HOMENATION
INDICATORS
Tax Dollars, Child Heath,
Internet Use and More
CAMPAIGN 2000
Pump Up the Volume
Who Gets the 'A'
in Education?
What They Think of
Each Other
WORKSHEET:
The Big Issues:
A Summary
CIVIL RIGHTS
The Ghosts of Alabama
SOCIETY
Aye, Aye, Ma'am
SCIENCE
The Race Is Over
BUSINESS
Grounds For Appeal
WORLD
GLOBAL ECONOMY
The New Radicals
MIDDLE EAST
Arafat's Long Journey
After the Lion
RUSSIA
The Acid-Bath Solution
WORKSHEET:
The Role of the President:
A Comparison
ASIA
The Remaking of
a Dictator
Taiwan Takes a Stand
AFRICA
When the Peace
Cannot Be Kept
LATIN AMERICA
The Bionic Candidate
Can One Boy
Change Policy?
WORKSHEET:
Deciding Elián's Fate
TECHNOLOGY
Attack of the
Love Bug
Current Events in Review
Answers
ASIA
By TIM LARIMER
When Kim Jong Il succeeded his father as leader of North Korea six years ago, he was lampooned by the rest of the world as a pudgy playboy who drank cognac while his countrymen barely subsisted, many of them reduced to eating roots. He favored James Bond and Daffy Duck in his collection of some 20,000 videotapes. He was a lush who once showed up at a meeting so drunk that his father had him thrown out. He was so paranoid that he would have rivals purged, so ruthless that he was accused of plotting to assassinate a South Korean President and to down an airliner.
The portrait created by these rumors and suspicions: North Korea’s leader was unpredictable and goofy, and because he was thought to control a nuclear weapons program on one side of the world’s most fortified border, he was dangerous. Fast forward to last week’s summit in Pyongyang. When Kim Jong Il, still pudgy, and still wearing a poufy black hairdo, reached out with both hands to welcome South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, the makeover of the madman image was complete. The 58-year-old leader of the world’s most mysterious country had been transformed into a fellow who could crack jokes at his own expense and show proper Confucian respect to the elder President Kim. “I am aware that one of your legs is not very comfortable,” he remarked to his 74-year-old South Korean counterpart during the limousine drive from the airport to the capital.
If there was one thing that most Korea watchers felt they knew for sure, it was that the comfort of a South Korean President was not on the list of things Kim Jong Il cared about. But that was the old Kim. The new one is a masterwork of political repositioning. Part spin, part smarts and all opportunism, Kim 2.0 is an impressive creation, an example of a 180-degree image shift that was achieved in near Internet time—hardly something anyone would have expected from Pyongyang.
But that’s precisely what the world got—much to the astonishment of the White House, which just weeks ago had been using Kim as Example A of a “rogue dictator” while trying to convince Russia of the value of a missile-defense shield. It’s too early to be sure that the new Kim is for real. The makeover, though, does seem to have legs. It’s not really that Kim is such a different guy—his charmingly opportunistic streak once helped him extort billions from foreign governments in exchange for capping his nukes program. It’s that his interests—and the world around him—have changed for good.
Last week Kim spoke of his eagerness to work toward reunification of South and North Korea. That was in keeping with the new Kim the CIA hears about, a man who is an avid watcher of CNN and at least a onetime surfer of the Internet. Then there’s the issue the two leaders merely flirted with: the weapons of mass destruction that Pyongyang uses to threaten the rest of the world. Warns Victor Cha, a Korea expert at Georgetown University in Washington: “Handshakes and hugs and delightful small talk are all very nice. But all the tougher issues are still out there.”
Time, June 26, 2000
Questions
1. How and why has Kim changed his image?
2. What issues were covered at the Pyongyang summit? What remain to be addressed?