A guidance officer of the Korean Children’s Union at a school in Sariwon has been dismissed over issues related to last month’s event in Pyongyang to commemorate the founding of the country’s largest children’s organization. The official got into trouble after arbitrarily changing the insignia patch of one of the students selected to participate in the event.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Daily NK source in North Hwanghae Province said last Tuesday that the incident occurred after a school parent sent an anonymous letter about the guidance officer to Sariwon’s party committee.
Earlier, the guidance officer of the Korean Children’s Union arbitrarily changed a student’s shoulder insignia while sending off the school’s participants to the Pyongyang festival. The parent of the student took a picture with his cell phone and complained to the city party committee, asking whether the guidance officer “can just change the badges of union members at will.”
The Korean Children’s Union, which North Korean children between the ages of seven and 13 are required to join, has a rank structure similar to the military.
The head of the school’s Korean Children’s Union committee – a school representative similar to the student body president in a South Korean school – wears a badge with three stripes and three stars. The vice chairperson’s badge has three stripes and two stars. Committee members wear badges with three stripes and one star.
Meanwhile, the heads of class committees wear badges with two stripes and three stars, while the heads of subcommittees for organization (administrative, class presidents) and ideology wear badges with two stripes and two stars. The members of the class committees for sports, academics, posters, and hygiene wear badges with two stripes and one star.
The parent who sent the anonymous letter complained that the guidance officer arbitrarily replaced the two-stripe, two-star badge of a student who was attending the memorial event as class president with the three-stripe, two-star badge of a deputy school committee leader, telling the student that he was “attending the event not as a class representative but as a school representative.”
“Such things are common, but the main reason the guidance officer was fired this time is the intense competition and jealousy among parents at the school,” the source said.
Intense competition among parents to further childrens’ future
According to the source, whenever a rally of the Korean Children’s Union is held in Pyongyang, parents with money and power try hard to ensure that their children attend, as participation in such events helps their children’s personal development.
Students should have certain qualifications to be selected as participants, such as exemplary performance in their organizational activities, good works and being model students and citizens. However, such conditions are only a pretext – in fact, money and power play a major role in the selection process, the source said.
Typically, seven or eight students are selected per city, but counselors select as many candidates as possible while building relationships with wealthy, influential parents and making some money on the side.
From the parents’ perspective, even though they use their power and money to get their kids selected, exclusions are inevitable because the number of participants is fixed.
“The parent who sent the anonymous letter to the city party committee hated the guidance officer because they had given him a bribe, but their child was ultimately excluded from the selection,” the source said. “People laughed at the letter at first, wondering why the sender wrote it when it is quite common to put fake badges on students, but they were surprised when the guidance officer was suddenly fired late last month.”
He added: The matter was concluded that way after it was treated as a sensitive political matter for ‘deceiving the general secretary’ [North Korean leader Kim Jong Un], perhaps because the parent who wrote the anonymous letter had a lot of political influence.”
Daily NK works with a network of sources living in North Korea, China, and elsewhere. Their identities remain anonymous for security reasons.
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