At the Third Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Party Central Committee in June 2021, Kim Jong Un announced that “creating a better environment for child rearing is of utmost policy importance and is the party’s greatest wish, regardless of the costs.” The 2021 meeting was the first time the country’s “child rearing issue” had been mentioned during a party plenary meeting.
Just two weeks after Kim’s remarks on the subject, province, county, and city-level organizations across the country began internally circulating materials titled, “The Central Committee Organization and Guidance Department’s Guidelines and Plans for Investigating the Ideology of Women Who Try to Avoid Marriage or Do Not Have Many Children After Marriage.”
Rather than take a policy-based approach to address the situation that is leading women to avoid marriage and childbirth, the government is handling the problem as an ideological issue. The party meeting tabled the question of how to encourage women to marry and have children and instead focused on labeling women who avoid marriage and childbirth as “targets for ideological reform.”
In particular, the Organization and Guidance Department drew a clear line connecting the recent spread of anti-marriage and anti-childbirth views among North Korean women and the corrupting influence of perverted capitalist lifestyles, effectively casting anti-marriage and anti-childbirth beliefs as anti-socialist thinking. The agency also sent out orders to correct this ideological issue among women by bolstering lectures and education.
Pyongyang and the city of Sinuiju promptly joined in on the campaign. The municipal party committees in the two cities assembled groups of “model” women who they brought around various local factories. During the speaking tours, audiences were told that “in this era, the greatest way for a woman to serve the party and nation is to marry and have lots of children.”
In particular, local party officials targeted factories, where the majority of unmarried women work, as they paraded around “childbearing heroes” (women who have given birth to an exceptional number of children). These tours included admonitions that “anti-marriage and anti-childbirth beliefs are closely tied to reactionary ideology.”
However, many of the unmarried women watching these “childbearing hero” lecture tours were left unconvinced, with some suggesting that the “child-bearing issue” will resolve itself if the conditions for raising children improve. Some women took issue with the Workers’ Party’s framing of the problem as an ideological issue, arguing that it was ridiculous to blame ideology instead of other factors when women “who don’t have washing machines, vacuums, or even hot water” are put solely in charge of childcare on top of having to earn money.
Many women expressed their dissatisfaction that officials chalked the issue up to flawed ideology rather than investigating and formulating policies to address the root causes behind the growing number of women avoiding marriage and having children.
At a private cosmetics factory in Sinuiju, presenters at a conference on “childbearing heroes” were met with a frosty reception after they told the assembled women that “from the moment a woman marries, she becomes the flower of the household. As the flowers of our nation, women must serve their nation by supporting and sending forth their husbands.”
Current efforts to raise birthrate ignore realities faced by many women
The reason that North Korea’s government blames its low marriage and birth rate issues on ideological shortcomings stems from its fear about the country’s shrinking population. In a country like North Korea that relies heavily on labor-intensive industries like agriculture, population decline presents a grave threat.
The fact that the June 2021 meeting was the first plenary meeting in the country’s history to address childrearing and Kim’s claims that improving child rearing conditions was of the “utmost policy importance” and “the party’s greatest wish” belie just how concerned the North Korean government is about its shrinking population.
Yet, North Korea continues to tell women that “the reality [of their lives] is marriage, childbirth, and child rearing.” While the North Korean government boasts about providing dairy products and other infant-specific food items to every government-run nursery and preschool, women are asserting that they need more practical policies and solutions.
In a society where the quality of life is low and women have to shoulder all of the responsibility for their household’s economic activity and childrearing, the trend away from marriage and children reflects the pragmatic, level-headed calculations being made by young North Korean women. The government’s focus on resolving the country’s low birth rate by raising issues with women’s ideology – while ignoring the fact that they have to work in squalid conditions earning money, taking care of children, and doing housework – will not lead to improvements in the situation.
Translated by Rose Adams. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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