Anna Fifield on What Drives Kim Jong-un

Anna Fifield was Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post from 2018 to 2020, before which she covered the Korean Peninsula and Japan as the Post’s Tokyo bureau chief from 2014 to 2018. Anna is the author of The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un, and an authority on North Korean society and politics, having visited the country a dozen times to report on the Kim regime. She has also traveled across Asia to interview North Korean defectors, giving her rare insight into the lives of ordinary people in North Korea. Anna now lives in her home country of New Zealand, where she is the editor of the Dominion Post. Anna painted a rare portrait covering the totality of North Korean politics and society, including her analysis of Kim Jong-un’s leadership, North Korea’s nuclear program and the prospects for denuclearization, China’s relationship with the Kim regime, the state of human rights in North Korea and the lives of the North Korean people, and more.