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Known officially as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea experienced its first and so far only leadership change when Kim Jong Il replaced his father, Kim Il Sung, as the communist nation’s president in 1994. Although Kim Jong Il had been identified within North Korea as his father’s successor as early as 1980, there was uncertainty about his character and qualifications. Kim Jong Il faced the difficult tasks of living up to the mythical legacy of his father, of preserving North Korea’s communist regime after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and of dealing with longtime enemies Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Despite severe poverty and famine inside North Korea and an increasingly adversarial relationship with the United States, Kim Jong Il exercises absolute control over his nation more than a decade after Kim Il Sung’s death.

The emergence of Kim Jong Il as premier of North Korea after the death of his father, Kim Il Sung, in July of 1994, marked the first time a change in leadership occurred in the country since the promulgation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in 1948. Unfortunately, however, the effects of the sixty-year dictatorship of father and then son had precipitated negative economic growth since 1989. In 1995, severe flooding weakened an already vulnerable economy and hastened a devastating famine that killed between 900,000 and 2.4 million people, threatening to topple the socialist state.