The birth rate in the country has fallen colossally
Kim Jong Un was filmed crying as he urged women in North Korea to have more children and raise them to love the authoritarian state.
The North Korean leader was seen wiping his eyes with a white handkerchief as he addressed thousands of women gathered at a national meeting of mothers in Pyongyang.
Many in the audience wept with him during the carefully choreographed event, the first of its kind to be held in 11 years amid growing concerns about falling birthrates in the shuttered country.
“Stopping the decline in the birth rate and providing good care and education for the children are all our family affairs that we must solve together with our mothers,” said Kim, who is rumored to have three children.
While North Korea has released few details about its population trends, the South Korean government estimates that the birth rate has fallen steadily over the past decade, which would alarm a regime heavily dependent on manual labor and military service.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry said Kim’s address marked the first time he had publicly acknowledged a decline in his country’s birthrate.
According to the UN Population Fund and the World Bank, the North’s fertility rate hovers around 1.79-1.8 children per woman as of 2020.
It fell from 4.05 in the late 1960s to below 2.1 by the late 1990s, following birth control programs in the 1970s and 1980s to slow postwar population growth and the great famine of the mid-1990s, which is believed to have killed hundreds of thousands of people.
However, the birth rate still remains more than twice that of rapidly aging South Korea, which hit a record low of 0.78 last year.
According to reports in North Korea’s state media, this year the country introduced a range of benefits for families with three or more children, including preferential free housing, government subsidies, free food, medicine and household goods, and educational privileges for children.
Kim reminded the mothers that their “primary revolutionary task” was to instill “socialist virtues” in their offspring and instill loyalty to the ruling party during his address.
“Unless a mother becomes a communist, it is impossible for her to raise her sons and daughters as communists and turn her family members into revolutionaries,” he was quoted as saying by the state-run KCNA news channel.
The North Korean leader also warned parents to remove foreign influence on young minds, instructing them to send their children to perform hard labor for the state to correct bad behavior that was not “our style”.
Kim’s emotional address wasn’t the first time he’s openly shed tears in public.
In 2020, he wept as he offered a rare apology for failing to lead the shuttered country through turbulent economic times at the start of the pandemic.
Earlier this year, his eyes filled with tears at a military parade in July to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the Korean War that divided the peninsula.
Photo: YouTube
