248 Korea, Republic of armistice was signed in 1953, establishing a demilitarized zone roughly at the 38th parallel The wartime situation gave Kim Il Sung the opportunity to consolidate his position and establish himself as the absolute power in North Korea In a series of show trials and purges, potential rivals were eliminated In 1956 members of rival factions were purged from the KWP In fact, some were made to shoulder the blame for the failure of the unification effort Two years later the KWP announced that it had ended intra-party dissent Kim Il Sung was now the undisputed leader, controlling virtually all aspects of North Korean society A personality cult soon emerged around the person of Kim Il Sung, who was elevated to the status of “Great Leader,” and his past as a guerrilla fighter against the Japanese, his defiance of the United States, and his exploits in building the nation were mythologized in song and poetry Institutions such as universities and museums bear his name, and important places in his life are national shrines A similar personality cult developed around his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, with mythical events written into his biography Revered as “Dear Leader,” the younger Kim is said to be imbued with extraordinary intellectual and artistic abilities North Korea adopted as its guiding ideology juch’e, or self-reliance Occasionally dubbed Kim Il-Sungism, the concept, which emerged in the mid-1950s, is an amalgamation of Marxist-Leninist doctrines with Maoism, Confucianism, and Korean traditions Juch’e in operational terms involves the creation of a self-sustaining national economy and a strong military that can provide self-defense After the Korean War, Kim Il Sung focused on economic development With a centrally planned command economy, North Korea at first appeared to be making great strides It recovered quickly from the devastation of the Korean War In the spirit of juch’e, economic planners focused on industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture Equally important for North Korean economic survival was Soviet economic assistance, although limited, and the preferential treatment that North Korean goods received in the Soviet Union, PRC, and the East European satellites through the late 1970s–80s The changing geopolitical situation reduced such outside assistance to almost nothing and exposed the vulnerabilities in the North Korean economy The consequences of a decades-old inefficient economic system could no longer be kept hidden Energy and food shortages plagued North Korea, a country with little arable land and no oil reserves Cycles of natural disasters exacerbated the situation From the late 1990s onward North Korea had to rely on food aid from other countries, including South Korea, to stave off widespread famine The relationship between the two Koreas continued a seesaw trend in the Kim Jong Il era From the mid1990s onward there were intermittent talks between the two governments In 1998 when South Korean president Kim Dae Jung initiated his Sunshine Policy, which held out hope for reconciliation between the two Koreas, he found a receptive audience in the north partly because North Korea saw this as a means of securing the necessary economic assistance In 2002 the North Korean government also began to abandon some features of its tightly controlled command economy In addition, it adopted some market features, such as removing price and wage controls The government also began to court foreign investment and foreign trade, including from the Republic of Korea In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, North Korea once again garnered attention because of its nuclear weapons program, weapons sales to Iran, and its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Six-party talks involving North Korea, South Korea, Japan, the PRC, Russia, and the United States did not yield definitive results In 2005, North Korea tested a missile over the Sea of Japan This approach increased the level of tension and raised the specter of a military confrontation in the Northeast Asia region In October 2007, North Korea agreed to disable its nuclear facilities by late 2008 in exchange for economic aid Further reading: Cummings, Bruce Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History New York: Norton, 1997; French, Paul North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula—A Modern History London: Zed Books, 2005; Kim, Chun-Kil The History of Korea Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005; Oberdorfer, Don The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History New York: Basic Books, 1999; Stueck, William The Korean War: An International History Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997 Soo Chun Lu Korea, Republic of With an area of 98,480 square kilometers, the Republic of Korea (ROK), or South Korea, occupies slightly less than half of the Korean Peninsula It is bordered to the north by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea), to the south by the East