In 2015, the North Korean diplomat Thae Yong Ho received an unusual assignment. Kim Jong Chol, the older brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was coming to London to attend an Eric Clapton concert, and Thae, who was then stationed in London, was assigned to look after him. Providing direct service to the ruling family confers honor on North Korean officials and their households, so Thae expected his two sons to be impressed.
To Thae’s surprise, his sons were outraged. Ordinary North Koreans could be expelled from university (or worse) for listening to Western music, they told him. And now the Kim family was spending thousands of dollars in a single evening to enjoy entertainment forbidden to all other North Koreans. In the eyes of his children, Thae later wrote in his memoir, Password to the Third Floor, he was a prisoner forced to take care of a prison warden. Their reaction left him ashamed.
The next year, Thae, his wife, and their sons escaped to South Korea. His defection surprised the international community. Only weeks earlier, Thae had been defending the North Korean regime with great fervor. Yet this incongruous behavior is familiar to those who understand life among North Korea’s elite: officials can profess full devotion to the Kim family right until the day they run.
The gap between public conduct and private belief is difficult to observe from the outside. For over a decade, I interviewed dozens of former diplomats, Korean Workers’ Party cadres, military officers, businesspeople, and technicians, all of whom had lived, studied, or worked in Pyongyang. These people ran the party, military, embassies, foreign-currency businesses, and technical programs on which the state depends for its survival. They received the best education, housing, food, and access to influential social networks their country could provide. Some once believed sincerely in the system; others learned early that loyalty was a role they had to pantomime in a nationwide, lifelong performance—now with Kim Jong Un as the maestro. Nearly all described an elite class under growing strain.
Since Kim Jong Un came to power in December 2011, he has tightened his grip on the country’s elites by carrying out sweeping purges of the old guard of senior party officials and military officers and executing others for minor political missteps. Many members of North Korea’s elite fear that they or their families can be killed at the drop of a hat. And their escape routes are narrowing; since Kim sealed off the borders during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of North Korean defectors reaching South Korea has plummeted.
Those North Koreans who still manage to escape increasingly come from the elite. As of August 2024, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service reported that the number of defections from North Korea’s upper class recorded under Kim Jong Un was two and a half times the combined total observed during the reigns of Kim Il Sung (1948 to 1994) and Kim Jong Il (1994 to 2011). The absolute number remains small—in the hundreds—and it would be a mistake to interpret this trend as a harbinger of imminent regime collapse. North Korea is remarkably effective at preventing private grievances from becoming organized opposition. The regime does not need every official to believe in it. But it needs its doubters to feel isolated and alone in their skepticism and disillusionment.
North Korea has long been referred to as the “Hermit Kingdom,” but that term offers the wrong impression of the country. It is not totally isolated from the world. It is a nuclear-armed state with diplomatic relations with over 160 countries, and it has the world’s fourth-largest standing army and highly skilled cyber-operators. The vast majority of the population may be fed a robust diet of state propaganda, but most elites are exposed to life outside North Korea. They have a reasonable sense of how the world works and their country’s place in it. And yet they have to live with intense cognitive dissonance, at once understanding the real world and having to create, enforce, and trumpet the state’s official narratives to their countrymen and foreigners.
Many high-ranking North Koreans are finding it harder to sustain this balancing act. Access to privilege can purchase compliance—and terror can enforce it—but the state will not give elites what they increasingly want: guaranteed security for them and their families and a viable future for their children. Kim can allay some frustrations by doling out luxury apartments, promotions, and access to extravagant lifestyles. He cannot address the deeper sources of discontent without relaxing the very controls that protect his family’s rule from challenges to its power. The regime remains capable of suppressing any organized resistance in the country, but the growing disaffection of the elite threatens to weaken the state from within. Kim presides over a system increasingly marked by doubt, suspicion, and pervasive anxiety. When the chips are down and North Korea faces a true crisis, its most powerful leaders may not know who they can trust and where they can turn.
TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN
Most of the more than 34,000 North Koreans now living in South Korea came from the poor northern provinces along the Chinese border. Many of them fled to the south to escape famine and economic hardship. They had little access to the regime’s inner workings, even if they had tremendous experience of its cruelty and depredations. In contrast, elite escapees come from a wholly different world. They are products of Pyongyang, a capital of roughly three million that is closed to most of the country’s 25 million citizens. They grew up with relatively reliable electricity and running water, and attended schools designed to educate the next generation of regime operators. They benefited from the new construction of luxury residential districts, extravagant resort towns such as Samjiyon and Wonsan-Kalma, and the country’s sustained economic growth in the face of heavy international sanctions. North Korea’s elite serve in a range of occupations beyond just the party cadre ranks, the military, and the security services; they can be artists, software engineers, restaurant managers, and much else. The regime groomed them from birth to serve the party and the Kim family.
