In a conservative Confucian society that reveres age, selling the public and, more important, the elite on a leader in his 20s is not easy. State-controlled media seem to be making a virtue of necessity, emphasizing not only Kim Jong-un’s computer expertise but also his freshness and youth, circulating songs, poems and posters singing his praises. He has lately accompanied his father on factory tours, and was said to have joined him on a recent trip to China.

The campaign may convince some of the people, experts say, but it is likely to have little impact on the elite, who will be testing his willingness to exercise power. Some in the West, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, have ascribed the sinking of a South Korean warship by a North Korean torpedo attack in March to the succession struggle and Kim Jong-un’s efforts to establish credibility with the military brass.

Others, however, contend that the elite are quite comfortable with the idea of an inexperienced leader. “I think he is chosen exactly because he is young,” Andrei Lankov, a North Korean expert at Kookmin University in Seoul, said in an interview this month. “He will be a dictator, but merely a rubber-stamping dictator. This is what the people in the positions of power want.”

The party meeting was due to begin later Tuesday. Although the secretive government has said a new supreme leadership body will be elected, very little has been disclosed about the agenda. The current gathering was originally announced by KCNA as scheduled for “early September,” and the slight delay touched off speculation about cutthroat internal wrangling over the presumed dynastic succession, Kim Jong-il’s health, and flooded roads and washed-out bridges that made travel difficult.

John Delury, a professor of international relations at Yonsei University in Seoul, was in Pyongyang last week for meetings with North Korean officials and said speculation was clearly starting to build around the meeting.

“This is a party meeting, and these are very rare in North Korean history,” he said in an interview on Monday.