How North Korean Defectors See Kim Jong Un’s Daughter As His Heir

Until she fled North Korea three years ago, Kim Yumi felt deeply frustrated whenever state TV showed leader Kim Jong Un with his young daughter. The message, she felt, was clear and worrying: North Korea was laying the groundwork for an eventual hereditary transfer of power, this time to Kim’s daughter. Publicly questioning the Kim dynasty’s hold on power would mean severe persecution. Already angered by draconian pandemic regulations that ruined her family’s fishing business, she defected to South Korea by boat with her family. “My husband and I didn’t want our children to live under a fourth-generation dictatorship. As…