Consider the family of Ri Jong Ho and his son Hyunseung Lee. Ri spent three decades in Office 39, which earns and manages foreign currency for the leadership. Kim Jong Il appointed him to senior trade and economic posts, and in 2002 the state awarded him a Hero of Labor medal and a Kim Il Sung watch, prestigious honors and a recognition of his loyalty and patriotism. Ri’s son attended some of the country’s finest educational institutions, including Kumsong Academy and Pyongyang Foreign Language Institute, which prepare the children of senior cadres to enter high positions in the party. Hyunseung and his sister were also among the rare few North Koreans who were permitted to study abroad in China. By his mid-20s, Hyunseung was already a party member, working in China, and was trusted to chair a branch of the Kim Il Sung Youth League while helping facilitate millions of dollars in trade between Chinese companies and North Korea. This family faithfully served their country while living at the highest echelons of their society and enjoying the best creature comforts. But their privileged positions did not make them safe.
The shocking 2013 execution of Jang Song Thaek, Kim Jong Un’s uncle, unnerved Ri. The slain Jang had been married to Kim Il Sung’s daughter and had served all three Kims. If the regime could eliminate such a decorated official—and a member of the ruling family—and seek to erase him from the country’s history and memory, then no one was untouchable. Ri’s family escaped to South Korea from their posts in China in 2014, and Hyunseung and his sister later earned master’s degrees from Columbia University. Despite the many privileges their family received from the regime, they fled because their proximity to power made them feel deeply vulnerable.
North Koreans live under institutions designed to make independent organization impossible. Party committees operate inside every school, embassy, farm, military unit, office, and factory. Security bureaus obsessively police information flows and political conduct, while neighborhood units monitor every household. Every citizen, starting at a young age, belongs to a state-directed organization. For elites, closeness to power invites suffocating scrutiny; it places them more deeply within the grasp of the state rather than freeing them from the overbearing system.
The Organization and Guidance Department, the party’s most powerful agency, oversees appointments, inspections, and discipline everywhere—in Pyongyang as well as rural villages. No escapee is known to have come from the OGD’s central ranks, an indication of the control imposed on the country’s most influential officials. Diplomats and workers sent abroad must surrender their passports and leave relatives in North Korea as collateral to deter defection. When they come home, they must account for what they saw, heard, and did abroad, enumerate every single political sin they committed, and then undergo extensive ideological deprogramming and reprogramming.
Kim Se Yun (a pseudonym), a former senior party cadre who traveled overseas, described the monthlong central review she underwent every time she returned to Pyongyang. Officials have to “cleanse” themselves of what they have encountered and report even small details, including whether they had gone out drinking with colleagues after dinner. A late night out could require a written piece of self-flagellation to account for a lapse unbecoming of “a devoted worker for the state.” The review was meant to minimize the effects of foreign exposure: a person could see how others lived but, upon returning, had to renounce what she had seen. Kim Se Yun described the constant surveillance when abroad and at home as miserable and utterly asphyxiating.
An elite position brings goods, status, and influence denied to ordinary citizens, but it also places a person’s career, relatives, and life within reach of the leader who can destroy them at any point for any reason. As one common saying in Pyongyang has it, “The closer you are to the sun, the more likely you will burn.”
A SPECK OF DUST
Nothing impressed this lesson upon the elite class more forcefully than the fall of Jang in 2013. His sudden arrest and execution sent lasting fear through Pyongyang. Every elite I spoke with understood the warning implicit in his killing.
Jang had already undergone “revolutionization” three times. This distinctly North Korean punishment, used especially to discipline and defenestrate high officials, strips a person of office and sends him to perform physical labor and political reeducation, often in the countryside. It humiliates an elite official in front of the people he once commanded, even if it does not foreclose the possibility of his future rehabilitation. Jang returned each time, only to be executed in the end by the third leader he served. Heo Kang Il, an elite defector who managed a North Korean restaurant in China and in 2016 brought 12 of his staff with him to South Korea, knew people subjected to revolutionization and was subjected to it once himself. He told me that many never recovered even after being rehabilitated. Some developed psychological illnesses or died within a few years from physical ailments.
