North Korea enacted the Youth Education Guarantee Act during the Fifth Meeting of the 14th Supreme People’s Assembly in September 2021. The law aimed to strengthen education and eliminate “non-socialist and anti-socialist” behaviors among young people, creating a foundation for the nation’s socialist future. However, four years later, young North Koreans are heading in a completely different direction than authorities intended.
Daily NK marked the fourth anniversary of the Youth Education Guarantee Act by tracking changes in young North Koreans’ thoughts and behaviors through five special feature stories. This article brings together those trends to examine the current reality facing North Korean youth.
Personal expression trumps state control
The first special feature highlighted how young North Koreans express themselves through clothing and hairstyles. North Korea has long viewed personal appearance as reflecting one’s ideological and spiritual state, cracking down on any deviations. Article 41 of the Youth Education Guarantee Act specifically lists prohibited behaviors for young people, creating a legal tool for control. Yet despite intensifying crackdowns, young people continue actively pursuing “new transformations” that fall outside the regime’s aesthetic standards.
Young people express themselves through above-the-knee dresses and hair straightening treatments. This demonstrates that North Korean authorities cannot suppress young people’s desire for self-expression, no matter how hard they try to force conformity.
The second feature explored the popularity of South Korean expressions among northern youth. Article 41 bans “speaking or writing in strange ways of expression that are not our own.” While intensified crackdowns force young people to avoid South Korean speech in public, they continue using words like jagiya (honey/dear), oppa (affectionate term for older men), and daebak (awesome) freely in private gatherings. This shows how deeply South Korean pop culture has already taken root among young North Koreans.
Young North Koreans also rely heavily on superstition, frequently visiting fortune tellers. The third feature spotlighted this growing dependence on superstition. In North Korea’s monolithic leadership system, such practices are forbidden and banned under Article 41. However, young people facing obstacles like money and power turn to fortune-telling to guide life decisions or ease frustrations. This phenomenon indirectly reveals young people’s deep distrust of the regime.
Redefining relationships and culture
The fourth feature examined how young people choose unofficial marriages, opting for common-law relationships instead of traditional wedlock. North Korean authorities view unmarried cohabitation as incompatible with socialist lifestyle and crack down accordingly. However, as economic hardships worsen and social attitudes shift, young North Koreans are abandoning traditional marriage views and embracing new lifestyles based on personal conviction and comfort, including common-law marriages and cohabitation. This trend shows how the concept of “family”—long emphasized by authorities as socialism’s foundation—is weakening among youth.
The fifth feature discussed young people’s consumption of South Korean culture despite crackdowns. Article 41 bans “importing, producing, reproducing, storing, disseminating and consuming impure publications and propaganda.” Nevertheless, young people continue enjoying South Korean pop culture away from enforcement eyes, secretly watching South Korean videos and devising ways to avoid detection despite intensifying efforts to stop them. Young North Koreans are thus fulfilling their own desires and hopes beyond the laws and systems authorities established to protect the regime.
Seungju Lee, a political scientist and profiler with the Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG), told Daily NK she believed the Youth Education Guarantee Act was enacted “to provide a legal foundation because authorities felt they couldn’t control things using existing crackdowns alone.” However, young people “are creating independent social trends by finding new pathways amid intensifying crackdowns,” she said.
“North Korea’s restrictions and young people’s resistance reveal the regime’s internal instability,” Lee explained. “Because young people cannot easily abandon their established life habits and cultural preferences despite continued crackdowns, the authorities’ controls will need much more time to produce substantial changes.”
Ultimately, the reality of young North Koreans represents more than simple deviation—it’s an internal crack in the regime. Even if authorities continue trying to bring young people in line through law, they will struggle to end attempts to escape the regime’s legal and systemic confines as long as young people’s desires and hopes remain unfulfilled. This creates heavy burdens for North Korean authorities seeking to restrain youth through intensive ideology and regulations.
