Did Kim Il-sung imagine his ‘martyred’ Chinese best friend Zhang Weihua?
- In Kim’s memoirs, Zhang Weihua is hailed as a saviour who gifted guns to anti-Japanese guerillas and took his own life to save the North Korean leader
- But as is so often the case with the hermit kingdom, the truth of the matter is difficult to discern amid all the embellishments and political propaganda
The pair, according to two chapters devoted to the subject in Kim’s memoirs With the Century, remained friends right up until the 25-year-old Zhang took his own life – 83 years ago on Tuesday – in a bid to protect the future “eternal president” of North Korea from capture by the Japanese, leaving behind a wife and two young children.
Yet the details of his story are hard to verify, Korean experts say, as the authorship of Kim’s memoirs is disputed and many parts were likely embellished or skewed for the sake of political expediency.
North Korea’s future leader was born Kim Song-ju on April 15, 1912 in Pyongyang, the eldest of three sons who followed his family to Manchuria – now northeastern China – where he attended primary school, according to Suh Dae-sook, a professor emeritus of political science and the former director of the Centre for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaii, in his book Kim Il-sung The North Korean Leader.
Kim wrote in his memoirs that he first met Zhang, the son of a rich landowner, at Fusong Senior Primary School No 1 after his father escaped the Korean peninsula once it fell under Japanese control. He remarked on how strange it was that “friendship sprouted and blossomed” between someone such as himself – “an unlucky boy from a ruined country” – and “the son of a millionaire”.
