{"id":1768,"date":"2026-05-17T10:43:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T02:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/?p=1768"},"modified":"2026-08-10T19:39:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T11:39:15","slug":"jonathan-cheng-on-the-religion-behind-the-kim-familys-rule-over-north-korea-the-wire-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/2026\/05\/17\/jonathan-cheng-on-the-religion-behind-the-kim-familys-rule-over-north-korea-the-wire-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Cheng on the Religion behind the Kim Family\u2019s Rule Over North Korea [The Wire China]"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Illustration by Lauren Crow<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Wall Street Journal\u2019s China bureau chief discusses the role of Christianity in shaping Kim Il Sung\u2019s personality cult, and talks about life now as a foreign reporter in Beijing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jonathan Cheng is the China bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. From 2013 to 2019, he was the Korea bureau chief, based in Seoul. A native of Toronto, he lives in Beijing. His first book<\/a>, <\/em>Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea\u2019s Personality Cult, recounts the profound impact of Christianity on North Korean society. The book is out with Alfred A. Knopf as of April.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: How did this book come about? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A: I was sent to Korea by the \uc2a4\ud2b8\ub9ac\ud2b8\uc800\ub110 <\/em>in 2013. I\u2019m not ethnically Korean, although I had been learning the language. I did what many people do when they get sent to a new posting, which is to read up on the country. Obviously, I wasn\u2019t going to be posted to Pyongyang, but I was going to be responsible for writing a lot about North Korea. I read everything about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s interesting is, if you pick up standard books on North Korea, you\u2019ll learn that the founder of the state, Kim Il Sung, was raised in a pretty devout household and that Pyongyang, where he grew up, was a city so Christianized it was known as the Jerusalem of the East. That was really interesting to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did you ever visit? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I went to North Korea in 2013 and again in 2017 and I was very struck by what I would consider the religiosity of the place. The first thing people do in the morning is use government-issued dusters to clean the portraits of Kim Il Sung \u2014 and later his son Kim Jong Il \u2014 that hang in every North Korean home. On your wedding day, on your graduation day, on New Year\u2019s Day, on his birthday, you\u2019re at his statue presenting a bouquet of flowers and bowing. Everyone wears his face over their hearts on little pin badges. They recite his words and sing his praises. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not the first person to point out the religious nature of all this, but it really struck me, and I didn\u2019t feel like I had much of an understanding of how to connect Kim Il Sung\u2019s Christian childhood and the religiosity of North Korea today. I thought for sure there would be books on the topic, because it seemed so obvious, but the more I read, the more I found there weren\u2019t any.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wasn\u2019t planning to write a book; it started off as a potential \uc2a4\ud2b8\ub9ac\ud2b8\uc800\ub110 <\/em>piece. But the more I dove into it, the more I realized I couldn\u2019t do this in even a 2,000-word article. It\u2019s like the frog being boiled in water: you go along, and at some point you realize, \u201cOh wait, I\u2019m writing a book.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s dive into it then. What was Korea like when American missionaries first arrived in the late 19th century?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Korea was known then as the Hermit Kingdom, which is still the moniker used for North Korea today. It was relatively isolated by the standard of the day. That\u2019s not to say there were no contacts between Korea and the outside world, but there were fewer than in other places. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This Christian thread is grossly overlooked when it comes to North Korea. Part of what I\u2019m trying to do is offer a corrective, to tell people this was a very powerful ideological thread running through modern Korea and specifically through the family of Kim Il Sung.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

