Collective Memory and Everyday Politics in North Korea: A Qualitative Text Analysis of New Year Statements, 1946–2019

ABSTRACT

Rulers often use a mythologised understanding of the past to further their political interests in the present. In authoritarian societies, rulers often manipulate collective memory to justify their hold on power. When rulers manipulate specific aspects of the past, they can shape the collective memory of ordinary people and thus have a significant impact on everyday politics. Using the case of North Korea, one of the world’s most authoritarian societies, I theorise everyday politics from the standpoint of the state by focusing on legitimation and collective memory. Based on the New Year statements issued by North Korean rulers between 1946 and 2019, I use thematic coding through qualitative text analysis to analyse how these rulers have portrayed specific aspects of the past in their political discourse. The article focuses on how legitimation claims about the ‘Chollima Work Team’ within the ‘Chollima Movement’ have used memory politics to shape the everyday lives of North Koreans. Because these claims have been invoked consistently in propaganda for decades, a comparative examination over time shows the propagandistic tools that North Korean rulers have drawn on for mobilisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective memory
• memory politics
• legitimation
• everyday politics
• New Year statements
• North Korea

Introduction

Politicians have frequently exploited mythologised understandings of the past to instrumentalise historical memory for politics. Authoritarian leaders manufacture history to legitimise their rule and prolong their regime. Several scholars have conducted theoretical and empirical case studies of how collective memory shapes society through political discourse (Bernhard & Kubik, 2016; Jelin, 2004; Nets‐Zehngut, 2012). However, these studies do not explore in sufficient depth why rulers choose to highlight specific visions of the past in their political discourse or how this manipulation of collective memory affects the everyday life of the public under authoritarian rule.

North Korea’s strong system of social control is a fitting case study for this research puzzle. Since the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was established, the regime has invoked hegemonic narratives for political purposes. Throughout its history, the regime has used episodes such as Kim Il-sung’s guerrilla warfare – highly mythologised in state propaganda – to solidify regime power (Scalapino & Lee, 1972). Through this extensive and far-reaching propaganda apparatus, collective memory penetrates North Korean society down to its smallest units, such as the family, workplace, and school (Kang, 2018). Legitimation refers to deliberate efforts to justify one’s leadership to gain legitimacy from the people, and North Korean rulers have substantially sought to justify their power by manipulating collective memory.

I propose theorising everyday politics in North Korea from the viewpoint of the state, with a focus on the functions of legitimation and collective memory. This article traces in depth how North Korean rulers have constructed and used the country’s hegemonic narrative (i.e., the ruling family’s history) as a ‘foundational myth’ and ‘cult of personality’ to create specific portrayals of the past. I use qualitative text analysis through thematic coding to examine political discourse over time by coding the themes in 73 New Year statements, speeches traditionally given by the leader of North Korea every year on 1 January. The results reveal how the rulers use specific portrayals of the past for legitimation in the process of political socialisation. This has ramifications for understanding North Korean everyday politics. The legitimation process utilising collective memory serves as a specific state-led political socialisation process and has a substantial impact on the definition of the relationship between the state and individuals in everyday politics.

In this article, everyday politics is defined as the political sphere in which official government institutions and grassroots citizens interact (Fitzpatrick, 2000; Kerkvliet, 2009; Migdal, 2001). Its analysis can focus on several perspectives: at the micro level, political changes in the private sphere and grassroots society; at the macro level, how the interplay of these changes and the state apparatus and institutions creates new political dynamics. This article follows the latter approach by tracing and examining the political discourse using the collective memory engineered by the state during the time in question. Therefore, the study focuses more on the governmental–institutional side of North Korea’s everyday politics rather than the grassroots perspective.¹

Specifically, I examine how North Korean rulers have used the ‘Chollima Work Team’ (CWT, Chollima Chagŏppan) within the ‘Chollima Movement’ (CM, Chollima Undong) to investigate how legitimation through collective memory has been used by the regime to shape North Korean society. The Chollima Movement was North Korea’s equivalent of the Soviet Stakhanovite shock-worker movement, which rapidly increased industrial output by rallying the masses and pushing them to work harder. The regime later also used the movement to overcome political threats when confronted with crises such as famine (the ‘Arduous March’ in North Korean parlance) in the mid- to late 1990s by emphasising mass mobilisation for economic development (Kim, 2000; Li & Seo, 2013). The case of the CWT within the CM demonstrates how North Korean rulers have exploited collective memory to manage legitimacy and, eventually, control the spheres of everyday politics in the country.

This article proceeds as follows. First, it reviews the relevant literature about collective memory and legitimation and discusses North Korea’s everyday politics and how the rulers’ manipulation of collective memory has sustained the legitimacy of their rule. Through thematic coding of New Year statements, the article examines how the rulers manufactured a collective memory and used it for the socialisation of ordinary people. The final section discusses how the political discourse manufactured based on memory politics shapes the everyday lives of North Koreans through its emphasis on creating a ‘new socialist human’ (an endorsement of the manipulated collective memory) under the different generations of the Kim family. Through its analysis of the CWT, the article examines how the new socialist human emerges through socialisation. Thus, it shows how the engineered collective memory structures political discourse in a way that is advantageous for social control. The article thereby expands our knowledge of how memory politics is used for legitimation through everyday politics in authoritarian regimes. While the grassroots perspective is crucial to understanding and theorising everyday politics, this article also emphasises that the North Korean authoritarian regime invokes hegemonic narratives and memory to justify its rule against the emerging private sector, which competes for the collective memory, in the public sphere of everyday politics.

