WHILE ragged children foraged for wild grasses and berries on the outskirts of North Korea’s cities last week, its soldiers gloried in their nuclear weapons and readiness for battle.

“Our party and our army have total confidence now that we have nuclear weapons and long-range missiles,” declared a lieutenant-colonel at the demilitarised zone that divides the country from South Korea.

“I hope for war because only war can break the present stalemate and only war can reunite Korea,” he added, accepting a Chinese cigarette.

North Korea has boasted of a triumphant confrontation with the United States and its allies, defying sanctions and advancing nuclear tests. However, its 20m people have paid a severe price for life in an isolated and highly militarised state.

As a new heir emerges to the world’s only hereditary communist dictatorship - Kim Jong-un, youngest son of the “Great Leader”, Kim Jong-il - an extensive journey inside North Korea has shown how the regime keeps control over its ruined realm.

A policy of “songun”, or military first, has created an impoverished society dominated by a martial class that rules at the point of a gun.

Firearms are everywhere - swinging from the shoulders of female border guards, slung over backpacks by soldiers clambering onto the overcrowded trains, hoisted by sentries at railway stations and by militiamen eyeing the public squares.

The gun is the ultimate guarantee that neither foreign pressure nor persuasion will change the way Kim Jong-un, 26, governs the nation if and when he claws his way to the top of its collective leadership. Although North Korea still depends on a personality cult, it is now more image than substance - a quasi-religious veneer over a society controlled by a privileged clique of secret policemen, generals and bureaucrats.

This elite inhabits a rarefied world of sealed residential compounds, Mercedes-Benz cars chauffeured by men in dark glasses (three-digit numberplates for the spooks, five digits for others), cognac and karaoke. For the rest there is endurance. Children in rural areas can be seen after school scavenging along roadsides as the sun sinks and a few pin-pricks of light begin to twinkle in the villages.

Rice crops are a stunted version of the billowing fields across the border in China, because foreign supplies of fertiliser have been cut. Every spare inch of land seems to be planted with vegetables.

In the cities beyond the capital, where a regimented perfection prevails, North Korean children in torn, patched clothes hover expectantly whenever foreign faces come into sight.

Charity is a crime, however, in Kim Jong-il’s proud state. When a girl about three years old plucked up courage to accept a handful of sweets and a small banknote, she stared in blank incomprehension at the sweet wrappers. Then a man in uniform snatched away the gifts, snarled at the child and arrested the donor, a visitor.

It took an hour to negotiate his freedom. The uniformed man kept the sweets and the money. “You offended the dignity of the Korean people,” an official said. Dignity is paramount in the regime’s psychological grip on its people.

“Our Great Leader has instructed us that girls are forbidden to marry foreigners,” said a young North Korean woman. “Korea is a pure racial nation. We must keep it pure.”

For a beautiful girl, she said, there were three desirable qualities in a man: “First, he must be a member of the Korean Workers’ party. Second, he must be a soldier or have been in the army. Third, he must have an official or technical job in the city.”

All three apply to the most eligible bachelor in the Hermit Kingdom. Jong-un, the youngest of three sons, remains mysterious to all but a handful of North Koreans but already the regime is constructing an identity for him. He is described as “our Morning Star General” in the lyrics of a song taught to schoolchildren, even though his military experience can be only slight.

The latest rumours, echoed by news reports from China and Japan, follow two consistent themes. One, told by an ambassador to Pyongyang, is that the hard-living elder Kim, now a stroke-shrivelled 67-year-old, is slipping into terminal decline.

The other is that Jong-un has come forward with unusual speed, acting as envoy for his father on a secret mission to China earlier this month. He flew to meet President Hu Jin-tao, accompanied by Jong-nam, his eldest and supposedly disgraced brother.

This show of dynastic unity was meant to impress on the Chinese that the North Korean leadership unanimously supports the young man.

The Chinese laid on a quick tour of their most prosperous provinces for Jong-un and a delegation of about 10 others from last Sunday until Wednesday. They stayed in military-run hotels away from prying eyes and moved around in unmarked cars, avoiding high-profile motorcades.

It was intended to persuade the heir of the merits of economic reform. However, the Chinese know very well from their own sources that gangster Stalinism suits the Kims and their cronies.

“These people are richer than the Chinese new rich,” said a businessman from northeast China who was on a commercial trip to Pyongyang.

“If they open the door to economic reform their power will be destroyed. I know them well. Their rule is completely stable because the military supports them.”

Inside North Korea, the calculated appeasement by Chinese policy-makers can be seen at first hand. Beijing did nothing recently after a North Korean border guard shot dead a teenage Chinese boy from the town of Anji who swam too far across the river that divides the two allies, local residents said.

Last week a train was seen carrying dozens of brand-new Chinese military lorries from the Jiefang (Liberation) truck factory to Pyongyang – days after Chinese diplomats at the United Nations had pledged support for new sanctions imposed after North Korea’s second nuclear test.

Along the same dilapidated coastal railway, two North Korean military trains groaned under loads of tanks, antiaircraft guns and wooden wagons full of troops, moving south at a painful 20mph.

The Chinese have tempered their public diplomacy with quiet warnings to North Korea that may have averted a military provocation last week while the South Korean president was in Washington.

As the dictator’s mortality has loomed larger, so his subjects have been relentlessly instructed that their own doom is at hand if they show any weakness in the face of the United States, South Korea and Japan.

The lieutenant-colonel’s warlike bluster at the demilitarised zone was not idle rhetoric but a learnt response to political indoctrination over the past few months.

While the military risks remain high, the Kim dynasty may opt for sheer political tenacity. The North Korean elite are well aware that there is a blueprint for their own survival as lords of misrule over a land of hardship. It is no coincidence that visitors to a huge exhibition of foreign gifts donated to the Kims are directed to one display of photographs.

They show the North Korean dictator shaking hands warmly with President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

Additional reporting: Shota Ushio, Tokyo

Hail to the new chief

North Koreans are being indoctrinated to hail the third son of Kim Jong-il as the dictator’s heir, The Sunday Times has confirmed.

“Yes, we are teaching our students a new song about Kim Jong-un,” said a middle-school teacher in Pyongyang. “We have never seen his photograph but we know he must be a great man who will make our country stronger and richer,” she told foreign visitors.

A North Korean official said the succession had “not been announced to the public” but was known among the elite.

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