When Kim Jong Un became the country’s leader in December 2011, he was in his late 20s (his exact birth year is unknown). He aggressively imposed his writ by carrying out purges of party senior cadres and military officials who had served under his two predecessors. Outside observers described his vicious consolidation of power as an attempt to compensate for his youth, his limited political experience, and his complete lack of a military background. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Kim Jong Un reinforced the country’s already hard borders to eliminate any unauthorized cross-border movement and passed draconian laws that further criminalized consumption of any unauthorized foreign media, all with the aim of “repurifying” the country’s socialist Korean culture. Although the pandemic has passed, the information environment is more controlled than ever before and the borders remain sealed.
In North Korea, loyalty is evaluated and documented from childhood. A person’s conduct at school; performance in political organizations; and songbun status (a hereditary classification of loyalty to the regime that breaks up North Koreans into three broad groups: “core,” “wavering,” and “hostile”), determine admission to universities, party membership, and promotion. Adults attend regular self-criticism sessions. At home, portraits of the Kims must hang spotless at the highest point of the most prominent wall, with nothing placed above them. One woman I interviewed recalled habitation inspectors making regular visits in white gloves to check the portraits for dust. She cleaned the portraits meticulously, not because she revered the men in them but because a speck of dust could endanger her family.
Officials can profess full devotion to the Kim family right until the day they run.
Even a weekly public self-criticism session, which requires a person to publicly share a political transgression they have made and then criticize a colleague, often becomes a coordinated performance. Many elite defectors told me that the day before a self-criticism session, colleagues would warn one another about what they planned to criticize at the next day’s session. The advance notice protected friendships while allowing everyone to satisfy the requirements of the political cleansing ritual. A person might confess to lacking sufficient revolutionary zeal during the previous week and vehemently rebuke a friend for a similar offense. The trick was to disclose transgressions that were sufficiently blameworthy but not serious enough to get oneself or a colleague in too much trouble.
Another former elite described the public mourning after Kim Jong Il’s death in 2011. She felt relief at the leader’s death, and no sorrow, but knew that she had to appear to cry, so she dredged up her saddest memories—those of her grandmother’s death and of a cousin who was forcibly repatriated after a failed defection—to force herself to weep. When tears still would not come, she bowed her head, dramatically shook her shoulders, and avoided eye contact with anyone in the hysterically wailing crowd. She believed that many people around her were giving the same performance.
Scholars refer to this gap as preference falsification: people publicly misrepresent their true beliefs because honesty is dangerous. In Pyongyang, preference falsification is an essential part of ordinary daily life. Elites constantly calibrate their speech and compartmentalize their innermost private thoughts. Some still believe in the system or feel genuine national pride. Others resent Kim while valuing the status his regime gives them. Belief and cynicism can exist in the same office and within the same person. This is how a senior diplomat can lecture British bureaucrats about North Korea’s victimhood one day and then flee North Korea with his entire family a few weeks later.
When elites do leave, their departures remind others who harbor private doubts that they are not alone. This is one reason Pyongyang treats prominent defections as security emergencies. When Heo (the restaurant manager) and 12 workers left a North Korean restaurant in China in 2016, the state recalled all other workers in China for interrogation. In his memoir, Thae analogized this group defection to stones falling from a castle wall: small losses can eventually lead to the collapse of the entire castle.
WHAT THE ELITE WANT
Nobody lightly gives up their lofty place in the pecking order of North Korean society. Kim Jong Un has not neglected his ruling class. His government has built gleaming new housing in Pyongyang for scientists, party cadres, and other favored groups, and it distributes foreign cars, watches, jewelry, food, and apartments. An elite position also provides something less tangible: a strong sense of purpose and relevance. A bureaucrat, as powerless as he may be, matters in North Korean society. People appreciate his official title, defer to his family, and recognize the heft of his social and political connections.
The prospect of losing that status can make the thought of escape unpalatable even for people who detest the regime. Over dinner at a Seoul barbecue restaurant buzzing with customers eating sizzling meat and drinking somaek, a mixture of beer and soju, a former official I call Mr. Kim recalled an incident elsewhere in which he had asked a table of loud college students to quiet down. Decades younger than him, they barely looked at him—they “didn’t even put their drinks down.” One student told him to eat somewhere else. As he recalled the humiliation, Mr. Kim removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. In North Korea, he told me, a restaurant would have gone silent when he entered. He would have walked with his shoulders straight and head held high, knowing that his family name and job carried weight. In South Korea, where he worked a warehouse job, he was “just a mere North Korean defector with a suspicious accent.”