Theorising Legitimation and Collective Memory for Everyday Politics

This article offers a theoretical explanation of why rulers highlight specific visions of the past in their political discourse. This, in turn, enables us to ascertain: 1) why North Korean leaders emphasise specific visions of history (particularly, the national heroes of the anti-Japanese guerrilla movement); 2) how North Korean authorities manipulate this focus on historical events to dominate everyday politics; and 3) the extent to which everyday politics in North Korea has shaped the new socialist human identity portrayed by the state. By offering new insights into North Korean rulers’ efforts to justify their rule (legitimation), the article develops a theory of everyday politics in North Korea.

Legitimation in authoritarian rule

Legitimacy and legitimation are concepts used in the study of authoritarianism to explain the political behaviour of both rulers and the ruled as well as regime resilience in authoritarian societies (Gerschewski, 2013; 2018; von Haldenwang, 2017; Von Soest & Grauvogel, 2017). The legitimacy to rule and the legitimation process – that is, collective efforts by rulers to acquire legitimacy – sit at the core of politics. As Lipset and Lakin (2004, 209, emphasis added) state, ‘stable political systems, even authoritarian ones, cannot rely primarily on force. The alternative to force is legitimacy, a broadly accepted systemic “title to rule”’.

The legitimacy to rule is crucial in both democratic and non-democratic regimes. For instance, the collapse of the USSR was at least partly caused by the state’s failure to legitimise its rule (Kotkin, 2008; Robinson, 1995; Steiner, 2017), as the communist government could not deliver on what its propaganda promised. The communist states that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union then successfully adopted diverse strategies for legitimation, such as institutional adaptability and ideological introversion (Dimitrov, 2013). Moreover, monarchies and communist ideocracies are relatively resilient regime types compared to electoral or personalist autocracies due to their strong legitimation claims based on history (Kailitz & Stockemer, 2017).

Thus, authoritarian rulers must manage legitimation successfully to maintain their rule. Some studies have analysed the North Korean rulers’ legitimation efforts, which include features such as the development of a ‘foundational myth’ and a ‘cult of personality’ as tools of legitimation (e.g., Kwon & Chung, 2012), but I theorise the regime’s efforts to tighten their control over everyday politics by illustrating how these features connect legitimation and the manipulation of collective memory. I next discuss how collective memory can be used by rulers to justify their legitimacy to govern.

Collective memory as source of legitimation claims

What kind of political sources, in ideology or history, form the basis for legitimation? The literature on authoritarian legitimation has proposed several mechanisms and typologies (see e.g., Dukalskis & Gerschewski, 2017; Von Soest & Grauvogel, 2017). In the case of North Korea, it is generally assumed that the regime has been ideologically frozen in its old patterns of legitimation claims for decades (Dukalskis & Gerschewski, 2018). Thus, it is useful to narrow the focus to identity-based legitimation and study it in greater detail. The broader society inherits shared social norms through the memory of revolution and drastic social change, such as independence movements against external powers, and this collective memory has great potential for constructing legitimation claims.

Rulers also use collective memory to formulate collective social norms. If these norms are built on revolutionary legacies, they facilitate elite cohesion due to a shared mission and standard set of experiences. Specific norms created by revolutionary regimes help secure elite cohesion and solidarity and provide sources of legitimacy for rulers (Kailitz & Stockemer, 2017; Levitsky & Way, 2012). Rulers’ efforts to justify their rule create effective legitimation and strengthen ordinary people’s beliefs in this legitimacy through everyday routines and behaviours that reinforce state ideology.

Meanwhile, collective memory shapes the social norms and identities that are shared by most members of society (Bell, 2021; Halbwachs, 2020[1952]). According to Assmann and Czaplicka (1995), the act of remembering includes normative features in the concretisation of social identity – that is, belonging to a community and adhering to the rules about how and what to remember. Shared social norms influence the public’s way of life, elite cohesion, and regime resilience because when the majority group shares specific memories and narratives about the past (either positive or negative), rulers can easily engineer these memories and narratives into hegemonic memory.

However, collective memory is not static: rather, it is a locus of competition between the continuous invocation by rulers of state-approved hegemonic histories on the one hand and vernacular memory on the other (Bell, 2021, 31). Due to this competitive feature, rulers constantly emphasise specific aspects of the past to solidify their rule in the present. The commemoration ceremonies for the victims of the Gwangju uprising (in May 1980) under South Korean military authoritarianism are an example of how preserving the memory of the past matters in the establishment of national identity (Kim, 2021). Additionally, as Kim Il-sung consolidated his power in North Korea throughout the 1950s, the centrality of the anti-Japanese guerrilla revolution was underlined in the spheres of not only politics but also the economy, society, and literature, and the opposition movement was suppressed on the pretext of anti-Party revisionism (Cho, 2017). It is thus clear that the manipulation of collective memory is a method for rulers to ensure their legitimacy to rule.

