"If Kim Jong-il decided on his own that his personality cult was a bit too much, such a decision could have involved a calculation that his subjects’ insulation from outside information was developing too many holes," writes Bradley K. Martin, author of Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty.

There are suggestions that the personality cult is being downsized. Assuming that’s happening, was Kim Jong-il pressured to permit it or did he decide on his own? We don’t know, but I’ve seen little evidence so far to suggest there’s been any sort of coup d’etat. And Kim’s record is one of being a proactive guy once he makes up his mind that change is inevitable. For several years he had been thinking ahead and preparing for economic reforms. He carried out, or at least permitted and then stuck with, some reform measures despite the sudden worsening of his international situation during the first Bush term.

If Kim decided on his own that his personality cult was a bit too much, such a decision could have involved a calculation that his subjects’ insulation from outside information was developing too many holes. The deals that Pyongyang needed to make with South Korea, Japan, the United States would all require more and more exchange between North Koreans and the outside world. Sooner or later, large numbers of North Koreans would hear that he was an object of derision to outsiders, would hear that the official version of his birth in a log cabin on Mount Paektu was false, etc.

Perhaps he had selected a successor and did not want to have to force the person chosen to build his or her own personality cult on increasingly easily disprovable lies...

For a long time he had followed his late father’s pattern of blaming subordinates for whatever went wrong. For example, Kim Jong-il claimed that economic reverses were not in his department; he had his hands full with the military and couldn’t be everywhere at once. The officials in charge of the economy weren’t doing their jobs, he complained to them. As time passed he may have found it hard to keep blaming faceless technocrats. After all, because of the personality cult and the regime’s related determination not to build up the reputations of other individuals, he himself was the one ruler known to every North Korean. In fact, I found in my interviews with defectors that many North Koreans had long since begun reflecting privately that things had been much better under his father. It was when Kim Jong-il took over major say-so in the regime that things started going horribly wrong, people were saying. He probably knew as well as we foreign analysts knew that the real problem was his father’s policies; the chickens had come home to roost. But Kim Jong-il was the Dear Leader, so he was getting the blame, unfairly or otherwise.

Kim Jong-il was also getting personal blame from critics abroad for North Korea’s sorry human rights situation—even though he had taken some little-known steps to moderate the police state system he had inherited from his father. In Washington, policymakers tended to accept a long-distance—and, I believe, incorrect—diagnosis of Kim as a madman. He was surely in danger of coming into the crosshairs of U.S. hawks, who were demonizing him the way they had demonized Saddam Hussein. He was routinely accused in the United States of having “systematically” starved his people, for example. If he has now attempted to convey the impression of a more collective leadership, that could be intended to take some of the pressure off him.

His admiring references to the Thai and Swedish systems in recent years suggested that Kim Jong-il was looking to transform the country into something like a limited monarchy rather than the absolute dictatorship it had become under his father’s and his own rule. That way the Kim family legacy could continue without being so vulnerable to policy-based criticisms.

China had been complaining since the death of Mao and the fall of the Gang of Four about North Korea’s continuing adherence to an extravagant personality cult. Deng Xiaoping himself is said to have criticized a gold-plated statue of Kim Il-sung. Softening the personality cult now could be seen as perhaps partially intended to play to Chinese concerns.