Kim Jong Un's repeated public appearances with his daughter over the past four years have led many North Korean defectors, and South Korea's spy agency, to conclude that she is being groomed as heir to a nuclear-armed dynasty, NPR reported, based on Associated Press interviews.
Not much is known about the girl except that she is reportedly about 13 and named Kim Ju Ae. Since late 2022 she has made dozens of public appearances, all with her father, at events such as weapons tests and military parades. State media has called her Kim's "most beloved" and "respected" child. Images have shown an elderly general kneeling before her and the girl standing in front of her father. The Associated Press spoke with nearly a dozen defectors who still have contacts in the North or who witnessed earlier successions, plus several experts. Eight of the 11 defectors shared the spy agency's view that she is the likely heir; the others disagreed, citing the country's deeply patriarchal culture.
Kim Yumi, 32, who fled by boat three years ago after pandemic rules ruined her family's fishing business and now lives in Seoul, said state television images of the leader with his daughter were a warning of a fourth-generation dictatorship. "My husband and I didn't want our children to live under a fourth-generation dictatorship. As parents, we thought the best thing we could do for our children was to give them freedom," she said. North Korea, established in 1948, is nominally a socialist republic but has been ruled by three generations of the Kim family, with no known public resistance when power passed from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il in 1994 or from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un in 2011. The country harshly punishes dissent and attempts to flee. Analysts and defectors told the AP that ordinary North Koreans will have no say in the choice and will, at least publicly, accept a third dynastic succession. The next leader would govern 26 million people in an impoverished, heavily surveilled, nuclear-armed state largely cut off from the world.
"During her visits to missile launch sites and factories, the way senior North Korean officials treat Kim Ju Ae involves protocols reserved for a successor, not the ones simply for a daughter of Kim Jong Un," said Tae Yongho, a former minister at North Korea's embassy in London who defected to South Korea in 2016. "They are repeating the same protocol and treatment they provided for Kim Jong Un" when he accompanied his father as heir. Those are assessments from defectors and a foreign intelligence service, not an official announcement from Pyongyang.