Social norms and identity based on revolutionary legacies also extend to the formation of collective memory among the public, as well as commemorating and forgetting specific moments of history. Thus, memory politics implies a process of interpreting the visions of the past to legitimise the rule of the incumbent ruler. Collective memory is influenced by ‘the conscious deliberate manipulation of the past for the interests of the present’ (Nets-Zehngut, 2011, 236). The so-called ‘useable past’ (Nets-Zehngut, 2011, 236) can be harnessed to influence collective memory in various ways. For instance, authoritarian rulers often manipulate historical narratives and assimilate them into the collective memory, as part of a consistent endeavour to assert their legitimacy and justify their rule. In other words, memory politics is based on the relationship between the memory provider (the ruler) and the memory consumer (the general public; see Verovšek, 2016). This process is similar to how legitimation claims function, albeit with a historical emphasis as legitimation is defined as an interrelational process between the supply of the ruler and the demand of individuals and political collectivities (von Haldenwang, 2017, 274).

The use of legitimation by authoritarian rulers in the service of regime resilience has been validated empirically through a wide variety of methodological approaches and case studies (Edel & Josua, 2018; Maerz, 2018; Morgenbesser, 2017). A linguistic analysis of government texts, for instance, has revealed some attributes and indicators of regime legitimation. As in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, whose rulers use nationalistic legitimation claims (Maerz, 2018; Omelicheva, 2016), nationalistic propagation in ordinary people’s everyday lives is central to regime resilience in North Korea (Dukalskis & Lee, 2020).

Memory politics can be used to justify a ruler’s legitimacy in various ways. In the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR), Khorloogiin Choibalsan, who was nicknamed ‘the Mongol Stalin’, followed a path like that of Kim Il-sung as the local leader of the struggle against Japanese imperialism (Soucek, 2000, 229). Choibalsan wrote the official history of the Mongolian independence revolution to legitimise his rule. The next ruler of the MPR, Tsedenbal, rehabilitated a Mongolian traditional and nationalistic figure – Genghis Khan – to manage the regime’s legitimacy, even though such displays of nationalism were previously criticised as opportunistic (Dillon, 2019, 110). Elsewhere, the cultural policy encouraging the film industry to emphasise patriotic elements of war, which arose during Putin’s second term as president, is another example of the use of memory politics to bolster regime legitimacy (Hoffmann, 2021).

Therefore, rulers have imposed specific historical memories as a political source of legitimation, which can be analysed as foundational myths on the one hand, and a cult of personality on the other. Rulers select the memory politics that reproduce the current political discourse in their favour. The next section of the article conceptualises how these legitimation claims connected to memory politics impact everyday politics in North Korea, particularly the state’s viewpoint on politics.

Memory Politics and the State’s Viewpoint in Everyday Politics in North Korea

Foundational myths underpinned by historical accounts are connected to the legitimacy of power in the present. For example, wars, revolutions, and liberation movements can function as powerful legitimation narratives for the origin of authority (Von Soest & Grauvogel, 2017). Amalgamating nationalism with religious claims creates a distinctive national, cultural, and linguistic tradition that can engender intense loyalty (Linz, 2004).

In North Korea, the legacy of the guerrilla movement against the Japanese colonial power and the Korean War against the US and other external powers constitute important elements of nationalism. The rulers use the (manufactured) collective memory of the anti-Japanese guerrilla experience up to the overthrow of the Japanese empire in 1945 and the Korean War (1950–1953) as the historical rationale for national unification under North Korean rule (Cumings, 2010; Park, 1996; Scalapino & Lee, 1972). Kim Il-sung continuously emphasised the traditions of the anti-Japanese guerrilla fighters: ‘We tell them to study the reminiscences in order that they learn the truth, the traits of revolutionaries, their methods and style of work and their unbending fighting spirit, contained in these books, and digest them to be their own flesh and blood and revolutionize and working-classize themselves’ (Kim, 1983, 378).

The North Korean government has controlled virtually all aspects of everyday politics, including economic activity, the public domain, cultural life, and even socio-political interactions, through its monopoly on information. In the collective memory of ordinary people, the central subject of the narrative is the Kim family and the foundational myth. The Memoirs of Anti-Japanese Partisan Participants, whose publication began in 1959, became mandatory for students and all North Koreans to study in the late 1960s. Establishing a monolithic system, Kim Il-sung introduced the Juche ideology of rigid self-reliance in 1955 and used it to eliminate his political opponents. In this process, the cult of personality was further stressed in nationalistic discourse (Lankov, 1999). This cult of personality combined with nationalism is well illustrated in the North Korean education system (Kim, 2018). According to the testimonies of defectors, North Koreans are surrounded by the myth of anti-Japanese guerrillas for most of their lives, and propaganda such as the memoirs of Kim Il-sung and other guerrilla soldiers is treated like the Bible (Kang, 2018, 69). Thus, the foundational myth includes North Korean tradition, the sacred Kim family’s rule and its descent from Paektu mountain,² the celebration of independence from Japanese colonialism, and the founding history of the North Korean Workers’ Party as inextricably linked to independence.

