec empire took the baptismal name Isabel Moctezuma after the Spanish conquest in 1521. She did so in order to tie herself more firmly to her father, the last emperor Moctezuma, in the hope of securing a financial settlement from the Spanish conquerors. We can expect that Kim Ju Ae will make much of her descent, likening her character, and even her appearance, to those of earlier members of her dynasty.

Having underscored her place in this lineage, Kim Ju Ae will then need to establish her own cult of personality. Such cults are marked by very public displays of devotion to the ruling family. Kim Jong-Un’s cult emphasizes his strength as a leader, as well as portraying him as, effectively, the father of his country. State propaganda also stresses his military strength and his prestige on the international stage, something that was bolstered by his meeting with Donald Trump in 2018. These values are distinctly masculine, and are in keeping with traditional views from around the world of what a leader should embody. These values can pose problems for women. It was the view of Matilda’s contemporaries that her arrogance cost her the throne, even though arrogance might not have been considered a problem in a man. 

One successful strategy is to attempt to turn the disadvantage of being female into a blessing. Elizabeth I of England did this remarkably well in the sixteenth century, portraying herself as “Gloriana”, or the unchanging Virgin Queen, and as the wife or mother of her kingdom. We still view Elizabeth, who stares down blank-faced and unageing from portraits, through the prism of this personality cult of hers. The same can be said for Catherine the Great, who, in the 18th century, rebranded herself from minor German princess to contender for the Russian throne. In Catherine’s 34-year-reign, she expanded Russia’s territory, enacting complex reforms, and helped elevate her country to the highest echelon of cultured European life. If Kim Ju Ae succeeds her father, she will attempt to depict herself as being on equal terms with the male leaders of North Korea’s allies. She will also, like Elizabeth I of England, invoke the ideas of marriage to her country, or the symbolic motherhood of her people.

As for her rule, we might wonder whether we can expect different behavior domestically from a female leader. Many reigning queens have shown a natural inclination to be merciful, with Elizabeth I of England highly reluctant to sign death warrants during her reign. Elizabeth of Russia — who was the only surviving child of Peter the Great, and had been initially passed over because of her sex — vowed when she took the throne in 1741 that she would order no executions. Astoundingly, Elizabeth kept her vow throughout her twenty-year reign, though she also beat her servants. As for plotters, they were exiled to Siberia after having their tongues cut out. Women are, on the whole, less aggressive than men, but a certain level of aggressiveness must be maintained by a female ruler if she is to ensure she is respected and obeyed. 

This is a difficult balance for Kim Ju Ae to have to learn. We tend to better remember women’s crimes than men’s. Wu Zetian, of 7th-century China, is remembered for her purges, while her literary achievements tend to be understated. Everyone knows “Bloody Mary”, the first crowned queen of England whose reputation rests on the nearly 300 of her Protestant subjects that she burned. Her father, Henry VIII who, on a conservative estimate killed 30,000 of his subjects, never acquired the nickname “Bloody”. 

A complicating factor for Kim Ju Ae, should she inherit the kingdom, is that its ruler’s safety depends on his or her implied aggression. North Korea lives a precarious existence. To deter interference, it issues frequent and bellicose threats to South Korea and other antagonists. North Korea’s military is therefore central to its self-image and how it is viewed on the world stage. 

It might be inconvenient for the claim of Kim Ju Ae, then, that most wars in history have been started by men and that many female rulers have shown a reluctance to go to war. Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary, for example, having won her throne after the long years of the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s, was always reluctant to commit herself to warfare. An exception was her participation in the Seven Years’ War of 1756-1763, though her aim — to regain the province of Silesia, seized by Prussia more than a decade earlier — was, in Austrian-Hungarian eyes, restorative rather than acquisitive. 

Given North Korea’s circumstances, Kim Ju Ae would need to project the impression that she is no more likely to back down from a conflict than her father. The concept of a warrior queen — such as Zenobia of Palmyra, who conquered Egypt in the third century AD, or Isabel I of Castile, who famously conquered Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, in the 15th century — can be extremely helpful to female rulers in how they are perceived internationally. Female leaders are less likely to be expected to act as generals or to direct military strategy, but they can burnish their reputations with appearances at military parades or in international negotiations. We cannot expect a female autocrat to be a pacifist. If Kim Ju Ae has the remotest sense of self-preservation, the dismal situation on the Korean peninsula will remain deeply entrenched.

If she marries, she will need to consider the threat that her husband might pose: a perennial problem for female autocrats. Elizabeth I never married, and was more secure a ruler for it. But Kim Ju Ae will be expected to produce an heir to continue the Kim line, and will one day have to consider her own succession, just as her father did before her. Behind the carefully-managed choreography, there will be plotting and rivalry. Whether any of this will improve the lives of the benighted North Korean people is impossible to know.

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