ABOVE: Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang in March this year

Gender battles

Her prominence in such a patriarchal society has irked Kim Jong-un, and this resentment surfaced during the recent stand-off, when he claimed her “venomous swish of skirt” was to blame. “This is a Korean expression to describe women who don’t know their place,” explains Mr Bong.

But Ms Park is very clear where her place is, and has spent more time on Barack Obama’s call sheet than any other leader in the free world over the past few months. The two nations have been close allies since the end of the Korean War in 1953, and have been in close step in their response to North Korea’s recent provocations. They pursued a UN Security Council resolution that increased sanctions on Pyongyang and stepped up their annual joint military drills that act as a show of force to North Korea.

But this prompted Kim Jong-un to threaten to turn both countries into a “sea of fire”. When US B-2 stealth bombers appeared in South Korean airspace, he was pictured in a scene right out of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy Dr Strangelove. Surrounded by generals, he was seen signing papers in front of a map titled ‘US mainland strike plan’ that showed missiles aimed at Washington, Los Angeles, Hawaii and Texas.

This sabre-rattling is a strategy he has inherited from his father Kim Jong-il, who ruled North Korea as dictator until his death in 2011, and continually manufactured aggression against what he called “imperialist” forces to unify a country suffering desperately from cyclical famine and poverty.

There are no official statistics, such is the country cloaked in secrecy, but North Korea is thought to be one of the world’s poorest nations, and the people are only kept from uprising by propaganda.

“The famines began in 1995,” says Hyeonseo Lee, a North Korean defector now living in the US. “It began as rumour and we were told it was normal. Eventually we would witness people who had starved to death on the street. That’s when I realised that I had to get out.”

Every year, around 2,400 people flee the state, and Kim Jong-un knows he will only remain in power while he retains the backing of the people. “His nuclear power play backfired because it led to Washington and Seoul’s push for sanctions aimed at the North’s banking, travel and trade sectors,” says Bong Youngshik. “He can’t back down or people will think him weak, but the sanctions just make life harder for his people.

Jong-un’s posturing is proof that the 29 year old has chosen to follow the “military first” policy of his father, but that is only possible because he has the backing of Beijing.

North Korea’s alliance with China stems from the end of World War II, when the region was divided between the US and USSR, who each set up their own sympathetic government, with the aim of claiming the whole country as their own. This led to the 1950-53 Korean War, with China backing the North and the US the South. The war ended not in a peace treaty but in an armistice and a simmering mistrust that boiled to the surface once more in 2010.

Meet North Korea's nemesis