A cult of personality entails claims that specific individuals possess extraordinary personal and leadership qualities, which are based on a heavily manipulated historical account. It can be used for stability, prosperity, hereditary succession, and other political goals. This characterises the Suryong system in North Korea, the formal name for the Kim family-centred system of governance in the country since 1967 (Byman & Lind, 2010). According to North Korean propaganda, Suryong also means ‘the great leader of the masses and the labourers, and [it] plays the role of uniting the people’ (Kim, 2008, 92). Having experienced guerrilla warfare against the Japanese colonial power, North Korean leaders shared a military-style political culture, and the concept of the Suryong worked well in that context. In the mid-1980s, Kim Jong-il further developed the Suryong system theory by stating that the people are a socio-political organism, with the Suryong functioning as the brain and the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) as the artery connecting it to the public. The regime fostered a collective consciousness of North Koreans as a distinct socialist humanity. This was achieved by linking their organisational life, centred around the Suryong, to the WPK (Park, 2002). An analysis of the forms of legitimation used by North Korean leaders indicates that Kim Jong-il in particular claimed that the Kim family has long been endowed with extraordinary personal characteristics and leadership skills (Coppedge et al., 2019, 21).

In sum, the legitimation process in North Korea, which is based on the manipulation of collective memory, is embedded in everyday life and fundamental to how society functions. I theorise that as a memory provider, the regime promotes specific visions of the past, including a foundational myth and a cult of personality, for memory politics, which engineers a collective memory structure and shapes the formal area in the ordinary citizen’s political reality (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Conceptual map: Memory politics and state viewpoint in everyday politics

Source: Created by the author

I conceptualise memory politics as rulers’ manipulation of collective memory for their own legitimation. Collective memory is an object of competition, so memory that is not approved by the state – such as stories that provide competing national histories – tends to be identified with the regime’s political opponents (Kim, 2013, 218). When the North Korean regime’s grip on everyday politics has weakened and doubts have been raised about its legitimacy due to the emergence of material failure and social change (Dukalskis & Lee, 2020), there has been a growing possibility that ordinary people (memory consumers) will ‘reject’ traditional institutions and the state.

Qualitative Text Analysis: Thematic Coding for Memory Politics

To set the general context of North Korea’s legitimation strategy over time, the qualitative text analysis of the New Year statements examines the memory politics used in this strategy. Since the 1950s, North Korea’s annual New Year statements have been central to setting government policy for the coming year (Dukalskis, 2017). The New Year statements include messages about accomplishments and the intentions of rulers in terms of policy (Park et al., 2015). By examining historical accounts related to legitimation in the New Year statements, we can illuminate how rulers try to burnish their legitimacy by creating visions of history. Of the various types of texts that have been used for regime legitimation, the New Year statements have been similar over time in their format and purpose. The statements and joint editorials are gathered from the Korean Central News Agency and Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the Workers’ Party. To preserve the integrity of the texts, the Korean versions of the statements and joint editorials are used. I coded the contents connected to the foundational myth and cult of personality in the sentence units after obtaining the New Year statements and joint editorials. The reason for coding in sentence units rather than words is to conduct qualitative text analysis with broader contextual meaning of the text corpus. The second cycle of coding was carried out based on the sub-themes that appeared in the first cycle. The revolutionary legacy and the Paektu mountain descent were coded under foundational myth, and the Suryong system and loyalty to rulers were coded under cult of personality. These two coding cycles were a reflective process, and I used analytical memos to decide the themes. For reliability and transparency, I used computer-aided qualitative data analysis with NVivo.

The foundational myth and the cult of personality in the New Year statements

Thematic coding analysis is effective for illuminating patterns in texts over time (Braun et al., 2019). The findings of the qualitative text analysis demonstrate that the North Korean regime has attempted to justify its social control through foundational myths and a cult of personality, which form the basis of our conceptual map. The results of the thematic coding for these themes show that rulers have used slightly different legitimation strategies. The central aim, however, is to boost their legitimacy by emphasising the guerrilla activities against Japanese imperialism and the sacralisation of the Kim family, with Kim Il-sung represented as its founding figure.

After the August Faction Incident in 1956, Kim Il-sung consolidated his power within the Party (Lankov, 1999; 2007). In doing so, he altered his claim to legitimacy slightly in relation to the new Suryong system. The regime promoted mass-based social organisations as ‘transmission belts’ connecting the Party with the masses (Kim, 2013, 112). Thus, the joint New Year editorial is also important because it is passed down and read by many North Korean social organisations, which in turn disseminate its news to the public. The process of repeatedly highlighting revolutionary legacies through the New Year statement contributed to creating an important shared norm for mass mobilisation during the postwar economic recovery process. This shift marked the start of the intensification of the cult of personality around the Kim family. These chronological changes in the legitimation claims are illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Thematic coding of legitimation claims in the text corpus (1946–2019)

Source: Created by the author Note: The fluctuations in the representation of the Suryong theme in the late 1960s are attributable to the word Suryong mostly being used in the joint editorials of the Rodong Sinmun, not in the New Year statements.