When the first Protestant missionaries arrived in Korea in the 1880s, they found a country that was curious about them as foreigners but not particularly interested in the message they were preaching, about a man who was crucified 2,000 years ago. Working in Seoul and down in Busan, they didn\u2019t succeed much in winning converts. It wasn\u2019t until one Indiana man, Samuel Moffett \u2014 arriving in Seoul on his 26th birthday in 1890 \u2014 went up to Pyongyang that things changed. Within a couple of weeks, he found a hunger for his message that was insatiable. He was writing back to the Presbyterian Church in New York saying he didn\u2019t have time to eat or sleep because of the queue of people at his door wanting to hear what he was preaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of these people were the grandparents and parents of Kim Il Sung.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only were they converts, they were very devout ones \u2014 architects of the Jerusalem of the East. Kim Il Sung\u2019s father had an aspiration, according to one source, of becoming a pastor. Whether or not that\u2019s true, there\u2019s very little question that he was essentially a Christian educator, devoted to winning Korea for Christ. Kim Il Sung\u2019s mother was the daughter of a devout early convert as well and she was what they called a \u201cBible woman\u201d, tasked with spreading the Christian message in the villages around Pyongyang, teaching women to read through the Bible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time Kim Il Sung was born in 1912 on the outskirts of Pyongyang, he was raised in a very devout Christian household, in a city that boasted the world\u2019s largest Presbyterian seminary, some of the world\u2019s largest churches and prayer meetings and Christian leaders from the U.S. and the UK flocking to see what was going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was Pyongyang like before its religious transformation?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was known as a Las Vegas type of city, famous for its saloons, for the most famous dancing girls in all of Korea. There were massive stone-throwing fights, with hundreds of men on each side, hurling stones at each other in a field. Many would die. That\u2019s what Pyongyang was known for when Samuel Moffett first arrived in 1890. Yet within just a few years, it was already developing a reputation as the Jerusalem of the East. Quite a transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Japanese colonizers arrived. What was Korea\u2019s experience under Japanese occupation and what was its relationship to China at this time?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you look at the map of Northeast Asia, Korea had somehow, through millennia, avoided fully falling into the Chinese empire. It has had a distinct language and culture separate from Chinese for a very long time and by almost any definition of statehood \u2014 certainly the kind Woodrow Wilson was proclaiming in the early 20th century \u2014 Korea was a nation, but one that had been subjugated by Japan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Japanese colonization of Korea was very different from other colonial projects. When the British and other European powers colonized nations, they were typically far away with very little historical overlap. Korea and Japan shared many historical, cultural, and linguistic ties, making it a deeply bruising experience for Koreans. They were made a protectorate in 1905 and a colony formally in 1910, a status that lasted until the defeat of the Japanese Empire in 1945. Forty years, front to back. Korean Christians were at the forefront of the fight against Japanese colonialism and Kim Il Sung\u2019s family was very much in that vein.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You describe how, as Korea\u2019s independence movement developed, China was a kind of staging ground, where exile communities plotted. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, in Manchuria and Shanghai, where you can still visit the Korean Provisional Government set up in 1919 in the French Concession. The seminal moment for Korea\u2019s independence movement was March 1st 1919, just two months before China\u2019s May 4th movement in Beijing. Both were inspired by the end of World War One and Woodrow Wilson\u2019s proclamation at the Paris Peace Conference that every people should have the right to self-determination. But it was the Koreans who went first, and in many ways inspired and foreshadowed what happened in Tiananmen Square that May. Obviously there were indigenous Chinese factors that led to the May 4th movement, but the March 1st events in Korea were very much an inspiration to Chinese nationalists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s one more China connection: a Korean Catholic famously assassinated the first Resident General of Korea, It\u014d Hirobumi \u2014 four times Prime Minister of Japan during the early Meiji years \u2014 with a pistol in Harbin. At the trial, held in Dalian, Liang Qichao, the leading reformer of the late Qing period, attended and expressed great admiration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mao Zedong was watching Korea\u2019s independence movement as well. He has a remark where he dismisses the promises of Wilsonian democracy, citing Korea as an example of how the West and its ideals failed the people of Asia. That drove many Korean and Chinese nationalists toward the other great force of the period: the Bolshevik revolution. You had 1919 \u2014 the failure of the Wilsonian project \u2014 alongside 1917, the success of the Bolsheviks. The same -isms flowing through China after May 4th \u2014 anarchism, socialism, Bolshevism \u2014 were flowing through Korea as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we fast forward to the founding of the DPRK: what do we understand about the Kim dynasty through this lens of Christianity that we were missing before?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When people describe North Korea today, they typically call it a socialist country. That\u2019s not incorrect: it certainly identifies as one and it was set up by the Soviet Union. You could describe the state as Stalinist, as part of the Soviet bloc. None of those labels are wrong per se. But if you\u2019d talked to Kim Il Sung\u2019s father and asked him, \u201cAre you a Confucian?