Kim Yong Ju, who was the oldest surviving member of North Korea’s ruling family, was once considered a potential candidate to lead the country
North Korea’s ruling familyThe younger brother of the country’s founder Kim Il Sung, Kim Yong Ju was praised for “accelerating socialist construction and developing the Korean-style state social system,” North Korean state media reported Wednesday., the North’s leader and grandson of Kim Il Sung, sent a funeral wreath and expressed his deepest condolences, state media reported.
He was seen as a potential successor to Kim Il Sung at one point in the 1970s, although testimonies from former high-ranking North Korean officials have split on whether Kim Yong Ju was viewed as a viable candidate for permanent leader or seen as a stopgap. Kim Yong Ju was born in 1920, in an area west of Pyongyang, during Japan’s colonization of Korea, according to South Korea’s unification ministry. He moved to the Soviet Union in 1941, where he studied politics and economics in Moscow. He returned to North Korea in the 1950s after Kim Il Sung had risen to power.
In 1993, Kim Yong Ju was appointed vice chair and a member of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party Central Committee. The following year he served on his older brother’s funeral committee. He held a seat in Pyongyang’s rubber-stamp parliament until a few years into Kim Jong Un’s rule, which began almost a decade ago. He was last photographed in North Korean state media in 2015, after having cast a vote at a local election.
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