In their research into the succession of charismatic authority, Kwon and Chung (2012) reveal that collective memory, including the revolutionary legacy of the founding figure, influenced the Kim family’s rule. For instance, they found that Kim Il-sung’s legitimation strategy demonstrated what Weber (2009[1947]) referred to as the ‘routinization of revolutionary charisma’. By establishing the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery in 1954, Kim tried to secure political legitimacy as the leader of the Manchurian partisan movement in postwar North Korea (Kwon & Chung, 2012, 111).

Kim Jong-il, for his part, emphasised the cult of personality during the crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Kim Jong-il, who was not closely tied to the revolutionary tradition, worked to further elevate and strengthen Kim Il-sung’s status as the Suryong and exercised strict control over the military via Songun (military-first) politics. He thus prevented the military from exercising influence over the Party while concurrently retaining the most important positions in the military apparatus (Woo, 2016). In this way, he emphasised his role as the legitimate successor to the Suryong tradition in carrying out the tasks of the revolution. Kim Jong-il not only used the Suryong system for his cult of personality but also appealed to the revolutionary legacy by initiating the renovation of the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery in 1975. In doing so, he accomplished the political succession by venerating the memory of the country’s founding revolutionary martyrs and their partisan leaders, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-suk, his birth mother (Kwon & Chung, 2012, 114). Thus, he consolidated his leadership of the regime in times of crisis as a hereditary charismatic authority.

Table 1 summarises the themes of the foundational myth and the cult of personality in the New Year statements. It is difficult to evaluate Kim Jong-un’s strategy regarding memory politics because the sample for his tenure is shorter than those for the other two rulers. Nonetheless, his New Year statements indicate that he followed the message of Kim Jong-il, emphasising the Suryong system of loyalty to the ruler. In particular, he underlined the Paektu descent line as well as his grandfather’s achievements. Media coverage of Kim riding horses and camping on Paektu mountain demonstrates how he wants to appear to ordinary North Koreans: the scenes are reminiscent of the anti-Japanese guerrilla movement and his grandfather, Kim Il-sung (Korean Central Television, 2019).

Table 1. Summary of the Thematic Coding with Examples

Ruler	Foundational Myth	Cult of Personality	Case Summary
Kim Il-sung (1948–1994)	‘With such a strong fighting spirit that used to build a rock-like foundation for a self-reliant economy by tightening belts and struggling with the war-torn ashes, let us create a more incredible revolutionary upsurge with the revolutionary spirit that defeated the enemies both home and abroad and opened the door to the grand tide of socialist construction and the great Chollima movement!’ (1970)	‘The burning hearts of the people who are leaving towards the North to honour Comrade Kim Il-sung, the great sun of the nation, from South Korea in the dark land, cannot be turned back by anything, nor can their consistent aim of living happily in a unified homeland with him be blocked by any force.’ (1970)	Stronger emphasis on the foundational myth
Kim Jong-il (1997–2011)	‘We must learn deeply about the revolutionary history of the great leader who achieved the country’s liberation by armed force, defended his country and revolution in the principles of military-first, and established an unbeaten socialist power. We should carry on the leader’s military construction work and tradition in a glorious manner.’ (2005)	‘All Party members, the soldiers of the People’s Army, all young people and the people should defend their beloved comrade Kim Jong-il, who is our destiny and supreme brainchild, firmly with their lives and firmly believe in Comrade Kim Jong-il only and walk the ten million miles of the revolution.’ (1996)	Stronger emphasis on the cult of personality than his predecessor
Kim Jong-un (2012–)	‘We must walk the path of self-reliance, the path of military-first, and the path of socialism that Comrade Kim Il-sung, the great leader, has pioneered so that the history of the Suryong’s revolution and the history of the general’s military-first revolutionary command will continue to flow.’ (2012)	‘Our military and people are determined to continue our revolution, which started with the Suryong and was won a hundred times by the general, to an eternal victory under the orders of Kim Jong-un.’ (2012)	Mix of foundational myth and cult of personality and reduction in the average coverage of thematic coding compared to his predecessor

Source: Created by the author

However, it is worth noting that Kim Jong-un has also used different strategies related to the cult of personality. In 2020, he declared that ‘if we make the Suryong mysterious, we will conceal the truth’. He cautioned against preternatural interpretations of Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese guerrilla activities. Instead, Kim highlighted the Suryong’s benevolent love for the North Korean people (Rodong News Agency, 2020). This change indicates that the mythical cult of personality is of limited use in regime legitimation because of the spread of rational reasoning among North Koreans.

