But this sort of thing happens all the time. The opinion that Kim is a dictator who really ought not to be allowed to have his own country is already widespread, but here is why he and other practitioners of assassination hang on:
In any state, ideas flow upward while authority flows downward. Let's consider a dictatorship for simplicity: it's not realistic to expect the dictator to think of everything other than for propaganda purposes. The dictator is presented with an endless supply of conflicting demands and requests, with different cost/benefit ratios. For any given idea, including his own, he needs to know roughly what the consequences are for implementing it.
For that to happen, junior intelligence and policy officials have to buy into and invest their political capital in an idea, and so on down the organizational pyramid of government. And the lower you get to the bottom of the pyramid, the more accessible you are to malefactors. So if you're a minor cog in the Chinese foreign ministry whose brief is to monitor North Korean affairs, North Korea might well take an interest in you and your extended family. And if you were to develop a reputation within the ministry for disliking Kim, it might become risky for your relatives to take foreign holidays, so you are incentivized to be cautious rather than prompting your boss to prompt their boss to Do Something about the Kim regime.
The messiness and made-for-TV aspect of it are the means of leveraging sustained attention. A simple shooting not have garnered anywhere near the same level of attention. It's high-precision terrorism as opposed to the mass casualty variety.
In any state, ideas flow upward while authority flows downward. Let's consider a dictatorship for simplicity: it's not realistic to expect the dictator to think of everything other than for propaganda purposes. The dictator is presented with an endless supply of conflicting demands and requests, with different cost/benefit ratios. For any given idea, including his own, he needs to know roughly what the consequences are for implementing it.
For that to happen, junior intelligence and policy officials have to buy into and invest their political capital in an idea, and so on down the organizational pyramid of government. And the lower you get to the bottom of the pyramid, the more accessible you are to malefactors. So if you're a minor cog in the Chinese foreign ministry whose brief is to monitor North Korean affairs, North Korea might well take an interest in you and your extended family. And if you were to develop a reputation within the ministry for disliking Kim, it might become risky for your relatives to take foreign holidays, so you are incentivized to be cautious rather than prompting your boss to prompt their boss to Do Something about the Kim regime.
The messiness and made-for-TV aspect of it are the means of leveraging sustained attention. A simple shooting not have garnered anywhere near the same level of attention. It's high-precision terrorism as opposed to the mass casualty variety.