Summary of Anna Fifield's The Great Successor

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Wonsan is a paradise in North Korea. It is where the country’s elite spend their summers. It is also where Kim Jong Un spent his childhood summers.

#2 While the North Korean people were starving and suffering from floods in the 1980s, the Kim regime was shipping relief aid to South Korea from Wonsan. In the 1990s, while North Korean children were eating seeds for nourishment, Kim Jong Un was enjoying sushi and watching action movies.

#3 Wonsan was an extremely important place for Kim Jong Un. It was there that he built a huge amusement park, as well as missile launching sites. He watched as his munitions chiefs used new 300mm guns to turn an island just offshore to dust.

#4 The Kim family’s claim on the leadership of North Korea has its origins in the 1930s, when Kim Il Sung was making a name for himself as an anti-Japanese guerilla fighter. In 1942, when Korea was liberated from Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States decided to divide the peninsula between them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822511910

IRB Media

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Insights on Anna Fifield's The Great Successor

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Wonsan is a paradise in North Korea. It is where the country’s elite spend their summers. It is also where Kim Jong Un spent his childhood summers.

#2

While the North Korean people were starving and suffering from floods in the 1980s, the Kim regime was shipping relief aid to South Korea from Wonsan. In the 1990s, while North Korean children were eating seeds for nourishment, Kim Jong Un was enjoying sushi and watching action movies.

#3

Wonsan was an extremely important place for Kim Jong Un. It was there that he built a huge amusement park, as well as missile launching sites. He watched as his munitions chiefs used new 300mm guns to turn an island just offshore to dust.

#4

The Kim family’s claim on the leadership of North Korea has its origins in the 1930s, when Kim Il Sung was making a name for himself as an anti-Japanese guerilla fighter. In 1942, when Korea was liberated from Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States decided to divide the peninsula between them.

#5

The Soviet Union installed Kim Il Sung as the leader of North Korea in 1945. He wasn’t the ideal candidate, as the Soviets were suspicious of his ties to the Japanese, but he had impressed his Soviet benefactors enough to earn himself a role in the new North Korean regime.

#6

Kim Il Sung was a flop. He was elected in 1948, and within a year, he had started a personality cult so pervasive it made Stalin look like an amateur. He established a Korean People’s Army, led by fellow veterans of the anti-Japanese struggle, and tried to take control of South Korea.

#7

After the war, North Korea blamed the American-backed South for the conflict, and declared itself the victor. Kim Il Sung cemented his leadership by overseeing a massive rebuilding program funded by North Korea’s allies.

#8

Kim Il Sung was beginning to think about his legacy, and making sure that the dictatorship he had established would