The consequences of North Korean rulers’ memory politics during the last seven decades have implications for future legitimation strategies. The legacy of the anti-Japanese guerrilla struggle, as well as the unquestioning dedication to the Suryong system, could play a vital role in the transfer of power to the next successor. Nevertheless, the sub-themes related to memory politics appear relatively less frequently in Kim Jong-un’s New Year statements than in those of the earlier rulers. In short, North Korea’s ruling system is based on a foundational myth and a cult of personality. The qualitative text analysis of the New Year statements highlights the trajectory of the legitimation strategies based on memory politics over the past seven decades. The next section delves deeper into the topic to examine the mobilisation of the Chollima Work Team (CWT) in the Chollima Movement (CM), focusing on the state’s manipulation of the collective memory of ordinary North Koreans in everyday politics.

The Chollima Movement: The Governmental Side of Everyday Politics

My analysis illustrates that North Korean rulers have engineered a discourse of foundational myths and a cult of personality in the CMs via the CWT. Over seven decades, they shaped the governmental side of everyday politics by manipulating collective memory for the purpose of legitimation. To understand the historical trajectory of North Korean propaganda, it is important to first examine the background of the two historical phenomena on which this article focuses. The CM was launched in the late 1950s to pursue rapid postwar reconstruction. Its core was the mass mobilisation of the population for economic growth to achieve the five-year economic plans. The regime saw this as the solution to the problems of securing food, clothing, and housing for the population (Boleslaw, 1957). With the adoption of the ‘Five-year plan for the development of the people’s economy’ (1956–1961) at the 3^rd Party Congress in 1956, the CM also had an impact on North Korea’s rural modernisation through new technological advances, which initially generated larger harvests (Lee, 2001, 90–91).³

Kim Il-sung drew on historical precedents for political purposes at around the same time. In 1956, after other factional leaders in the Party challenged his rule, Kim responded by reorganising the Party’s subordinate structures, using history as a justification. At that year’s Congress, the WPK purged its ranks by focusing on Kim’s faction and portraying it as the only force that could lay claim to the heritage of the anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle (Lee, 2006).⁴

This context explained why Kim launched the CM at this time: he killed two birds with one stone by increasing economic production and fostering internal political unity (Kim, 2001). The first CM was also essential in overcoming the Soviet Union’s unilateral withdrawal of support for North Korea’s steel industry, which was vital to the first five-year plan (1957–1961; Kang, 2007).⁵ The first CM began in earnest in 1956 with Kim’s field guidance to Kangsŏn Steel Mills (later renamed the Chollima Steel Complex; Scalapino & Lee, 1972, 1077). In this way, the CM became a foundational myth and an extension of the anti-Japanese movement in North Korean propaganda.⁶ This linkage is described in Kim Il-sung’s official biography:

During the anti-Japanese armed struggle, the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army made bombs with their bare hands and took away enemy guns, armed with its own weapons, and lived in abundance, and the source of its power to fight against the elite troops of the Japanese Kwantung Army was also the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance. Riding the Chollima, which became a symbol of the revolutionary orientation and heroism of the Korean people, was our role due to the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance; it is not something anyone else does for us (Baek, 1987, 299–300).

Beyond merely increasing production, the CM also sought to reinforce a new socialist identity, and collective memory was an important part of this endeavour. Collective memory was closely linked to the previous Stakhanovite shock-worker rewards system, which also sought to modify people’s consciousness and unleash their ideological awareness and further communism. For example, in the field of education, the Chollima School Title Campaign was carried out, and especially after the National CWT Pioneer Conference in August 1960, it was strengthened to broaden into an ideological movement focusing on communist education (Kim, 2016).

The CWT has been another important mechanism in the regime’s propaganda efforts. It was launched in March 1959 by one of the work teams (Chagŏppan) at the Kangsŏn Steel Mills. The team was an important innovation within the CM because it formed the most basic unit of labour. North Korean authorities used the work team to boost production through the promotion of technological innovation and communist beliefs (Kang, 2005). Crucially, the CWT was intended to bolster not only productivity but also technological innovation; it encouraged the qualitative growth of labour activities and systematically infused Kim Il-sung’s communist principles and legacy of anti-Japanese guerrilla struggle into the basic production units and thus North Korean society.

During the postwar era, industrial work in North Korea was recognised as honourable, dutiful, and joyful; participating in work meant elevating the individual’s ideological and ethical standing. Work entailed both ‘repetition’ and ‘everydayness’: that is, a mechanism of repetition of competitive and intensive work unfolding in everyday life. Thus, the ruler’s ideological force influenced the everyday life of North Koreans in mundane ways in relation to the modes of production and administration (Kim, 2022).

The CWT movement spread beyond the steel industry and became known as the Chollima Workplace Movement or Chollima Factory Movement. The CWT spread to factories in the form of competition and to all fields of society, including businesses, farms, and schools in the 1960s (Kim, 2016). Thus, CWT served as a political tool to deliver the foundational myth and the cult of personality formed by the engineered collective memory.

Collective memory in the Chollima Movements

The regulations for conferring CWT titles and its membership textbook demonstrate that North Korean rulers viewed the movement as a tool for not only economic revitalisation but also the manipulation of collective memory regarding the guerrilla legacy. It was created with the intent of engineering a usable past for collective memory. North Korean rulers, as memory providers, structured the governmental side of everyday politics by shaping ordinary people’s daily lives through the CWT:

The purpose of the Chollima Work Team Movement is to inherit the Party’s brilliant revolutionary tradition, to protect the Party’s policies and Comrade Kim Il-sung’s teaching to the end, to keep the Party’s principles politically and ideologically, to love the group and comrades in daily life, and to possess a noble communist state and society (General Federation of Trade Unions of North Korea Publishing House, 1964, 347).

