7 The 100 Most Influential World Leaders of All Time 7the office of premier and was elected president of North
Korea in December 1972. In 1980 he raised his eldest son,
Kim Jong Il, to high posts in the party and the military, in
effect designating the younger Kim as his heir.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s
left China as North Korea’s sole major ally, and even China
cultivated more cordial relations with South Korea than
with North Korea. Meanwhile, North Korean policy toward
the South alternated between provocation and overtures of
peace throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Relations
improved somewhat with Seoul’s hosting of the Olympic
Games in 1988, to which the North sent a team of athletes.
In 1991 the two countries were simultaneously admitted to
the United Nations, and a series of prime-ministerial talks
produced two agreements between North and South Korea.
One agreement pledged nonaggression, reconciliation,
exchanges, and cooperation. The other was a joint declara-
tion on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The
agreements went into effect in February 1992, although
little of substance came of them, especially after the North
became embroiled in controversy over its nuclear program
and suspended all contacts with the South in early 1993.
South Korean president Kim Young Sam was scheduled
to travel to P’yo ̆ ngyang in July 1994 for an unprecedented
summit between the two Korean leaders, but Kim Il-sung
died before the meeting could take place. Kim Jong Il
ascended to power after his father’s death, and in the
revised constitution that was announced in 1998, the office
of president was written out and the elder Kim was written
in as “eternal president of the republic.”
Kim Jong Il
The official North Korean version of Kim Jong Il’s life,
different from the biography documented elsewhere, says