Hundreds of North Korean students who were repatriated last year are being transferred to domestic universities or assigned to work. The future of the students, who returned home in several batches since last fall, depends on the outcome of an ideological examination conducted by the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea.
A source in North Korea told Daily NK on Jan. 9 that the Ministry of Education received instructions from the Central Committee through the Cabinet on Jan. 6 to admit some of the students who returned last year to state-run universities by the end of January, if space permits, so that they can continue their studies in March.
Meanwhile, the labor bureaus of various provincial and municipal people’s committees have been instructed to assign returnees on a list sent by the Central Committee to serve as “youth workers,” with their assignments to be completed by mid-January.
The source said the party “stressed that the returnees from other countries, such as China and Russia, who will be transferred to state-administered universities or admitted to graduate programs after graduating from foreign universities, have regained the party’s trust.
“At the same time, returnees who have been assigned to the labor force as ‘youth workers’ by the labor bureaus of the people’s committees are being told that if they keep their spirits up and do their assigned tasks, they will have a chance to return to their university studies. Officials think the party is desperate to strengthen the ideology of people who studied abroad.”
In fact, the decision to put some of the returnees to work instead of sending them to local undergraduate or graduate programs was based on the Central Committee’s ideological review, which took into account the returnees’ loyalty while abroad, their ideological leanings, and their grades, the source explained.
The party is unwilling to train ideologically problematic returnees as future officials for fear that they will end up being disloyal or even treacherous. Instead, it stresses that such students must be tempered in the crucible of the workforce.
Following its ideological review of the returned students, the party has repeatedly declared the need to “review and revise the whole method of selecting, sending and managing overseas students that we have used for the past 11 years” and “introduce a change in the way we check the ideological tendencies of people studying abroad,” the source said.
In effect, all this suggests that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will be overhauling the country’s system for managing overseas students for the first time since he took power. This has led some insiders to speculate that Kim intends to shake up the system by introducing a new method of selecting, sending, and managing these students to replace the one that has been in place for more than a decade.
“The Ministry of State Security and party committees at the undergraduate and graduate programs where the returnees will begin their studies in March are under orders from the Central Committee to closely monitor who they associate with and what they say, and to submit evaluations twice a year,” the source said.
Translated by David Carruth. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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January 16, 2024 at 05:30AM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)