North Korea’s Strongwoman-in-Waiting

Kim Jong Un is orchestrating his daughter’s ascent through a campaign of maternal statecraft.

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For nearly eight decades, North Korea has followed a pattern of patrilineal succession. Absolute power has transferred from father to son, producing a predictable, male-dominated hierarchy that appeared resistant to change.

But the unprecedented public elevation of Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter, Kim Ju Ae, presents a potential disruption to this order. In early 2026, state media showed Ju Ae firing a sniper rifle among senior party and military officials; on March 19, she was photographed operating a new battle tank during a tactical drill.

For nearly eight decades, North Korea has followed a pattern of patrilineal succession. Absolute power has transferred from father to son, producing a predictable, male-dominated hierarchy that appeared resistant to change.

But the unprecedented public elevation of Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter, Kim Ju Ae, presents a potential disruption to this order. In early 2026, state media showed Ju Ae firing a sniper rifle among senior party and military officials; on March 19, she was photographed operating a new battle tank during a tactical drill.

According to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), Ju Ae is the most likely successor to Kim Jong Un’s regime. The question now is not whether the regime intends to install a female supreme leader, but rather how it plans to legitimize this transition within a society known for its patriarchal conservatism. The answer lies in a campaign of mythmaking, linguistic and visual manipulation, and maternal statecraft, derived from the regime’s long-standing fusion of dynastic symbolism and deified maternal leadership.

Estimated to be around 13 years old, Kim Ju Ae remained out of public view for the first decade of her life. Her debut in late 2022 at a ballistic missile launch site linked her symbolically to the nation’s nuclear deterrent, while recent imagery has demonstrated active, operational involvement. The regime is transitioning her from protected heir into budding commander, embedding her into the state’s defense apparatus.

This trajectory differs slightly from Kim Jong Un’s rise in the early 2010s. Although Kim Jong Un was internally designated as heir in 2009, his father, Kim Jong Il, died suddenly in 2011, severely truncating his public preparation period and forcing him into a credential-building campaign. Within his first year in power, Kim Jong Un purged military elites—most notably the army’s chief of the general staff, Ri Yong Ho—and elevated himself as supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army. Similarly to the campaign to prepare his daughter, state media inundated the domestic narrative with images of him directing combat drills and overseeing strategic weapon tests.

Kim Ju Ae’s early debut—Kim Jong Il was in his 30s and Kim Jong Un his mid-20s when their public succession grooming began—suggests an unprecedented acceleration of the succession timeline, likely driven by Kim Jong Un’s reported health concerns. Perhaps more significantly, however, Kim Ju Ae’s gender demands a longer run-up to overcome the inherent biases of a male-dominated military hierarchy. By starting early, the regime grants itself years to normalize her image and consolidate authority well in advance of the eventual power transfer.

The regime has also signaled Kim Ju Ae’s authority by deploying a sequence of honorifics. During her 2022 debut, state media referred to her as saranghaneun jajebun (“beloved child”). This soon escalated to jongyeonghaneun jajebun (“respected child”), a transition mirroring the elevation of Kim Jong Un from cheongnyeon daejang (“young general”) to jongyeonghaneun dongji (“respected comrade”). In early 2024, the term hyangdo (guidance)—historically reserved exclusively for a supreme leader or designated successor—was applied to Kim Ju Ae.

The NIS believes Kim Jong Un has three children, reportedly including an eldest son—raising the question of why Kim Ju Ae has emerged as heir. Some suggest she serves as a “human shield” to protect a male successor from global intelligence. Yet the NIS recently assessed that it would be practically impossible to conceal such a son if he were abroad—and no older son has ever been officially acknowledged by the regime or shown in state media.

Kim Ju Ae holds a pistol during a visit to a munitions factory in Pyongyang in a photo released by North Korea’s official news agency on March 12. KCNA via Reuters

Even if an older son does exist, bypassing a firstborn male is hardly unprecedented in either East Asian history or the Kim family’s playbook. Royal succession during Korea’s Joseon dynasty frequently prioritized political viability and competency over birth order, while Kim Jong Il similarly bypassed his eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, for Kim Jong Un.

Kim Jong Un also has a younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, who acts as department director of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. Why groom an untested teenage daughter rather than an experienced and politically entrenched sister? The primary answer lies in Paektu bloodline mythology. According to North Korean legend, Mount Paektu—an active volcano on the border of China and North Korea—was the birthplace of the mythical founder of the first Korean kingdom as well as the purported birthplace of Kim Jong Il. Kim Il Sung also purportedly used it as a hideout from Japanese soldiers during the fight for independence in the 1930s and ’40s.

The mountain is used by the regime to symbolize the Kim dynasty’s noble lineage. While Yo Jong shares this bloodline, passing power laterally to a sibling would create competing branches of the family and stall the regime’s generational advancement. The Paektu bloodline therefore dictates a strict vertical inheritance—transferring absolute power directly from the supreme leader to his own offspring—to maintain the exclusive purity of the main branch.

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Still, Kim Yo Jong remains a vital political operative. She often employs abrasive rhetoric as the regime’s primary diplomatic enforcer, allowing her to absorb domestic and international backlash while normalizing the image of a woman exercising aggressive executive power. Her niece can thus be positioned in contrast as a benevolent and dignified figure, facilitating her public acceptance as a successor who represents a more “sanitized” and stable leadership.