Mr. Kim’s experience of losing status and purpose after defection helps explain why the regime’s mixture of privilege and coercion still works. Elites know they have a lot to risk and lose, so for most aggrieved elites, the rational option is to remain in the system, perform loyalty for the rest of their lives, and extract all the advantages their positions still offer.
Yet this bargain has an expiration date. After retirement, senior officers and cadres do not receive pensions. The government takes back state-provided cars, homes, and appliances. After serving the state for decades, retired generals and senior cadres are often reduced to working as guards or market vendors. Younger elites watch this happen and accumulate money as much as possible, knowing that the state that demands their whole lives will not care for them in their old age.
Younger and middle-aged elites are also less inclined to put up with the careers and sacrifices the state has historically presented as honorable. Many interviewees told me that elite parents no longer want their sons to spend over a decade conscripted in the army or build careers entirely inside the party. They prefer business, technical work, study abroad, and amassing private wealth. They want access to the outside world and would welcome greater economic liberalization at home, even if they do not expect full democracy or the reunification of the peninsula in the near future. Above all, they want their children to have lives less constrained than their own.
Money has altered the old order in what Kim Jong Un calls a “socialist paradise.” During one interview, an escapee told me that he knew who would succeed Kim Jong Un to become North Korea’s fourth ruler. I expected him to name Kim Jong Un’s daughter or sister. “Money,” he said. He was being cheeky, but only partly. He pulled out his phone and read the biblical warning that no one can serve two masters, God and money; in his analogy, Kim occupied the place of God. North Koreans jostle for food, better education, and influence, and search for ways to make money outside state-sanctioned activities by paying bribes and using black markets. Younger elites increasingly judge a good marriage, job, and future career path in terms of how it can offer them access to cash and useful business connections. A title remains useful, often because it can be converted into income. The collapse of the state’s public distribution system and devastating famine years of the 1990s drove the grassroot marketization of the country, with the development of state-regulated marketplaces, some so large that they’ve hosted over 10,000 vendors. Presently, in this de jure socialist country that officially condemns capitalism, markets and the imperative of earning hard cash shape people’s daily lives.
This change appears in ordinary choices. One former businessman carried a two-dollar bill in his wallet as a good-luck charm to attract prosperity and wealth. Other interviewees remembered a time when families seeking husbands for their daughters preferred sons of party cadres; today, a man with access to foreign currency or a profitable business can be much more desirable. Political rank still opens doors, but money can keep them open.
Kim has accommodated some of these economic changes; once prohibited, markets are now regulated and taxed by the state. Although foreign media and the Internet remain strictly prohibited, the state allows North Koreans to access a highly controlled intranet and use smartphones with local software and applications. It grants apartments to selected families and permits officials to enrich themselves by engaging in business ventures, provided they continue to perform their jobs exquisitely and contribute mandatory “loyalty funds” to the state.
What Kim cannot offer is dependable and lasting safety. Everything remains subordinate to the leader’s needs and whims. An official who follows the law may still be punished for crossing a better-connected family, and a successful cadre may be swept away because his patron was purged.
ALONE, TOGETHER
Growing elite grievances do not mean an uprising is near. A disaffected elite has five options: remain silent and maintain the status quo; flee the country; build parallel networks of money and influence; protest; or push for incremental reform. The last three are extraordinarily dangerous in North Korea. The regime will extinguish dissent, bids for reform, and any networks that strive to operate or even seem to operate beyond the state’s control. For most, the choice then narrows to either carrying one’s grievances to the grave or mustering the courage and resolve to defect.
Most people opt to stay. Through imposing guilt by association and collective punishments, the North Korean state has spent decades attenuating the relationships through which private anger might be converted into collective action. Its surveillance system encourages colleagues, neighbors, and even relatives to watch and report one another. Unapproved associations and even impromptu sports matches at schools that bring together more than a few people are forbidden unless they are specially approved, and the state tightly controls information about purges and acts of protest to prevent the spread of dissension. In some border cities, such as Sinuiju, the party has recently banned any unapproved gatherings of three or more people.
When I discussed the obstacles to collective action with Lee Chul Eun, a former high-ranking official in the Ministry of State Security who defected in 2016 by swimming six kilometers to South Korea, he described the state’s security apparatus as a spiderweb of security agents, surveillance offices, military commands, and party bodies. A person would have to be “absolutely insane” to challenge such a system, he told me. Another former official summarized the social knowledge produced by that web: “We [elites] know everything but just don’t express it.” Elites can recognize propaganda, corruption, and private anger around them while not knowing whom they can fully trust to confide in.
