'Like Gods...': How North Korean Defectors See Kim Jong Un's Daughter As His Heir

Until she fled North Korea three years ago, Kim Yumi felt deeply frustrated whenever state TV showed leader Kim Jong Un with his young daughter. The message, she felt, was clear and worrying: North Korea was laying the groundwork for an eventual hereditary transfer of power, this time to Kim's daughter.Publicly questioning the Kim dynasty's hold on power would mean severe persecution.

Already angered by draconian pandemic regulations that ruined her family's fishing business, she defected to South Korea by boat with her family."My husband and I didn't want our children to live under a fourth-generation dictatorship. As parents, we thought the best thing we could do for our children was to give them freedom," said Kim Yumi, 32, who now lives in Seoul.North Korea allows no dissent and harshly punishes attempts to flee the country.

Established in 1948, the nation is nominally a socialist republic, but in reality it is an authoritarian dynasty, with three generations of the Kim family ruling in succession.