The assassination of Kim Jong-un’s exiled half brother, who was China’s main North Korean asset, points to Beijing’s currently fraught relationship with Pyongyang.
For more than a decade, Kim Jong-nam, the exiled half brother of North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, lived in Beijing and Macau under the protection of the Chinese state. But, on February 13th, he looked to be travelling alone when two dark-haired women approached him at Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur International Airport. In what appears to be leaked CCTV footage, one of the women approaches Kim in the check-in area, while the other rushes up from behind and seems to wipe her hands across his face. After the alleged assassins stroll away in opposite directions, Kim is shown, alone, approaching airline personnel and miming the mysterious ambush. Soon after, a direct descendant of North Korea’s ruling dynasty was dead.
Kim’s assassination, which the South Korean government called a “ terrorist act ” carried out by the North Korean regime, shocked China’s leadership. (Malaysian police have implicated several North Koreans in the killing and want to question a diplomat at the North Korean embassy in Kuala Lumpur.) In recent months, when Kim stepped out in Macau, the semiautonomous Chinese casino town, where he spent much of his time, he could be seen without a security detail, but he was nonetheless China’s main—if politically blemished—North Korean asset. (Kim went into exile after he was stopped at the Tokyo airport, in 2001, while trying to sneak into Japan with a forged passport from the Dominican Republic. He claimed that he was trying to visit Tokyo Disneyland.) The suggestion that his younger half brother—known as “Fatty Kim the Third” in Mandarin—had ordered the assassination strained at the bonds between the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or the D. P. R. K.
This was not the first hit on a pro-China relative of the Supreme Leader. In late 2013, Kim Jong-un’s uncle Jang Song-taek, who had tried to reinvigorate the North Korean economy through market reforms advised by the Chinese, was executed. Jang’s offenses included “half-heartedly clapping” when his nephew received a military promotion. China, uniquely among the world’s powers, has continued to offer its assistance to North Korea. It’s a big-brother relationship that goes back to the first half of the twentieth century, when revolutionaries in both places were experimenting with communism; it was only because Chairman Mao Zedong dispatched more than a million Chinese troops to fight in the Korean War that Kim’s grandfather Kim Il-sung kept control of the northern half of the Korean peninsula. But the reign of Kim Jong-un has caused consternation.
