Ryanggang province’s party committee is conducting a comprehensive survey of this year’s volunteers at socialist construction sites to assess their adjustment to local conditions. Since mid-September, the committee has been collecting data on the situation of volunteers at various work sites, as their challenges have become a priority ahead of the party’s founding anniversary on Oct. 10.
According to a source in the province recently, the provincial party committee has been reviewing and compiling evaluation materials on volunteers from each workplace to find out the problems faced by volunteers in so-called “rough places” in adjusting and settling down in their new surroundings, and to get an accurate picture of the current situation.
The committee is particularly concerned about the recent trend of women who volunteered to leave Hyesan for rural communities in other counties later abandoning rural life and returning to Hyesan to marry young men in the city.
“The reason why unmarried women from the city go to rural communities such as Pungso, Taehongdan, and Pochon counties is so that they can meet and marry men in farm towns or mines, settle down permanently in those places and have children to keep the socialist rural communities and mines going, so the provincial party committee is quite concerned that many women are fleeing back to the city,” the source said.
“The provincial party committee has ordered the party’s organization department to make an accurate assessment of the situation, and the party’s propaganda department to conduct ideological indoctrination activities to somehow resolve this situation,” he added.
The committee is investigating female volunteers more closely than male volunteers. It has also ordered a month of ideological indoctrination activities in October to encourage women to have families in their new communities and settle there permanently.
The committee has also sought ways to encourage women who have returned to the city to return to their volunteer posts promptly, and women who have married men in the city to move to rural areas together.
In addition, committee is recruiting new volunteers and planning a provincial event at the end of October for new volunteers to pledge their resolve and go to their new homes.
“Factories and enterprises have received several orders to recruit volunteers to speed up the provincial party’s activities to gather volunteers to move to the battlefields of socialist construction,” the source said. “But with no young people volunteering, factories and enterprises in Ryanggang province are trying to persuade or coerce people, and young people are worried that they’ll be selected for construction work.”
The Daily NK works with a network of sources in North Korea, China, and elsewhere. For security reasons, their identities remain anonymous.
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