That day, Chairman Kim Jong Il was elected as the general secretary of the WPK.

This happy news was widely reported by media in more than 100 countries, and at least 1 300 heads of state and government and prominent figures and organizations sent congratulatory messages and letters, floral baskets and bouquets to him.

And such celebration functions as evening gala, meeting, seminar, photo exhibition, lecture meeting and film show took place all over the world day after day.

It was an expression of all people's deep trust in Chairman Kim Jong Il who had performed great feats for the human cause of independence.

In his early years, the Chairman clarified the philosophical principles that a revolutionary party is a leading political organization which upholds its leader's idea and ensures its leader's guidance.

When modern revisionism was exerting a harmful influence on the working-class party activities, he conducted his energetic ideo-theoretical activities to provide a firm guarantee for developing the WPK into the party of President Kim Il Sung both in name and reality.

In the 1980s and 1990s, he authored such works as "On Some Immediate Tasks of Party Ideological Work for Modeling the Whole Society on Kimilsungism", "On Correctly Understanding the Originality of Kimilsungism", "Socialism Is a Science", "The Historical Lesson in Building Socialism and the General Line of Our Party" and "On the Fundamentals of Revolutionary Party Building" to provide the guiding principles for party building and activities.

And he saw to it that the revolutionary parties around the world set the Pyongyang Declaration as a joint action programme and struggled in unity.

Indeed, Chairman Kim Jong Il is a peerlessly elder statesman as he steered the global politics in the annals of the revolution.