ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with Kim Jong Il's career. Kim Jong II became a public figure when he was elected to a series of high Party positions at the Sixth Korean Workers' Party (KWP) Congress in October 1980. The principal significance of the work lay in how Kim Jong II described the tasks of the Party at a time when, as he put it, 'the revolution is assuming a protracted and arduous nature'. Far from symbolising the rise of a new generation of technocratically-minded cadres oriented toward pragmatic policies, the younger Kim himself emphasised that his role was to ensure that the Party safeguarded the revolutionary tradition of the anti-Japanese guerillas. The Kim Jong II succession was his father's means of guaranteeing that such traditional parameters as command economics, mass mobilisation, profound militarism, and uncompromising confrontation with the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the United States (US) would guide future policy.