The regime has other sources of durability. Trade with China, weapons sales, cybertheft from foreign banks and companies, and sending North Korean laborers abroad all help fund the regime’s operations, including its nuclear weapons program, security services, national network of political prison camps, and luxuries necessary for managing elites. The regime has survived famine, international sanctions, and leadership successions. Discontent has been building for years without ever transforming into any form of sustained, organized opposition.
Access to privilege can purchase compliance—and terror can enforce it.
This helps explain another surprising finding from my interviews and research. Many elites understand that the official story is false. They know that colleagues complain in private, seek bribes, watch foreign media, and concoct safe ways for their children to remain and work abroad. What they cannot safely determine is who would follow and stand with them if they tried to protest and push for reform. First movers are the most vulnerable to state repression, while everyone else can deny sharing the same views. North Korea’s political system depends on atomization and making doubters feel isolated from one another. The regime understands that the most plausible organized threat to its hold on the state would be Pyongyang powered, not people powered; a challenge or rebellion is more likely to start among elite insiders than as a mass revolt from below. But for now, elites don’t trust one another and lack the shared vision required to move against the regime.
Defection is the one option an individual can choose without first building a coalition. Elite escapees take with them expertise and signal to peers that leaving is possible. Yet China continues to forcibly repatriate North Koreans who cross its border. Officials posted abroad wishing to defect must dexterously evade state security officials stationed alongside them and come to peace with the fact that loved ones back home will surely be punished.
In August 2025, a North Korean interpreter traveling with a delegation from Pyongyang’s Academy of Social Sciences entered the South Korean embassy in Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia and asked to defect. A year later, the request is still unresolved and the interpreter remains in limbo in the embassy. Mongolia, which maintains relations with Pyongyang, has been slow to cooperate. North Korea objected, and Seoul, currently under a left-leaning administration that seeks warmer relations with the North, will not even confirm that the case existed. For officials considering escape, the lesson is stark: even reaching the embassy of an ostensibly democratic country may not deliver them from the tyranny of home.
Several elite defectors I spoke with had reached the United States and applied for asylum. Their claims have languished for years or been rejected; one claimant has waited more than nine years. They cycle through hearings and background checks with no resolution to their cases. A former North Korean official could certainly pose a counterintelligence risk. But keeping them in this purgatory tells others that the United States may be happy to take their valuable intelligence while still not offering them a future. The vagaries of American asylum policy are not responsible for the persistence of the Kim family regime, but Washington’s reluctance to welcome these defectors could suggest to wavering elites in Pyongyang that it might just be safer to stay put.
KIM’S LAST DAYS
Kim Jong Un can continue to manage elite disaffection by rotating, purging, rewarding, and surveilling the very people who keep his regime running on a daily basis. But this approach provides only symptomatic relief to the overarching and insoluble crisis produced by his totalitarianism. To gain the confidence of his elites, he would have to stop using purges and executions, end the collective punishment of families for the transgressions of an individual, close political prison camps, permit freer flows of information, and allow for autonomous market activity without the fear of unpredictable shutdowns and confiscations. Each concession, however, reduces the fear and isolation of elites. To Kim’s detriment, that would only embolden elites to turn against him.
He will likely not relax his grip on the ranks of the powerful. But in so doing, he will weaken his own regime. The costs of preference falsification and performative loyalty will accumulate among the highest echelons of the regime’s operators. That will become most dangerous during a succession struggle or severe economic shock. In ordinary times, each official can continue assuming that all his colleagues will strive to maintain the status quo. But a crisis—such as a military coup, another volcanic eruption of Mount Paektu, or an economic meltdown—can change those assumptions swiftly.
In a moment of upheaval and uncertainty, already disaffected officials may conclude that obedient compliance will no longer protect their positions or their families. Officials who appear loyal today might withhold cooperation from a startled regime, engage in a power struggle, or defect en masse. If enough regime operators make these calculations, then Kim will find that the people he depends on to carry out his orders are prioritizing their own survival over that of his regime. And he could lose his hold on the country.
My interviews with erstwhile members of North Korea’s elite do not point to imminent regime collapse. Rather, they suggest a more haunting vulnerability for the Kim family: the loyalty of the elites, which is critical for regime survival, is becoming more performative, less genuine, and motivated by self-preservation, not a wellspring of ideological conviction. The regime’s habitual recourse to maximalist punishments and mass purges will likely drive more elites to defect and maybe, more strikingly, muster unprecedented expressions of collective action. Kim will face his last days when a large enough body of North Korean elites conclude that remaining loyal is no longer their safest and most rational choice.
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