15 Facts About Hwang Jang-yop

Hwang Jang-yop was a North Korean politician who defected to South Korea.

Hwang Jang-yop served as the Chairman of the Supreme People's Assembly from 1972 to 1983 and was largely responsible for crafting Juche, the state ideology of North Korea.

Hwang Jang-yop defected in 1997, the highest-ranking North Korean to have defected.

Hwang Jang-yop 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 old school.

Hwang Jang-yop joined the Workers' Party of Korea in 1946, soon after its founding; from 1949 to 1953, he was sent to study at Moscow University in the Soviet Union.

Sometime in the late 1950s, Hwang Jang-yop discovered a 1955 speech, On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work, in which Kim Il Sung said, "Juche means Chosun's revolution".

Hwang Jang-yop 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.

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

Chinese authorities eventually permitted Hwang Jang-yop to depart for South Korea via the Philippines several weeks later.

However, under the Sunshine Policy of president Kim Dae-jung, who took office in 1998, Hwang Jang-yop found himself increasingly marginalised; in November 2000, he was removed from the chairmanship of the Unification Policy Research Institute, leading him to complain that the South Korean government wanted him to stay quiet so as not to upset the North.

Hwang Jang-yop contributed to the Daily NK, an online newspaper funded by US state funded NGOs with staff in South Korea and China.

Hwang Jang-yop described his feelings surrounding the defection in the paper.

Hwang Jang-yop was found dead in his home in Seoul, South Korea, on the morning of 10 October 2010.

Hwang Jang-yop died while bathing, and as such a large amount of water entered his lungs; however, an autopsy found no poison or drugs in his body, and footage from surveillance cameras showed no signs of forcible entry.

Hwang Jang-yop published 20 books after his defection to South Korea:.