What is Juche?
Juche is the official ideology of North Korea and its ruling Workers' Party. Its name is often rendered as self-reliance, or sometimes subjecthood. The founder of the state, Kim Il Sung, shaped it, and his son Kim Jong Il developed it further. It started as a Korean version of Marxism-Leninism, then slowly pushed that out of official texts. The state teaches that Korea must be independent in politics, self-sufficient in its economy and strong in defense, and that the supreme leader stands at the center. A lot of scholars think its real function is to defend the Kim dynasty.
Core beliefs
- Korea must be free of control by any bigger power.
- The country should feed and supply itself, and avoid relying on imports or gifts.
- The country must be able to defend itself with its own forces.
- The people make history, but only under the guidance of one supreme leader.
- Faithfulness to the leader and the party outranks every other duty.
- Korean nationhood and history are the starting point of all thinking.
History
The word first appeared in a speech by Kim Il Sung in 1955, which attacked the habit of copying foreign models. The split between the Soviet Union and China in the following years gave North Korea a reason to stay clear of both. By the late 1960s it had three pillars: political independence, economic self-sufficiency and a defense the country could manage alone. A new constitution wrote Juche into law in 1972. Kim Jong Il's On the Juche Idea (1982) turned it into a full philosophy on paper. Hwang Jang-yop, a senior figure who helped shape the doctrine, crossed over to South Korea in 1997. Kim Il Sung died in 1994, and under his son the army-first line called Songun took over. In later years the constitution and party texts dropped their references to Marxism-Leninism.
Variants
Songun gave the army first claim on resources, and it dominated official policy through the late 1990s and 2000s. More recent texts use the term Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism, and the Byungjin line tied the nuclear program to economic goals. Abroad, tiny Juche clubs have existed, mostly with Pyongyang's help.
Criticisms
Human rights groups and a UN commission of inquiry that reported in 2014 documented grave abuses in North Korea. These include political prison camps, public executions, forced labor and tight limits on travel and speech. Economists say the drive for self-sufficiency helped wreck the economy once Soviet help dried up, and a famine in the mid-1990s killed somewhere between several hundred thousand and more than two million people, depending on the estimate. Many scholars say Juche works less as a philosophy than as a prop for rule passed from father to son. Marxist critics add that it swapped class analysis for nationalism and the worship of a leader.
In practice
North Korea has run on Juche since the 1970s and is among the most closed countries on Earth. Power has passed down through three generations of one family. Almost the whole economy is state-run, though informal trade has grown since the 1990s. The armed forces come first, the country has built nuclear weapons, and heavy international sanctions apply. On the 12 axes the profile sits at the extreme end of Authority, Security, Structure and Culture, and strongly toward Public ownership and Planned markets.