Opinion | With sister’s promotion, Kim Jong-un consolidates family’s control over North Korea

When looking at North Korea, sometimes it is useful to tune out the Americans altogether and look at who is governing the country internally, and how they are doing it. As the instrument that built and continues to amplify the overarching personality cult of the Kims, the Korean Workers’ Party remains an important vehicle both for controlling and understanding North Korea. On October 7, the party’s Central Committee voted to elevate Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of Kim Jong-un, to the rank of alternate to the Politburo. It is a further reminder of the unique family dynamic that continues to shape the nominally socialist regime and increasingly marketised society.

It is likely to take a few weeks to digest the meaning of the personnel shifts announced after the unexpected meeting of the party’s Central Committee. The meeting agenda consisted of Kim Jong-un holding forth at length about the complex international situation as he saw it, then further describing the strategy for economic growth under heavy sanctions. But it was the limited reshuffle that then started at the top of the party that attracted the most attention.

For all the discussion of North Korea timing its tests to the Chinese political calendar, this meeting was perhaps also meant to keep the regime proactive and not waiting to see what arrives – a harder line, perhaps? – out of this week’sCommunist Party congress in China. Some initial commentary on the reshuffle was overly optimistic, seeing in the elevation of Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho as an intent to deal diplomatically with the United States and China. But in part this is the problem with the dominant narrative of US-North Korean confrontation: it has a way of assuming that every action taken by the leadership in Pyongyang is motivated by its need to respond to Washington or Beijing.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the elevation of Kim Yo-jong, a 30-year-old woman, as an alternate member of the WKP Politburo, is not about the administration of US President Donald Trump, nor is it about Chinese President Xi Jinping. Put in the context of other Leninist party-states, her appointment would be remarkable under any circumstances. Apart from there being no women on the Politburo, perhaps more shocking is her age; other than the supreme leader, the leadership tends to be overwhelmingly old.