Since 1959, popular monthly magazines praising the CM have been published, as well as descriptions of the movement and handbooks for work crews. Kim Il-sung published a speech and several reports on the CM in 1970. Sculptures that promote participation in the CWT have also been highlighted (Kim, 2016). The image of the Chollima rider was incorporated into socialist norms after the launch of the CWT, glorifying physical labour heroes by emphasising speed and increased production, to maintain the North Korean regime (Yee, 2016). In this way, we can assess the CWT’s progress in burnishing Kim Il-sung’s legitimacy through messages of collective memory.

As previously stated, the CWT began in steel mill production units and spread across the industry. The CWT included farmers and students in its latter phases, as well as workplaces, factories, schools, and social organisations (Kang, 2018). Thus, Kim Il-sung’s rule influenced not only the ruling ideology but all aspects of society and citizens’ lives, including Juche education, music, architecture, literature, sports, and medicine.⁷ Every factory, cooperative farm, and school had a ‘WPK History Laboratory’ and Kim Il-sung’s Rojak (a painstaking work of ideological and theoretical guidance), which were studied extensively in relation to the revolutionary tradition and Juche discourse in the micro-level structure of society (Kang, 2018, 68).⁸ The CWT bolstered communist cultural elements in North Korea (Suh, 2005) and sought to generate enthusiasm among workers through incentives (Kim, 2001, 232). Various propaganda projects, public performances, and lectures promoted the CWT’s achievements and encouraged mass mobilisation by awarding flags to individuals, work teams, and workplaces.

The later rulers’ Chollima Movements: Revival of the North Korean belle époque

Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un are also linked to the CM legacy. Facing a regime crisis after the demise of the Soviet Union, Kim Jong-il recalled the CM’s discourse and how it reflected previous mass mobilisation that impacted everyday life. In 1972, the movement was called the General Line of Socialism Construction. Following Kim Jong-il’s visit to the Sŏngjin Steel Complex, the second CM was launched in late 1997. After the Arduous March, the state focused its propaganda on building a strong and prosperous nation (Kangsŏngtaeguk). Kim Jong-il lauded the second CM in his New Year statement in 1999 for responding to a succession of difficulties, including severe economic and food shortages since 1993, the fall of communist countries, and economic sanctions imposed by Western powers (Rodong News Agency, 1999).

In 2009, the DPRK initiated the third CM movement, termed the ‘150-day battle’ (a fixed-term mobilisation order) to construct a Kangsŏngtaeguk by 2012, Kim Il-sung’s 100^th birthday. To reach this objective, the third CM pushed grand innovation and readiness by increasing production in all sectors. The 2009 CM was ideologically identical to the original one: it promoted mobilisation, economic growth, and the planned economic system. When external constraints such as economic sanctions made it more difficult to achieve economic goals, the North Korean authorities acknowledged these difficulties. Kim Jong-il repeatedly contended that North Koreans should remember and carry on his father’s CM legacy:

The whole nation should once again create a boom in leapfrogs with the momentum of the whole nation riding on the Chollima during the postwar period, and our Kangsŏn worker class should take the lead at the call of this era (Rodong News Agency, 2008).

The CM underwent many derivatives throughout Kim Jong-un’s regime. To emphasise self-reliance in the early days of the succession, a large-scale ski resort was built in Mashingnyŏng near Wŏnsan-gun, Gangwon-do, in just a few months. The ‘spirit of Gangwon-do’ (economic campaign slogan) was promoted throughout the country by praising the construction of a hydroelectric power station in the province (Hong et al., 2021). The term ‘Mallima’⁹ initially appeared in April 2015 when Kim Jong-un visited the Wŏnsan Nursery School, and the ‘Mallima Movement’ was introduced at the 7^th Party Congress (Hong et al., 2021, 77). In 2016, Kim Jong-un devised a five-year economic development plan by instilling in the people ‘the great Mallima spirit’ and ‘the Mallima Speed Movement’, thereby propagating the idea of the great Paektu road (Kim, 2016). However, the economy in 2020 did not meet expectations, and in March 2021, the phrase ‘Chollima’ replaced ‘Mallima’.

Kim Jong-un’s engineering of the collective memory and the CM’s legacies frequently conveyed current messages to ordinary North Koreans. In a letter to the participants in the 8^th Congress of the General Federation of Trade Unions of Korea in May 2021, Kim stated:

Our working class should carry forward in today’s revolutionary advance the spirit and mettle of their predecessors in the postwar reconstruction period and the Chollima days who, filled with extraordinary revolutionary enthusiasm to advance faster towards socialism and communism true to the call of the Party and the leader, rejected passivity and conservatism, and worked legendary miracles in the history of our economic construction on the strength of mass heroism (Korean Central News Agency, 2021).

