North Korean state media is encouraging residents to undertake winter climbs of Mount Baekdu, a peak honored by Koreans historical and fashionable, North and South.
The official Rodong Shinmun newspaper famous approvingly late final week that 1000’s of teams have adopted chief Kim Jong-un‘s example and ascended the mountain. It urged others to do so to refresh their “revolutionary spirit.”
The deliberate association of a myth-laden mountain with newer myths of the Kims has emerged as a core element of the powerful personality cult buttressing the family that has ruled North Korea for three generations, Pyongyang watchers say.
A merger of propaganda from the 1970s and 1980s with East Asian traditions of sacred mountains has generated the legend of a “Mount Baekdu bloodline” that supposedly runs through the veins of Mr. Kim, his ancestors and a rising generation coming to prominence.
The current North Korean dictator, having succeeded his father and grandfather in the post, has often been photographed in the area. Most famously, he was shown in 2019, outfitted in bespoke riding gear and mounted upon a white steed on Baekdu’s snow-covered trails.
The photographs of an overweight particular person in a nation wracked by malnutrition placing heroic poses generated guffaws throughout English-language social media, however to North Koreans, it was no joke to North Koreans.
Living in a shuttered state with out freedom of motion, info, affiliation or expression, one thing shut to non secular fervor surrounds the Kims, and Mount Baekdu is a key pilgrimage web site.
Mighty mountain, heroic Kim
The mountain, which straddles North Korea’s border with China – the place it is named Changbai – is definitely an extinct volcano. Complete with a scenic lake in its crater that was legendarily inhabited by a water dragon, the 9.003-foot Mt. Baekdu is the Korean peninsula’s highest level.
East Asians have lengthy honored mountains. Japan has Mount Fuji. Chinese sages and emperors had been related to sure peaks, mentioned tutorial and tour information David Mason, and an official system of mountains, full with shrines and pilgrimage websites, was established.
Ancient Koreans embraced the idea as properly.
“Mountains were very much used in the founding myths of various Korean kingdoms and dynasties,” mentioned Mr. Mason, who makes a speciality of sacred Korean peaks. The mythological first Korean, Dangun, was supposedly born on the mountain.
“It has often been remarked how North Korea is un-Communist and anti-Marxist because it turned to a traditional, mountain-based bloodline royalty,” Mr. Mason mentioned.
Though a robust persona cult surrounded Chinese Communist Party founder Mao Zedong, he didn’t create a dynasty.
Kim Il Sung – who was put in in Pyongyang underneath Soviet auspices — was extra profitable: His son and grandson went on to carry apparently undisputed energy in North Korea, a grip that has lasted to this present day.
Born in 1912, Kim Il Sung was a Korean communist and guerilla chief who spent three a long time in exile earlier than returning house when Soviet Union forces invaded Manchuria and northern Korea in 1945 on the very finish of World War II.
His persona cult went into overdrive after the disastrous Korean War that he had initiated.
In the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties, state propaganda linked Mr. Kim to Mount Baekdu. It claimed he established a secret guerilla headquarters on the forested slopes, siring his son there between battles with the Japanese.
“This a pure, 100% propaganda fantasy: Such a camp never existed,” mentioned Andrei Lankov, a South Korea-based Russian specialist in Korean research who beforehand studied in Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung University. “But the myth of Mount Baekdu is extremely important for North Korean nation-building and the essential ‘Koreanness’ of the Kim family.”
Working behind the scenes in Pyongyang media within the Nineteen Seventies and ‘80s, Kim Il Sung’s Russian-born son, named Yuri at start, took the Korean title Kim Jong-il.
“He was a big influence on his father’s personality cult though he was smart enough not to promote himself,” mentioned Michael Breen, a biographer of Kim Jong-il. “Therein lay his own legitimacy.”
Kim Jong-il took energy after his father died in 1994, the first-ever dynastic succession in a supposedly Communist state. He was succeeded by his personal son, Kim Jong-un, after his demise in 2011.
Further broadening the Kim dynastic footprint is Kim Jong-un‘s sister, Kim Yo Jong. A high-ranking party functionary and state media columnist, some credit her with boosting her brother’s public picture by linking it extra carefully to that of his esteemed grandfather.
Official statues and work depict the latter on horseback, whereas a well-known poster of Kim Jong-il exhibits him standing on Mount Baekdu.
Mountain landscapes, sacred landscapes
A diplomat with expertise in Pyongyang mentioned that the common North Korean takes the “Baekdu bloodline” critically. South of the DMZ, few South Koreans admire the Kims, however Mount Baekdu is famed there, too.
It is talked about within the first line of South Korea’s nationwide anthem, and its crater lake is a vastly standard picture on work, posters and calendars. Despite its border location, younger South Koreans in Seoul say that they’re taught in class that the mountain is Korean, not Chinese.
It was no coincidence {that a} journey up Mount Baekdu, by cable automotive, was the spotlight of a go to by then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in with Mr. Kim in 2018 when inter-Koreans relations had been – briefly – rosy.
Currently, Mr. Kim seems to be increasing his household’s media presence. He has made a number of appearances together with his daughter Ju Ae. His spouse, Ri Sol Ju, has been pictured with him at a wintry Mount Baekdu.
In an formally agnostic state, the linkages cast between an iconic mountain, a heroicized ruling clan and North Korea itself aren’t any joke, consultants mentioned.
“People from different religions take pilgrimages to their holy lands – be it Islam, Christianity or ‘Kimism,’” mentioned Steve Tharp, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who previously undertook negotiations with North Korean officers.
“Though we live in an age when we are encouraged to respect others’ religions and cultures, I don’t think we should respect North Korea’s, as that state is not admirable,” added Mr. Breen. “But I don’t think we should dismiss it either, as it is sort of a symbol of the sacred — it is a deep place.”
