The Sister: The extraordinary story of Kim Yo Jong, the most powerful woman in North Korea is a 2023 biography of Kim Yo Jong, the sister, closest deputy, and potential successor to North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un. It was subsequently published in the United States with the title The Sister: North Korea's Kim Yo Jong, the Most Dangerous Woman in the World. It is written by Sung-Yoon Lee, a scholar of Korean and East Asian studies. It is regarded as the first book to offer an in-depth portrait of its subject.
The book received generally positive reviews, praised for being an authoritative, meticulous, and engaging portrait of Kim Yo Jong. It was also valued for the insights it offered into the Kim family's domestic machinations and geopolitical tactics for regime survival. Reviewers also noted that the book had to contend with a dearth of information available on Kim Yo Jong, with mixed opinions on whether the attention to small details were astute observations or unnecessary speculation.
The Sister portrays Kim Yo Jong as the second most powerful person after her brother. She leads her country's foreign policy, and heads the agencies in charge of internal political propaganda and of implementing policy and appointing personnel. The book warns against mistaking her femininity for weakness or amenability, and describes her as cold and ruthless.
Lee asserts that North Korea is the only of the world's nine nuclear states that has no checks or balances on the leadership; that it has a bellicose stance against other countries including South Korea and the United States; and that it is extremely repressive to its own people. He concludes that this makes Kim Yo Jong one of the most powerful and dangerous leaders in the contemporary world.
Lee posits her to be best positioned among the Kim family members to succeed her brother, especially if he were incapacitated before his own children had grown up. Were she to become the supreme leader, her personality and track record suggest that she would not be a reformist, and would rule her country with an iron fist much like her predecessors.
Historical and geopolitical background
Korea became divided between North and South at the end of World War II. The South pursued a market economy that eventually led to prosperity, first under military dictatorships, and later as a democracy. The North was established as a communist state by Kim Il Sung. He was succeeded by his son Kim Jong Il in 1994, and his grandson Kim Jong Un in 2011. All the while the vast majority of North Korean populace lived in extreme repression, poverty, and famine.
With their opposite political and economic regimes, the two Koreas were at odds from the outset, both vying to govern of the entire peninsula. The North attempted to conquer the South in the Korean War, but was thwarted by the intervention of the United States. For decades the North continued to be belligerent and threatening to the South and the international community. North Korea successfully developed nuclear weapons, in pursuit of regime preservation and possibly to cow South Korea into submission in the future.
The North's nuclear capabilities, paired with its bellicosity, made the regime a concern to the international community. Further, the country was closed to the outside world, with little information coming in or out. This heightened the uncertainty of how dangerous and how erratic might its leadership be, and how should the international community contend with it. Given the uniquely hereditary and authoritarian nature of the regime, outside observers paid special attention to the ruling Kim family.
In 2023, when The Sister was published, Kim Jong Un was 39 and had been ruling North Korea for 12 years. He was known to have at least a ten-year-old daughter, whom he brought to some public events. Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un's only full sister, was 35.
Contents Synopsis The Sister offers a profile of the enigmatic Kim Yo Jong (b. 1987), sister to Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea. Both siblings are the third generation in the Kim dynasty, preceded by their father Kim Jong Il, and their grandfather and founder of North Korea, Kim Il Sung.
The book constructs a biography of its subject combining three layers of history: of her country, of her family, and of her own life. In it, Sung-Yoon Lee argues that Kim Yo Jong is a key figure of North Korea's nuclear, despotic, and opaque regime. She rose to become Kim Jong Un's closest aide and deputy. She had great influence in the regime's decision making, including in the control of the nuclear weapons. And she was seen as a strong contender to succeeding her brother.
Themes Emergence of North Korea The book explores the historical context of the 20th century partition of the Korean peninsula, and the communist rule that ensued in the North under the Kim family. It describes the totalitarian regime's foundations and its efforts to endure.
Kim dynastic rule The Sister also examines Yo Jong's broader family history, the so-called Mount Paektu bloodline; Lee explores both the real history and the propaganda image the Kim family created.
The book includes a detailed family tree to help the reader make sense of all the familial relationships.
Myth-building of a semi-divine dynasty
The Sister shines a light on the "bold and blatant falsehoods" upon which three generations of the ruling Kim family have built a set of myths to make them semi-divine in the eyes of the populace. That includes hiding "dark secrets" from the populace that would otherwise tarnish the propaganda image of the Kims, upon which the survival of the regime depends.