This section has explored how memory politics, in which the ruler manipulates collective memory for legitimacy, has impacted the everyday lives of ordinary North Koreans. As a response to the economic crisis, Kim Jong-il sought legitimation by referring to the anti-Japanese guerrilla movement and the postwar recovery efforts of the 1970s, which served as a common denominator of collective memory in society. In other words, North Korea’s leaders sought to galvanise ordinary people by summoning the CM’s legacies and invoking the manipulated collective memory associated with the foundational myth and the cult of personality. This collective memory, which had already been endorsed by the North Korean people, is consistently ‘remembered’ in accordance with the rulers’ legitimation strategy. Thus, later rulers recalled the CM in keeping with their legitimation approach and using memory politics to control everyday life in North Korea.

Conclusion

Most studies on North Korean politics emphasise the importance of strong ideological rule, but this article has illustrated how the notion of everyday politics provides a better understanding of the changing political dynamics of that country. The article has focused on ‘what the rulers have said’ rather than whether ordinary North Koreans have genuinely believed these statements. The political discourse engineered by the rulers’ memory politics, it has shown, shapes North Korea’s everyday politics. Although these rulers have highlighted the foundational myth and the cult of personality differently since the founding of the state in the 1940s, they have used the manufactured collective memory to govern and influence the everyday lives of North Koreans. The article has demonstrated how the government’s official control methods and institutions affect the socio-political interactions between the state and society across the three generations of the Chollima Movement. Our analysis shows how the manipulated collective memory is used to validate the Kim family’s right to rule through the CWT in the CM.

However, the mass mobilisation system initiated by memory politics also has limitations. After the economic crisis of the 1990s, Hamhung City, a major industrial hub since the late 1960s, experienced a deterioration in its factory management and distribution system (Kim, 2014). This indicates that the influence of memory politics and the legitimation of the ruler in everyday politics are not static and could evolve with the memory consumer (i.e., ordinary people).

Thus, it can be inferred that the emerging ‘Jangmadang’ generation has partially ‘rejected’ the state-led collective memory in North Korean everyday politics. This new generation of ordinary North Koreans remembers little of the years of rigorous central planning before marketplaces became the central arena for acquiring food and other necessities (Cho, 2007; Choi, 2013). This generation’s different identity periodically manifests itself in the rejection of memory providers due to social changes at the grassroots level and the private sphere of everyday politics, and because material failures breed concerns about the government’s legitimacy (Dukalskis & Lee, 2020; Yeo, 2021). The recent reinforcement of communist customs and tight control over the infiltration of capitalist culture among the younger generation demonstrate that Kim Jong-un’s regime is concerned with governmental–institutional control in everyday politics (Han, 2017; Kim & Ahn, 2018).

To further comprehend ordinary North Koreans’ beliefs regarding legitimacy, future research should use various methodological approaches.¹⁰ The understanding and acceptance of the foundational myth and cult of personality in everyday politics could be investigated using diverse research approaches as well. Doing so will allow us to grasp the socio-political interactions more precisely by shedding light on the governmental and private spheres in theorising everyday politics in North Korea.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to extend gratitude to Alexander Dukalskis and Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein for their invaluable contributions in organising this Special Issue. The author also acknowledges the journal editor and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback on an earlier draft. Any remaining errors are solely the responsibility of the author.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. For a discussion of the grassroots dimension of everyday politics in North Korea, see Choi (2013) and Dukalskis and Lee (2020).

^2. The term ‘Paektu mountain descent’ refers to Kim Il-sung’s family tree and their sacred rule. Connecting the traditional place name of Paektu mountain, a sacred mountain in Korea, with the heritage of the anti-Japanese guerrilla movement can be regarded as mythologising the Kim family.

^3. The industrial sector grew at an annual rate of 36.6 per cent, while the agricultural sector was irrigated, electrified, and mechanised (Kim, 1981).

^4. The Party’s membership roughly doubled between 1946 and 1948, and reached 1,164,945 in 1956 (Lee, 2006).

^5. The withdrawal was caused by a clash between the Soviet leadership and North Korea over industrial policy. The Soviet Union, which was dissatisfied with North Korea’s emphasis on heavy industry over light industry, reduced its aid by more than 50 per cent in 1956 compared to three years after the Korean War (Park, 2013).

^6. Chollima is a legendary horse that is said to be capable of running 1,000 Chinese miles (approximately 400 km) every day. The metaphor portrays the heroics of the rider with exceptional ability in literary terms.

^7. For anthropologically oriented analysis of the institutional evolution of Juche ideology and how its non-static features have shaped North Korean politics and society, see Kwon and Chung (2012) and Suh (2012).

^8. In this regard, it could be stated that Juche in North Korea is not a political system but rather a social belief system and a way of life. For an analysis of Juche ideology as a belief system, see Park (2002).

^9. Mallima refers to a horse than can run a distance 10 times greater than Chollima. According to the Korean Central News Agency (2019), the movement is viewed as a countrywide initiative, seeking to set new standards and milestones. It fosters comprehensive economic development through success sharing, experience exchange, and strong competition to outperform top-performing units.

^10. For a discussion of research methods in North Korean studies, see Song (2021).