Has North Korea's Kim won a propaganda coup?

SEOUL: If North Korean chief Kim Jong Un was once in search of the easiest propaganda set piece, something designed to turn his people that he's a strong chief pushing inexorably for the long-delayed, long-promised prosperity they deserve, then visiting South Korean President Moon Jae-in may well be providing him with a unique opportunity all through their summit this week.
Moon believes that his deep engagement with North Korea is the most important after final year's fears of warfare, when Washington reacted with fury to a torrent of ever-more-powerful North Korean weapons assessments. He argues that higher ties with North Korea will lend a hand South Koreans, and the area, via settling the decades-long standoff over the North's pursuit of a nuclear arsenal designed to focus on the US mainland.

But his engagement push, which contains bringing a few of South Korea's maximum powerful industry tycoons to Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, moves some observers as also boosting Kim as he tries to turn his electorate that he's pivoting to financial growth and — the most important but unstated — elevating his impoverished country as much as South Korea's level, after his claim final year to have finished his nuclear arsenal.

Throughout the first day of Moon's three-day trip to North Korea, the South Korean chief could be seen grinning broadly as he and Kim loved the ecstatic reception of a Pyongyang that seemed to had been painted, polished and framed until it was once the most efficient possible version of itself — on the video that South Korean media touring with Moon captured and beamed again to Seoul, no less than.

Consider one telling scene, now not lengthy after Moon's arrival Tuesday, when cameras stuck Kim and his sister, Kim Yo Jong, who acts as her brother's chief propagandist, both maneuvering Moon so that he had the easiest view — and could be perfectly seen on a reviewing stand, Kim via his aspect — as an honor guard of goose-stepping troops armed with bayonet-tipped rifles marched via.

A little later, Moon waded into the gang of elite North Korean electorate who'd been brought out to welcome him, shaking arms with some after which deeply bowing amid wild cheers. Even the venue for one of the crucial leaders' conferences — the ruling Workers' Party headquarters, the place Moon signed a guestbook near a map depicting a single, undivided Korea — will play smartly with a delighted North Korean public.

The optics of Moon's seek advice from to Pyongyang are "reminiscent of the Chinese emperor receiving tributary missions — with a pan-Korean ethnic nationalistic twist — the Son of Heaven graciously receiving the barbarian envoy, dazzling the visitor with opulence, grace, and power," in step with Sung-Yoon Lee, a Korea knowledgeable at Tufts University's Fletcher School.

North Korea, Lee stated, portrays all visits via foreign heads of state as reflecting on the "manifold virtues of the Great Leader," and that's especially true of "a Pyongyang pilgrimage by the leader of the illegitimate Korean state" to the south.

Moon's place of job downplayed worries that North Korea could use his seek advice from as propaganda, saying the enthusiastic welcome for Moon will have to be "seen just as it is."

The images of Moon being led via Pyongyang via Kim can be picked over, edited and proven many times on North Korean state TV.

Moon's trip can even become a centerpiece of North Korea's propaganda specialists as they advertise an ideology of race-based nationalism that describes North and South Korean people as one country, quickly divided, in step with Nam Sung-wook, a North Korea knowledgeable at Seoul's Korea University. The North has many times used this ideology to again its demand that the South break up from its alliance with the United States.

"The lavish welcome for Moon will be used to push an image of the Koreas as belonging to a single nation and create detachment between Washington and Seoul," stated Nam, a former authentic in South Korea's secret agent company.

Moon's place of job stated Seoul and Washington are all the time keeping up close communication over North Korea.

Nam also stated that the seek advice from will lend a hand restore the delight of North Koreans, who've been promised financial prosperity after a devastating famine within the 1990s and a steady focal point on construction the army.

Vipin Narang, a North Korea knowledgeable at MIT, stated Kim's efforts this week are compatible into his new strategic line. "Nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles are quietly being mass-produced but Kim won't flaunt them. All attention and focus is on economic development," Narang stated.

There's speculation that the size of the political theater could grow even grander on Wednesday, the second one day of the summit, with North Korea perhaps engineering one of its large mass games spectacles for Moon. The North is being treated to a veritable who's who from the arena of high-powered South Korean industry leaders, lots of whom could be seen lining as much as get on Moon's plane for Pyongyang on Tuesday, some taking a look a little bit taken aback at having their IDs scanned via a safety person.

Moon, meanwhile, all through his welcome in Pyongyang, regarded "like a child in a candy store — wide-eyed, all smiles, bowing to the North Korean people gathered at the airport, and with a retinue of (business leaders) eager to make gifts in the billions of dollars," Lee, the Korea knowledgeable at Tufts, stated. "It's all grand theater, North Korean style."