Kim Jong-un’s older half-brother was reportedly living under Chinese protection before he was killed.
The Cold War-style assassination of Kim Jong-un’s exiled half-brother, who had reportedly been living under Chinese protection in Macau, is likely to inflame existing tensions between Beijing and its ally Pyongyang, experts told The Diplomat.
China reportedly viewed Kim Jong-nam, who shared a father with the North Korean dictator, as a potential replacement for the current leader, who has tested Beijing’s patience with repeated nuclear and missile tests and by executing his reform-minded uncle Jang Song-thaek, who had close relations with the county. In an interview in 2012, Yoji Gomi, a Japanese journalist who extensively interviewed the estranged Kim, said that Beijing viewed him as a “political card” for the future.
As the first-born son of late dictator Kim Jong-il, Kim was once assumed to be the heir to the dictatorship but later fell out of favor, and in recent years he denied having any interest in power. After years of living outside North Korea, he was killed in an apparent poison attack at Kuala Lumpur airport in Malaysia on Monday.
Nam Change-hee, an international relations professor at Inha University near Seoul, said Kim’s assassination was “another slap on the face of Beijing,” leaving it with the competing options of punishing its ally or accommodating the slight.