Kim Ju Ae’s selection also reflects a broader risk management strategy. In highly personalized authoritarian regimes, naming a successor often risks premature power consolidation and elite fragmentation, as competing patronage networks gravitate toward the new heir. A juvenile successor entirely dependent on the incumbent mitigates this threat; unlike her aunt, who has cultivated extensive networks within the party apparatus, Kim Ju Ae will assume her role without an independent factional base, ensuring she poses no immediate challenge to her father’s absolute authority.

This photo released by North Korea’s official news agency shows Kim Jong Un and Kim Ju Ae taking part in a tree-planting ceremony at a museum in Pyongyang on Jan. 5.KCNA via Getty Images

However, while Kim Ju Ae’s selection mitigates the risk of elite fragmentation, it introduces an ideological challenge. While it is true that North Korea’s political legitimacy has rested on patrilineal traditions and a hypermasculine military culture for decades, the assumption that North Korean leadership is exclusively patriarchal is partially due to a linguistic failure: Western media routinely translates Kim Il Sung’s historical title, eobeoi suryeong, as “fatherly leader,” when “parent leader” is a more accurate translation.

In fact, a deeper examination of domestic propaganda reveals that the regime has long blended patriarchal hierarchy with maternal symbolism. Scholar B.R. Myers has argued that North Korea operates as a “mother regime” that infantilizes its population to ensure absolute emotional loyalty, cultivating a relationship of perpetual, childlike dependence on the leader’s self-sacrificing care. The androgyny of the parent leader therefore makes the concept of supreme leadership more flexible.

This maternal framing permeates North Korean state visual arts and propaganda. Kim Il Sung is traditionally depicted as soft and solicitous, holding weeping citizens to his expansive bosom and bending down to tie the bootlaces of young soldiers. Kim Jong Il is lauded in state media as “more of a mother than all the mothers in the world,” while state reports of his military inspections focused less on tactical brilliance and more on a meticulous concern for troops’ health and comfort. Myers argued that international ridicule of Kim Jong Il’s drab parka and pillow-swept perm missed its domestic significance: To the North Korean populace, this exhausted leader mirrored a mother who supports her children by sacrificing her own comfort and appearance.

Kim Jong Un has maintained this image, weeping during military parades and public addresses and exhibiting the empathetic sorrow expected of the leader of a mother regime. State media highlights his physical affection and anxiety regarding the people’s daily lives. By consistently projecting this emotional distress, Kim cements his image both as supreme commander and self-sacrificing caretaker of the nation.

Similarly, scholar Sonia Ryang notes that the self-identity of the North Korean citizen is formed through an emotional connection with the leader. State narratives focus on the leader’s physical proximity and tenderness, turning the state itself into a familial structure. The ruling Workers’ Party of Korea is referred to in propaganda poetry as a “Mother” and a “breast” where the citizen’s life begins and ends, encouraging dependence on the maternal state. When viewed through this lens, the patriarchal barrier to Kim Ju Ae’s succession appears significantly less formidable, reshaping the terms on which potential resistance can be expressed and narrowing the space for overt opposition.

In a photo released by North Korea’s official news agency, Kim Jong Un and Kim Ju Ae inspect a test firing of a rocket launcher system at an undisclosed location in North Korea on Jan. 27KCNA via Getty Images

However, the regime must still overcome the bureaucratic and institutional inertia of a male- dominated military elite. To achieve this, the regime is de-gendering Kim Ju Ae’s political identity. She is almost never presented in a traditionally feminine or delicate manner; instead, she frequently wears long, dark leather trench coats. Her clothing, posture, and demeanor during public appearances closely mimic the authoritative stance of her father, who treats her in public as an equal-in-training rather than a subordinate. They walk shoulder to shoulder while inspecting troops, and Kim Ju Ae is frequently placed at the center of official photographs— even receiving the salutes of senior officers and bows from her aunt.

The blurred lines between father and daughter position Kim Ju Ae as a direct vessel of the sacred revolutionary spirit, forcing elites to view her through the lens of absolute power and bloodline continuity—and elevating her beyond the realm of ordinary human gender constraints into that of the divine. A historical parallel can be found in Emperor Wu Zhao, the only female emperor in Chinese history. Confronted with a deeply entrenched male bureaucracy that excluded women from governance, Wu Zhao legitimized her ascent by constructing a pantheon of female political ancestors. By aligning herself with divine figures, she shifted the debate from earthly gender politics to cosmic destiny, rendering her biological sex politically irrelevant.

Pyongyang appears to be treating the Paektu bloodline as a sacred, gender-transcendent entity akin to Wu Zhao’s divine pantheon. Just as Chinese officials could not argue against the authority of a divine avatar, North Korean generals cannot openly challenge the living embodiment of the Paektu legacy. The sanctity of the Kim lineage thus supersedes all other social contracts: To oppose Kim Ju Ae is to oppose the divine order.

The elevation of Kim Ju Ae signals a notable evolution in totalitarian statecraft, as the North Korean regime attempts the first female dynastic succession in modern authoritarian history. Ultimately, Kim Ju Ae’s rapid rise demonstrates that the Kim dynasty’s instinct for survival and absolute control supersedes even the deepest patriarchal power structures—making her succession not just plausible, but strategically inevitable.

Donggak Heo is a policy aide at the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea and a member of the Ministry of National Defense’s youth advisory group.

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