While North Korea officially rejects the idea that it has an elite class, it remains one of the most highly stratified societies in the world. In a detailed study of this social structure, Dr. Jieun Baek, author of "Privileged but Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness" (Yale University Press 2026), explores how the deep-seated grievances of these privileged individuals represent the regime's most critical vulnerability. This analysis is featured as the 525th entry in "The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series," which regularly engages global experts to understand strategic dynamics in Asia.
The country's elite class is divided into two distinct groups. The traditional elite includes Korean Workers’ Party cadres, intellectuals, senior military and security officials, and individuals personally close to Kim Jong Un. This group largely inherits its status through favorable songbun—North Korea's rigid hierarchical classification system—as well as family history and proven political loyalty. Alongside them is a rising unofficial elite known as the donju, or "masters of money," who derive their influence from capital, private markets, and strategic connections.
None of this is discreet. The regime deliberately stages elite rewards to incentivize loyalty. For instance, when the Kyongru-dong neighborhood opened, officials framed the new housing not as a public good but as the deserved inheritance of those whose loyalty had earned them "the best of civilization." However, these privileges are entirely conditional. Elites must continuously demonstrate political reliability, professional usefulness, and personal loyalty to Kim Jong Un. Crucially, privilege and surveillance rise together; the most powerful figures are also the most closely monitored.
To examine why North Korean elites are "privileged but powerless," one must look at the paradox of their daily lives. They possess influence, wealth, and access unimaginable to most citizens, but they lack the most basic power over their own lives. They cannot safely criticize policy, organize independently, protect their families from the country's system of guilt by association, or know whether today's privilege will survive tomorrow's purge. Even the most senior officials can be demoted, imprisoned, or executed without due process, as demonstrated by the high-profile execution of Jang Song Thaek in 2013.
Proximity to power actually creates additional danger. Elites face intense surveillance, mandatory ideological activity, extractive "loyalty" contributions, workplace rivalries, and constant evaluation. Thae Yong Ho, the most senior North Korean diplomat to defect in years, summarized this reality with characteristic economy: "The closer you are to the Sun, the higher the chances you will burn." Several escapees have noted that middle-ranking posts feel safer than the absolute apex of power. While they may supervise institutions or control substantial resources, they cannot challenge the system that grants those privileges. As one elite escapee remarked, they are "disposable slaves to Kim Jong Un," powerful downward toward those beneath them, but powerless upward before the Leader.
This environment fosters "feigned fealty," a phenomenon where elites perform intense public devotion to protect their careers, status, and families. Public life is a carefully directed performance where elites attend rallies, recite ideological texts, participate in self-criticism sessions, and display intense devotion. However, visible obedience should not be mistaken for sincere belief. One interviewee described this through an anecdote: inspectors would arrive at his home in white gloves to check the portraits of the Kim leaders, hunting for a speck of dust that could bring serious consequences down on his family. He cleaned those portraits not out of reverence, but out of self-preservation. Feigned fealty describes that widening gap between low inward loyalty and high outward loyalty—a form of preference falsification under extreme coercion where everyone plays a role while few can know what others truly believe.
This gap appears to be widening under Kim Jong Un. Elite defections have increased dramatically; younger elites prioritize money, business, foreign study, and opportunities for their children over service to the Party; and many privately favor economic reform and greater access to information. The regime’s elaborate demands for loyalty reveal not confidence, but anxiety. A system sustained by genuine conviction is resilient, whereas one sustained by surveillance, rewards, and fear may look stable until a shock exposes how shallow its support has become.
In her analysis, Baek helps to identify the five options available to North Korean elites with grievances. These aggrieved elites have five primary options to choose from:
First, they can maintain the status quo and do nothing. This is the least immediately dangerous and most rational choice, but it allows resentment and distrust to accumulate beneath the surface.Second, they can defect and seek asylum abroad. Defection is an unequivocal rejection of the regime, but it carries extraordinary risks for escapees and their families.Third, they can erode the regime’s monopoly over resources by building alternative power structures. Markets, private food production, solar energy, informal finance, tutoring, communications, housing, and healthcare can gradually reduce dependence on the state.Fourth, they can engage in dissent—ranging from coded criticism and "hidden transcripts" (using James C. Scott's concept) to subtle defiance, clandestine information sharing, or organized resistance.Fifth, they can push for democratization and systemic reform. This is the most ambitious and dangerous option because it requires trust, coordination, and first movers willing to confront enormous barriers to collective action.The regime’s greatest strength and greatest weakness are the same: its dependence on elites. Elites are its architects, administrators, financiers, enforcers, and protectors. The broader population can be controlled through isolation and terror, but the regime must continuously manage elites through a delicate combination of privilege, surveillance, and coercion. If elite allegiance fractures, the system’s foundation begins to crack.
Policymakers in the United States, Europe, and Asia should therefore look beyond missile tests and leadership imagery to study elite incentives, generational change, defections, market activity, information consumption, and signs of preference falsification. They should avoid assuming that elite dissatisfaction will automatically produce reform, as North Korea’s barriers to trust and collective action remain formidable. They should also avoid inadvertently improving the regime’s capacity to reward loyalty; hard-currency access, prestige projects, and engagement channels the state can capture are redirected into patronage for insiders. Sanctions design and diplomatic sweeteners deserve to be tested against that standard.
The United States, Europe, South Korea, Japan, and other partners should expand secure access to outside information, combining radio and portable media with technologies that circumvent censorship. North Korean escapees should lead content creation so that it is credible, tailored, and safe for intended audiences. Governments should also protect escapees, strengthen pathways for asylum, document elite testimony, and support decentralized economic and information networks that reduce the state’s monopoly over daily life. Finally, strategists must prepare for multiple futures, including gradual liberalization, elite-led reform, succession instability, or sudden internal shock. A regime that requires constant performances of loyalty is revealing its fear: that when people are finally free to choose, many of its most privileged citizens may choose something else.
North Koreans pay their respects before the 20 meter tall Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il statues at the center of the Mansu Hill Grand Monument located at Mansudae, Pyongyang, North Korea.
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