\u201d he would have said, \u201cNo.\u201d Korea was deeply influenced by Confucianism, but he\u2019d have said they\u2019d rejected that. If you\u2019d asked, \u201cAre you a socialist?\u201d he\u2019d have said, \u201cI\u2019m definitely not a socialist. I\u2019m a Christian.\u201d He would have said Christianity was the path to Korea\u2019s national liberation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I\u2019m trying to posit in this book is that to understand North Korea, you cannot overlook the Christian influence of the Jerusalem of the East, and specifically its influence on Kim Il Sung. I\u2019m not saying he created a crypto-Christian state, but that it definitely played a deep role in his upbringing, just as we\u2019re all products of our influences. This Christian thread is grossly overlooked when it comes to North Korea. Part of what I\u2019m trying to do is offer a corrective, to tell people this was a very powerful ideological thread running through modern Korea and specifically through the family of Kim Il Sung.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But fanatic cults of personality have prospered in other states lacking a deep history of Christianization \u2014 Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. It seems to me that part of your argument is that this Christian legacy somehow explains the remarkable endurance of the Kim family cult. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Absolutely. Stalin was at the unquestioned peak of his cult for about eight years, from 1945 to his death in 1953. Mao\u2019s cult of personality peaked during the Cultural Revolution, roughly 1966 to 1969, about three years at its height. And after each of them, you had a reckoning: Khrushchev\u2019s de-Stalinization, Deng Xiaoping\u2019s \u201c70 percent right, 30 percent wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing remotely like that happened in North Korea. There was no reform and opening, no glasnost<\/em> \uadf8\ub9ac\uace0 perestroika<\/em>. When Kim Il Sung died, he handed it off to his son, who had been one of the main architects of his father\u2019s cult, putting it into overdrive. And it\u2019s now been handed to a third generation in Kim Jong Un, with nobody along the way incentivized to dial things back at all. If anything, they keep dialing it up. They\u2019ve made Kim Il Sung the Eternal President of North Korea. Nobody knows for certain what\u2019s going on with Kim Jong Un\u2019s daughter, but it looks like they\u2019re preparing for the cult to continue into a fourth generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is Christianity\u2019s role in North Korea today? I\u2019m thinking of the missionaries in China who have operated an underground railroad of sorts for defectors. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1990s, around the time of Kim Il Sung\u2019s death, a massive famine struck North Korea and thousands fled over the Yalu and Tumen rivers into northeastern China. Many South Korean missionaries were operating undercover there, running safe houses. The North Koreans were fleeing primarily for economic reasons \u2014 not out of political defiance, but because they were starving. Many eventually made their way to South Korea along a route that first ran through the consulates in Shenyang and the foreign embassies in Beijing, then through Mongolia when China shut that channel, and eventually through Southeast Asia \u2014 across the border from Yunnan into neighboring countries to seek asylum. Some 30,000 North Koreans made that very difficult journey and ended up in South Korea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The country is not as welcoming to outsiders as it was even in the pre-COVID period. But North Korea, I don\u2019t think, is going away anytime soon. They are a nuclear-armed state. There\u2019s very little debate about that anymore, even if the U.S. government is reluctant to apply the label. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s fascinating is that South Korean missionaries were the primary conduits of this underground railroad. Many used the opportunity to share the gospel \u2014 the same thing Samuel Moffett did in the 1890s. Many of these North Koreans, encountering Christianity for the first time, were struck by how similar it was to what I call Kimilsungism<\/em>, the religion they were raised in. They\u2019d do a double take: \u201cThis sounds like a replica of Kimilsungism.\u201d And the missionaries would have to explain: no, Kimilsungism came later. It borrows from Christianity, not the other way around. The North Koreans almost couldn\u2019t believe it \u2014 until they were told the Bible predates Kim Il Sung by 2,000 years. It just speaks to how strong those echoes are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t want to say Kim Il Sung was sitting with a Bible on one side creating his ideology. It was likely far more subtle than that. But the end result is the same: North Koreans who come out, encounter Christianity and ask, \u201cWhat is this, and why is it so similar to what I was raised in?\u201d Many do become Christian when they reach South Korea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d be remiss if I didn\u2019t ask you about your day job. There are few foreign correspondents in China today. What\u2019s it like reporting there now compared to, say, ten years ago? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t really compare it to back then because I wasn\u2019t here; I was reporting in Hong Kong, which is a different environment, and then Seoul. But even when I was based in Seoul, I was flying in and out of Beijing, partly to get to Pyongyang. Beijing was a gateway to North Korea, though that role has diminished. North Korea hasn\u2019t truly reopened since Covid and the infrastructure in Beijing for North Korea-watching \u2014 chiefly Koryo Tours, which for decades was the main conduit for Western visitors \u2014 has atrophied somewhat. Flights between Pyongyang and Beijing have recently been restored. That remains the main way in and out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for the general freedom in Beijing, by all measures it has gotten a lot more difficult. Surveillance and technology have made things easier for reporters in some respects but also much easier for the state to track what we\u2019re doing. That\u2019s true in the North Korean context too: go to the border regions, go to Dandong, and you\u2019re guaranteed to be followed. The most sensitive areas of China reporting are arguably the party leadership and the frontier regions: Tibet and Xinjiang first among them, but the North Korea border not far behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I think about being a China journalist, so much of what I see rhymes with North Korea \u2014 though North Korea provides a more extreme version of everything. The suppression and repression are more pronounced. The Christian influence is much stronger in North Korea, though that\u2019s not to say it isn\u2019t present in Chinese history. At heart, that\u2019s the argument of the book: North Korea is perhaps best understood not only as a nation state but as a religious society built around Kim Il Sung.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like a theocracy? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTheocracy\u201d isn\u2019t necessarily misapplied to North Korea, though North Korea would certainly not use that term about itself. I like the phrase \u201creligious society\u201d because it\u2019s relatively neutral \u2014 almost respectful, in a sense. Many people there genuinely believe what they are taught. That doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s real. But you could say that of a lot of religions. And the people born in North Korea had about as much say in being born there as any of us did being born where we were. I want to leave space for that kind of respect: to face it, examine it on its own terms and recognize it for what it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would you welcome the chance to return to North Korea?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would, but I\u2019m not sure I\u2019d dare to. The country is not as welcoming to outsiders as it was even in the pre-COVID period. But North Korea, I don\u2019t think, is going away anytime soon. They are a nuclear-armed state. There\u2019s very little debate about that anymore, even if the U.S. government is reluctant to apply the label. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for internal threats, I wouldn\u2019t dare predict. But the state has proven to be incredibly robust. Very few people in 1989 would have predicted that North Korea in 2026 would not only have survived but arguably thrived, with a non-negotiable nuclear deterrent, a third-generation leader and possibly a fourth generation on the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has China as a backer, too. It\u2019s hard to imagine that Beijing would allow the Kim regime to fall.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, though nobody saw Nixon going to China. Donald Trump is realigning the world in many ways. Maybe we do see him in Pyongyang at some point. But as a journalist, my goal is less to be predictive or prescriptive about where North Korea is headed and more to be descriptive about what is happening and what has happened. Part of what this book was about was showing readers that there are a lot more dimensions to North Korea than meet the eye. It\u2019s about developing a more holistic understanding of what it is and where it came from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Link<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Wall Street Journal\u2019s China bureau chief discusses the role of Christianity in shaping Kim Il Sung\u2019s personality cult, and talks about life now as a foreign reporter in Beijing. Jonathan Cheng is the China bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. From 2013 to 2019, he was the Korea bureau chief, based in Seoul. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49546014,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_gspb_post_css":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1373],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-appearances"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":false,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ph2bTO-sw","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49546014"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1768"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1773,"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768\/revisions\/1773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}