HONG KONG — For North Korea experts, virtually every detail in the authoritarian state is a potential window into the political priorities of its elusive leader, Kim Jong-un.
A mass gymnastics performance that ended in North Korea on Sunday, after a nearly two-month run, was no exception: Unlike in previous years, this year’s edition was said to highlight recent changes in Mr. Kim’s posture toward China, South Korea and the United States.
This year’s Mass Games gymnastics bonanza, which began in early September in the capital, Pyongyang, was the first edition of the event since 2013. Along with a military parade in September, it marked the 70th anniversary of the founding of North Korea.
The performance, “Glorious Country,” featured about 17,000 schoolchildren who formed a “human-pixel” backdrop with colored cards in the stands, plus thousands of performers on the arena’s floor, according to Andray Abrahamian, a fellow at Stanford University and the author of a book on North Korea who attended the show in September.
A banner at the show also read, “From now, a new history begins.” Mr. Abrahamian said that was an apparent reference to an April declaration by Mr. Kim and President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, in which the two leaders agreed to work to remove all nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula and, within the year, pursue talks with the United States to declare an official end to the Korean War.
The choreography of this year’s Mass Games presented the Kim regime’s vision of its own history, in keeping with the style of previous years. Yet it also told “a significantly more positive, forward-looking and less militaristic tale” than the 2013 edition, Mr. Abrahamian wrote in a commentary on the website 38 North.
And unlike previous shows, he added, it did not include a single image of a missile.
Nancy Snow, a North Korea expert at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies and a former State Department official in the Clinton administration, said the lack of militaristic symbols at this year’s event might reflect Mr. Kim’s growing awareness that reprising the missile tests of 2017 would probably not help his regime’s international image.
“I don’t think he’s going to give up his weapons anytime soon, but slowly, surely, they’re going to introduce themselves more to the world,” she said. “And this is one way they do that.”
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