Upon examination, the DPRK's Constitution mirrors the reality of the state and serves as one of most effective ways to understand the ‘government's management of society and its responses to changes in its internal and external environments'.[320]

Its Constitution reflects how the nation-state developed through internal socio-cultural changes and foreign pressures. In this sense, the North Korean Constitutions of 1948 and 1972 ought to be examined as a ‘changeable national charter[s] that describes the political state's political priorities, structural changes that consoli­date leadership, citizen's rights in relation to duties, and markers in economic development’.^[321] The intentions behind the Constitution transcend beyond the rigid legal language of the text itself; it is a porthole into the dynamic culture that can be overlooked without the contextual understanding of the state.

In this chapter, I argue that the main thrust for the revision of the 1972 Constitution was to legalise and legitimise the cultural revolution which Kim Jong Il had prepared since the mid-1960s that would first, distinguish itself from South Korea; second, build the cult of personality around his father to secure his political position; and third, justify the transformation of all cultural prod­ucts in North Korea.^[322] Once the constitutional revision had been implemented, Kim Jong Il used it as the authoritative legislation to unify and control modes of cultural production, which is the DPRK the world is familiar with today. Kim's cultural revolution entailed a complete transformation of the education system, the Writer's Union, radio and television production, arts and journalism, and music. Kim's cultural revolution shaped the political, economic, ideological, and cultural identity of the DPRK as we know it today.

The 1972 constitutional revision certainly did not emerge from a vacuum. There were both external (international) and internal (domestic) factors that contributed to the decision-making process of the constitutional revision. In terms of international affairs, major events such as the Sino-Soviet Conflict, Park Chung Hee's implementation of the Yusin Constitution in South Korea and his normalisation with Japan, China's Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the ever-increasing Cold War tension between the Soviet Union and the US, and the aggressive US policies in Asia pressured the DPRK to construct a national ideol­ogy and state policy that would defend itself from the outside world.

Domestically, there was a tremendous amount of political strife among Party members vying for power. When the DPRK was established in 1948, there were largely six factions that occupied seats in the Korean Workers' Party Central Committee: Kapsan faction, Soviet Koreans, Yan'an Chinese Communist faction, the domestic communists, South Korean Workers' Party, and the Manchurian partisan, which was led by Kim Il Sung. Each faction despised the others and sought to take control over the entire Party. However, the Soviet Union chose Kim Il Sung's faction (the Manchurian partisan) to govern the country. After the Korean War in 1953, Kim Il Sung began a series of purging and ousting of oppositional members. His justification for purging these members was that they had lacked the revolutionary and socialist vision of Juche and were too depend­ent on foreign assistance. In short, Kim Il Sung applied the Juche ideology in the international community to distance the DPRK from the rest of the world, and he applied it to domestic policies to purge any members who opposed his politi­cal power. After members had been purged by the mid-1960s, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il moved to transform the entire society into loyalists by controlling the means of cultural production. What China had envisioned with the Cultural Revolution, Kim Jong Il was able to accomplish with his own cultural revolu­tion in the 1970s and maintains absolute control over cultural production to this day even after his death. The significance of understanding Kim's cultural revolu­tion is to decode the discursive strategy through which North Korea controls its citizens.

This chapter will first examine the 1948 Constitution and then the signifi­cant revisions that were made into effect in the 1972 Constitution. Second, it will contextualise the state's revamping of the education system and modes of cultural production in order to understand the lives of North Koreans today. The 1948 Constitution was North Korea's attempt at discovering its identity amid remnants of Japanese colonial legislation and Soviet influence. By 1972, North Korea had solidified its political position on the international stage and decided on its national identity as that which would be guided by Juche ideology. What is important here is North Korea's arduous task of transforming the entire mode of cultural produc­tion so that Kim Il Sung's political power was secured.

I.