The regime bans religion and persecutes any known practitioners. However, Kim Il Sung's parents were Christian (and her mother a deaconess). North Korea relegates to the lowest class in the regime's caste system any families with links to Japan, as they are deemed disloyal. However, Kim Jong Un's and Yo Jong's mother Ko Yong Hui was born in Japan. The regime punishes any family who had a member leave the country without permission. However, Kim Jong Un's own aunt defected to the United States in 1998. The book also notes how the Kims live a rich lifestyle that is infamous internationally but also kept hidden to their own people.
These would be unremarkable in other parts of the world, but in North Korea they make entire families guilty by association. The regime deprives them of access to resources and life opportunities, and may even send them to a gulag for hard labor.
Kim Yo Jong's rise to prominence The Sister charts Kim Yo Jong's own life in the context of her country's and family's history. Her first public appearance was in 2011, but she remained mostly unknown. She was first mentioned by name in the North Korean media in 2014 but remained a largely background figure, and even as she rose to greater prominence, North Korean state media had not officially identified her as Kim Jong Un's sister as of the book's publication. She gained public notoriety in 2018 by leading her country's delegation at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. From then on and until 2023 (the book's publication) Lee chronicles in detail all her public appearances: the inter-Korean summits of April 2018, May 2018, September 2018, and the North Korea–United States summits of 2018 in Singapore, and 2019 in Hannoi.
Kim Yo Jong's rise to power The book follows her professional steps and rise to power. Since at least 2014 Yo Jong led the Workers' Party's Propaganda and Agitation Department, in charge of indoctrinating North Koreans with state ideology. In 2020 she become the de facto head of the Organization and Guidance Department, a powerful organ that monitors personnel at all levels, giving her the authority to have anyone investigated and punished. She was also appointed an alternate member of the Politburo and member of the State Affairs Commission by which her brother delegated foreign policy to her. Lee highlights that in June 2020, Kim Jong Un unofficially elevated his sister to deputy leader, whereby, according to Lee, "her words were his words, vetoable only by him."
The regime's diplomatic ploys The Sister also follows the diplomatic stratagems the Kims engage in, especially with South Korea and the United States. Lee argues that early in this period of public notoriety of Kim Yo Jong, North Korea was on a "charm offensive". The Kim siblings used Yo Jong's femininity as a ploy to yet again dupe foreign leaders in to believing that the country's leadership was becoming more reasonable. Lee points out how Kim Yo Jong and Kim Jong Un had learned well from their forebears the playbook of duplicitous diplomacy, making some foreign leaders (chief among them then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in) too quick to seek appeasement and offer concessions at the mirage of a gentler North Korea. However, the North eventually again turned belligerent and stopped meeting with foreign leaders. From that point Kim Yo Jong continued to be outspoken, often making vitriolic statements published in North Korean media.
Conclusions
Lee cautions against underestimating the Kims. The oddities of the North Korean regime and its leadership can cause outside observers to be condescending (as has been the case with several American administrations). Further, Lee also cautions against being credulous when the regime periodically appears to seek denuclearization negotiations or improved diplomatic relations; it is likely a ploy to extract concessions, as they have done in the past.
The book suggests that Yo Jong's feminity can also be mistaken for weakness or amenability. But to patronize the North Korean leadership is to fatally underestimate it. She is ambitious, smart, and ruthless. Inside her country, she "make[s] men twice her age tremble and grovel." Outside her country she is a cool and adept player in North Korea's diplomatic and geopolitical gamesmanship.
Since coming to the public view in 2018, Yo Jong "has remained her despotic nation's chief censor, spokeswoman, mocker and threat-and-malice dispenser." She is "one of the most powerful leaders in the contemporary world, with her nation's foreign policy at her fingertips, and with unfettered access to her nuclear button-controlling brother." Indeed, as the subtitle of the book says she may be the most dangerous woman in the world.
Kim Yo Jong is well-placed to wield power for decades, whether as Kim Jong Un's closest deputy or as his successor. Her existence buttresses the regime and its long-term survival. She is very much part of the family, adept at internal repression and international extortion and vitriol. There is a distinct possibility that she would succeed her brother, becoming the first female supreme leader; the world's first "nuclear despotess". Change would not come at her hands.
Normally being a female would be a hurdle to becoming the leader of a "chauvinistic, male-dominated culture and society," but Lee feels that if Kim Jong Un were incapacitated while his own descendants were not yet adults, Kim Yo Jong would nevertheless be able to rule. This would be by virtue of the divine and royal aura that the decades-long propaganda has bestowed upon the direct descendants of the country's founder Kim Il Sung.
The book also underscores the importance of taking seriously the regime's danger to international security. North Korea is the only of the world's nine nuclear states that has no checks or balances on its leadership. The regime continues to threaten South Korea, Japan, and the United States. In particular the Kim regime sees as its core mission the reduction of the South to North's domination.