NK News (file) | Official portraits of past North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il hang in a dark Pyongyang subway car
In much of the English-speaking world, the country ruled by Kim Jong Un is known simply and succinctly as North Korea. Yet this, of course, is not the country’s official name — the much longer Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — and Pyongyang shuns the shorter “North Korea” in all official and even semi-official dealings as a label legitimizing the peninsula’s division.
There is a degree of hypocrisy in these statements. Northerners themselves normally prefer to just say “the Republic” rather than to break their tongue over the convoluted sobriquet. But what’s funnier, in a rather dark way, is that the DPRK once referred to itself by a wrong name for several years, in a little-known episode that highlights the enduring political culture of fear north of the DMZ.
In much of the English-speaking world, the country ruled by Kim Jong Un is known simply and succinctly as North Korea. Yet this, of course, is not the country’s official name — the much longer Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — and Pyongyang shuns the shorter “North Korea” in all official and even semi-official dealings as a label legitimizing the peninsula’s division.
There is a degree of hypocrisy in these statements. Northerners themselves normally prefer to just say “the Republic” rather than to break their tongue over the convoluted sobriquet. But what’s funnier, in a rather dark way, is that the DPRK once referred to itself by a wrong name for several years, in a little-known episode that highlights the enduring political culture of fear north of the DMZ.
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Fyodor Tertitskiy is a leading researcher at Seoul’s Kookmin University. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Seoul National University and is the author of several books on North Korean history and military in English and Korean.