Party members in North Korea are increasingly taking official leave from their duties to secretly engage in private commerce and money-making activities in cities like Hamhung. The members are taking advantage of “social guarantees,” which temporarily relieve them of party obligations and allow them to engage in business activities outside their official roles.
To become a party member in North Korea, one must have a good background and undergo an ideological screening. So-called loyal elements who are relatively loyal to the party and leadership can join, but a growing number of such people are shirking their party duties to engage in business after receiving social guarantees, the source said.
A social guarantee is a social benefit that exempts people from their work obligations if they are temporarily unable to work due to illness or disability. Recently, however, there has been a marked increase in cases of party members in South Hamgyong Province bribing doctors to diagnose them as unfit to work – and thus eligible to receive social guarantees.
“The number of people who have received or are trying to receive social guarantees is skyrocketing, and most of them are party members,” a source in South Hamgyong province said recently. “The problem is that these people are actively engaged in economic activities even while receiving the social guarantees.”
Driving this phenomenon are economic hardships, which worsened after COVID-19, and tighter regulations on party organization. Simply because of who they are, party members cannot avoid their organizational life despite the continuing economic hardships, so they have destroyed the social guarantee system.
In fact, a party member in his 40s who lived and worked in Hamhung, Hungnam county, received a social guarantee earlier this month after submitting a diagnosis of mental illness. He was perfectly healthy, but he successfully obtained the social guarantee after several months of acting as if he had a mental disorder.
“In order to meet the requirement for a social guarantee, party members work with doctors they’ve bribed and pretend to have a disease for several months. In the end, they get the social guarantee,” the source said. “If they get a social guarantee this way, they don’t have to attend weekly self-criticism sessions, and they can engage in commerce, killing two birds with one stone.”
“It’s hard to make a living now, and you have to go to work every day, and since party members are harassed even more than ordinary people, more people now consider party membership cards – once a prized possession – a nuisance,” the source said. “If it weren’t so bad, so many people would now sarcastically ask, “Will a party membership card feed me?”
Taking the situation very seriously, South Hamgyong province’s party committee convened a meeting of party secretaries this month to draw up measures to deal with it. The subcommittee adopted a policy to expel party members found to have bribed their way into social security, and to punish the party secretaries of their affiliated party organizations and the medical professionals who took the bribes.
This has lit a fire under the party secretaries, the source said, but party members who have received social guarantees do not seem to care – “Go ahead and expel me,” they say. As a result, the party secretaries are losing sleep.
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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October 25, 2024 at 05:30AM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)