North Korean intelligence officers in North Hamgyong province used neighborhood lectures in mid-October 2026 to attack secret users of Chinese mobile phones. Visiting towns along the Chinese border, they hurled crude insults at phone users and told ordinary North Koreans to report anyone they catch.
The officers belong to the National Intelligence Agency, North Korea’s secret police, which hunts down political offenders and polices contact with the outside world. The agency went by the name Ministry of State Security until the regime renamed it at the Ninth Party Congress earlier this year.
Officers in Hoeryong, Musan county and other border areas worked in pairs, according to a Daily NK source in North Hamgyong province. They went from one neighborhood watch unit to the next and gathered people mostly in the evenings.
Neighborhood watch units are grassroots surveillance groups that organize every North Korean household into small blocks. Each unit answers to a local leader who reports back to the authorities on the families in that block.
Hoeryong and Musan sit on the Tumen River across from Jilin province in northeastern China. Their location puts them close enough for smuggled handsets to pick up signals from Chinese cell towers.
The lectures centered on the struggle against “anti-socialist and non-socialist” behavior in the border region. Pyongyang uses the phrase as a catchall for anything it sees as a threat to the socialist system.
The label covers acts ranging from watching foreign media to private trading outside state control. The officers argued that such behavior still had not disappeared from North Korean society despite years of crackdowns.
They singled out people who unlock their television sets to watch foreign broadcasts in secret. North Korean authorities fix every television to state channels before it reaches a household.
Tuning in to Chinese or South Korean programs can bring harsh punishment under a 2020 law against “reactionary ideology and culture.” Even so, Chinese phones topped the list of concerns at the latest round of lectures.
“Security officers recently went around every neighborhood watch unit in Hoeryong to give lectures,” the source said. “What they stressed most was people hiding foreign cell phones, meaning Chinese phones, and using them in secret.”
One officer lashed out at Chinese phone users in especially vulgar language, the source added. He also vowed that the authorities would crack down hard on anyone caught with one of the devices.
“The party is doing everything it can to improve the people’s lives,” the officer reportedly said. “Yet there are still people hiding in back rooms like [expletive] rats and using Chinese phones.”
He described the phone users as human garbage who fail to appreciate the party’s grace and love. The authorities must make sure such people can never raise their heads again, he told the gathering.
He went on to call the fight against them a serious class struggle tied to the fate of socialism itself. The officer urged every North Korean to join that struggle and to report such behavior the moment they spot it.
Chinese mobile phones keep border livelihoods alive
Pyongyang has long cracked down hard on Chinese mobile phone use along its northern border with China. Enforcement grew far harsher after the regime sealed the border at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even so, a significant number of North Koreans in border areas still use the phones to reach the outside world.
Late last year, the Ministry of State Security ordered its border branches to wipe out Chinese phone use in 2026. In Hoeryong, the authorities have also sent in extra enforcement teams with signal detectors to track down callers.
For many families along the border, however, a Chinese phone is an essential tool for making a living. Remittance brokers depend on the phones to stay in contact with people abroad sending money home.
Many of those senders are defectors in South Korea who want to support relatives still living in North Korea. Money changers use the phones to check international exchange rates and swap Chinese yuan for their customers.
Traders, meanwhile, rely on them to negotiate terms and place orders with business partners across the river in China. That same link to the outside world also makes the phones a major channel for information.
News and rumors flow into the country through them, and details about life in North Korea flow out. For that reason, the authorities treat Chinese phone use as a direct threat to regime security.
The latest campaign has drawn a cold response from North Koreans in border towns like Hoeryong and Musan. Many of them simply cannot earn a living without their phones.
“No matter what they call us, rats or human garbage, telling people who live off their phones to stop using them is like sending them to war without a gun,” one complaint went.
Others questioned whether the authorities understand what their demands mean for struggling households in the region. “They tell us to fight no matter what, but without a phone some people would have nothing to put in the pot,” another person said.
Fatigue is also mounting as the lectures pile on top of inspections that have become part of daily life. Officials regularly search homes for “impure recordings,” the authorities’ term for foreign films, dramas and other unauthorized videos.
Inspectors also make regular rounds to crack down on unauthorized electricity use in homes across the region. The source said these constant checks have left people along the border exhausted and resentful.
“These days, between inspections for impure recordings and crackdowns on electricity use, not a single day goes by without an inspection,” the source said. “With these lectures on top of that, people’s frustration is bound to run high. But nobody can say it out loud, so people just swallow their anger and suffer in silence.”
This article was originally written in Korean and translated with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
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October 28, 2026 at 12:03AM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)