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( Kim Il-sung)
This article is part of the series
Politics and government of
North Korea Much of the early records of his life come from his own personal accounts and official North Korean government publications, which often conflict with independent sources. Nevertheless, there is some consensus on at least the basic story of his early life, corroborated by witnesses from the period. Kim was born to Kim Hyong-jik and Kang Pan-sok, who gave him the name Kim Song-ju, and had two younger brothers, Ch’ol-chu and Yong-ju. He was born in Nam-ri, Kophyong District, Taedong County, South P'yongan Province (currently the Mangyongdae area of P'yongyang), then under Japanese occupation. The ancestral seat (pon’gwan) of Kim's family is Chonju, North Cholla Province, and what little that is known about the family contends that sometime around the time of the Korean-Japanese war of 1592-98, a direct ancestor moved north. The claim may be understood in light of the fact that the early Choson government's policy of populating the north resulted in mass resettlement of southern farmers in Phyongan and Hamgyong regions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At any rate, the majority of the Chonju Kim, today live in North Korea, and extant Chonju Kim genealogies provide spotty records. Moreover, a persistent rumour alleges that during the North Korean occupation of Seoul in the Korean War, the North Koreans collected all the available Chonju Kim genealogies and took them to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea[citation needed]. The exact history of Kim's family is somewhat obscure. The family was neither very poor nor comfortably well-off, but was always a step away from poverty. Kim was raised in a Protestant Christian family with strong ties to the church his maternal grandfather was a Protestant minister, his father had gone to a missionary school, and both his parents were reportedly very active in the religious community. According to the official version, Kim's family participated in anti-Japanese activities and in 1920 they fled to Manchuria, where he became fluent in Chinese. The more objective view seems to be that his family settled in Manchuria like many Koreans at the time to escape famine. Nonetheless, Kim’s parents apparently did play a minor role in some activist groups, though whether their cause was missionary, nationalist, or both is unclear.[2] Kim’s father died in 1926, when Kim was fourteen years old. Kim attended Yulin Middle School in Jilin, where he rejected the feudal traditions of older generation Koreans and became interested in communist ideologies; his formal education ended when he was arrested and jailed for his subversive activities. At seventeen, Kim had become the youngest member of an underground Marxist organization with less than twenty members, led by Ho So, who belonged to the South Manchurian Communist Youth Association. The police discovered the group three weeks after it was formed in 1929, and jailed Kim for several months.[3][4]
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