North Korea’s recent sentencing of senior military official Pak Hui Chol centered on familiar allegations: bribery, abuse of power and illicit wealth.

However, what made his downfall remarkable was that Pyongyang wanted everyone to know about the alleged crimes.

At a rare joint meeting of senior party, government and military officials, Kim’s public condemnation of Pak’s “extra-large crimes” took the regime’s intensifying anti-corruption drive far beyond North Korea’s traditionally opaque treatment of officials’ graft.

From elite power struggles to the limits of rooting out corruption in North Korea’s political system, the former official’s fall from grace sheds light on the