The Economist explains
How we have portrayed North Korean leaders on The Economist’s covers
A view of the hermit kingdom in the 21st century
A DECADE AFTER Kim Jong Un took over, North Korea is more North Korean than ever. The country is ever more isolated, with its borders shut in response to the coronavirus pandemic. There are reports of food shortages and political purges. State media rebuff any diplomatic overtures from the West. For the North Korean people the situation is tragic. They have lived under the dictatorship of Mr Kim, his father or his grandfather for more than 70 years. In that time The Economist has put the country on its cover many times. Here we look back at the most notable ones of this century.
2000 – Greetings, earthlings
In June 2000 the leaders of North Korea and South Korea met for the first time since war broke out in 1950 (officially, the conflict is still not officially over). South Korea was by the turn of the century a developed, open-market, open-minded success, but North Korea was—and remains—an impoverished, feudal place, unable to feed its people, surviving on the charity of China. The caption poked fun at the eccentric Kim Jong Il, with a Babygro suit zipped-up over his pot belly, his oversized sunglasses and bouffant hair. Mr Kim loved the film “Godzilla” so much he kidnapped a South Korean director, Shin Sang Ok, to shoot a “Godzilla” of his own devising. But he was far from a harmless eccentric. On his death in 2011 perhaps one in 20 North Koreans had passed through Mr Kim’s gulags, and possibly 200,000 remained there. (When Mr Kim died, The Economist reported it with the headline “Farewell, earthlings”.) Although Mr Kim spoke the language of reunification, his overriding aim was to keep himself and his cronies in power. Today, with his son Kim Jong Un in his place, reunification looks no closer.
2006 – Rocket Man
North Korean leaders have long been missile-mad. In 2006, Kim Jong Il launched a Taepodong rocket, a multi-stage ballistic missile for longer-range attacks (which fizzled) and half a dozen others (which worked). The fireworks display, a rebuke to the West’s efforts to get Mr Kim’s regime to give up its nuclear bomb-building, sparked a diplomatic crisis. That week The Economist chose to send Mr Kim skyward instead, blasting him off with the moniker “Rocket man”. As in Elton John’s song of the same name, the dictator is “burning out his fuse up here alone”. The name appears to have stuck: as president, Donald Trump repeatedly used it to goad Mr Kim’s son, Kim Jong Un.
2013 – Change in North Korea
Early in Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship, North Korea-watchers speculated that he might be a moderniser. By 2013 it was clear that he was no such thing; he had reverted to type by prophesying war. But change was happening: a new class of traders and merchants was using an informal system of money-changing to move funds in and out of the country. Capitalism was seeping into North Korea. Our cover illustrated this by altering a statue in Pyongyang of Mr Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung. Mr Kim senior is showering American dollars and Chinese yuan on his subjects below. In our leader we encouraged the West and China to back North Korea’s capitalists. Sadly the country is now more isolated and wretched than ever. During the covid-19 pandemic, shops in Pyongyang rationed staple foods and Kim Jong Un shed tears as he apologised for not freeing people “from the difficulties in their lives”. The only things improving in North Korea are the missiles.
2017 – It could happen
In 2017, President Donald Trump vowed to stop North Korea from perfecting a nuclear warhead that could threaten the American mainland, tweeting, “It won’t happen!” But as our briefing laid out, it could happen, and might have catastrophic consequences. Our cover put both men at the centre of a mushroom cloud rising into the sky. A bird resembling the logo of Twitter, then Mr Trump’s favourite tool of international diplomacy, perches on a bare tree. Our leader concluded that rather than stumble into a conflict, the world must keep calm and contain Mr Kim. Today, with Mr Trump no longer in the White House, that may seem slightly easier. But that does not mean a conflict could not still happen.
2018 – Kim Jong Won
Less than a year after that cover, the situation seemed briefly hopeful. Mr Trump and Mr Kim met in Singapore, where the North Korean leader made a vague promise of “complete denuclearisation” in exchange for security guarantees. His American counterpart called it “a very great moment in the history of the world”. Alas, the deal amounted to nothing. Instead Mr Kim got what he wanted: a meeting as equals with the sitting president of the United States—an external validation of his godlike status at home. In his attempt to sell the deal, Mr Trump gushed about Mr Kim. We illustrated the failed summit with a close crop of the defining image, the democratically elected president reaching out to shake the dictator’s hand. The caption put it bluntly: Mr Kim got much more out of it than Mr Trump did. In the years that have followed, Mr Kim has resumed missile tests, including firing a submarine-launched ballistic missile in September, the development of which the armed forces had previously declined to confirm. Far from marking a new period of co-operation on the Korean peninsula, Mr Trump’s summit preceded a dangerous new phase in its arms race.