Professor Zhao Huji, a North Korea specialist at the Central Party School in Beijing, said Thursday that North Korean generals and high-ranking officials are deserting the crisis-plagued state as a mirror of growing instability and its leader's waning authority. "These high-ranking defectors aren't leaving because of material want, but because these feel chaos within the Kim Jong-il regime... High-ranking administrators like military officials have visited China several times and are well connected there, and because they have money, they have many chances to defect to China," said Zhao.North Korea experts calculate that 130 North Korean generals have defected to China, some of whom may have entered the Chinese military, as reported in a recent edition of the International Herald Tribune. However opinion is divided, with other specialists arguing that the removal of Kim Jong-il's portraits from public buildings in Pyongyang and the continuing exodus of defectors does not signify a loosening grip on power by the North Korean leader. Peking University professor Cui Yingjiu, who studied with Kim Jong-il at Kim Il-sung University and had until recently kept in contact with the North Korean leader, said, "Kim Jong-il has a stronger grip on power than Mao Zedong in China during the 1960s ... In North Korea, there are no people like Liu Shaoqi or Deng Xiaoping [who challenged Mao] to compromise Kim Jong-il's authority." Cui added that China has less influence over North Korea than is widely believed.