Brian Myers teaches at Dongseo Unviersity, in Busan, in South Korea. He is the author of The Cleanest Race, a book about propaganda in North Korea, and told the BBC: “With Kim Jong-un, I do get the impression that he’s not his father’s intellectual equal. I think he’s done a terrible job at managing his own image.”
This matters in North Korea. “North Koreans are not looking as critically at him as we are, but they’re not fools. They are a much more sophisticated people than we think. He’s simply too young and unsophisticated and too un-parental in his demeanour to exert the same kind of charisma on his people as his father did.”
Mr Myers cites the visit of the American basketball player Dennis Rodman as a miscalculation: “Pictures of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il receiving foreigners always showed the foreigners bowing and scraping and the leaders standing very straight as though the foreigners were not very important.
“In the film of Kim Jong-un meeting Dennis Rodman, you had this retired basketball player with his legs crossed, a can of Coca-Cola in front of him, sunglasses on and the baseball cap. You could see by the faces of the people sitting behind him that they were having difficulty trying to understand just what was going on.
“When I saw those film clips, it occurred [to me] that, perhaps because Kim Jong-un had grown up overseas, he was not in tune with the official culture.
“And that’s going to cause problems for him down the road.”