Hwang Jang-yop

Hwang Jang-yop
황장엽
Hwang in September 2009
Chairmen of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People's Assembly
In office 1972–1983
Preceded by	Choe Yong-gon
Succeeded by	Yang Hyong-sop
Leader	Kim Il-sung
Personal details
Born	Hwang Jang-yop 17 February 1923 Kangdong County, South Pyongan Province, Japanese Korea
Died	10 October 2010 (2010-10-11) (aged 87) Seoul, South Korea
Nationality	Korean
Political party	Workers' Party of Korea (1946–1997)

Hwang Jang-yop (Korean: 황장엽; 17 February 1923 – 10 October 2010) was a North Korean politician who defected to South Korea in 1997, best known for being, to date, the highest-ranking North Korean defector. He was largely responsible for crafting Juche, North Korea's official state ideology.

Hwang was born in Kangdong, South Pyongan Province. He graduated from the Pyongyang Commercial School in 1941, and then went to Tokyo in 1942 to attend Chuo University's law school; however, he quit two years later and returned to Pyongyang, where he taught mathematics at his alma mater. He joined the Workers Party of North Korea in 1946, soon after its founding; from 1949 to 1953, he was sent to study at Moscow University in the Soviet Union, where he met his wife Pak Sung-ok. Upon his return to North Korea, he became head lecturer in philosophy at Kim Il-sung University. He would later ascend to the presidency of that university in April 1965.

In 1972, Hwang became Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People's Assembly, a position which he would hold for 11 years.

Sometime in the late 1950s, Hwang discovered a 1955 speech in which Kim Il-Sung said, "Juche means Chosun's revolution" (Chosun being the traditional name for Korea). At the time, Kim wanted to develop his own version of Marxism-Leninism, and Hwang was largely responsible for developing what became known as "the Juche Idea." As part of this, he helped scrub all of the paeans to Joseph Stalin that had been typical of Kim's speeches in the 1940s and early 1950s. He also supervised the rewriting of Korean Communist history to make it look like Kim had been the founder and leader of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea from its inception.