Kim Jong Un is learning that being a dictator is no fun if there aren’t enough people to boss around.

He is worried about the birth rate in North Korea, so his solution? Cry and tell women to have more babies, and raise them to be good little communists, so that the future of his dictatorship will be assured. Yes, really. Kim Jong Un, a man who never met a dessert he wouldn’t eat, apparently put on quite the show for his country, openly crying and trying to convince the mothers of the country to pop out some more kids, all for the “revolution.” Or at least it LOOKED like he was crying. Who knows.

Addressing the audience as “Dear Mothers” he told them: “Preventing a decline in birth rates and good childcare are all of our housekeeping duties we need to handle while working with mothers.”

He added his country was being confronted with a host of “social tasks that our mothers should join to tackle.”

“These tasks include bringing up their children so that they will steadfastly carry forward our revolution, eliminating the recently-increasing non-socialist practices, promoting family harmony and social unity, establishing a sound way of cultural and moral life, making the communist virtues and traits of helping and leading one another forward prevail over our society, stopping the declining birth rate, and taking good care of children and educating them effectively.

“These belong to our common family affairs, which we need to deal with by joining hands with our mothers.”

And yes, Kim Jong Un was quite clear that these as-yet unborn children should be raised as “pillars of socialist and communist construction” (I’m sure the “or else” was heavily implied).

The supreme leader counseled North Korean women to raise their children as communists.

“All mothers should fulfill their responsibility and duty assumed before society and families with confidence in and optimism about the prospects of our socialist construction and a changed ideal society to come in the near future,” Kim Jon(sic) Un said in the speech. “They have a heavy mission to bring up their children to be pillars of socialist and communist construction and masters of future society.”

Now, it’s not like Kim Jong Un is facing an unusual problem in Asia. Birth rates have been declining for years, and are even worse in South Korea and Japan. But North Korea faces even bigger challenges because of their highly insular country, the level of control that Kim Jong Un has, and their economy.

While getting a detailed read on North Korea’s population trends is extremely difficult because of the limited statistics it discloses, South Korea’s government assesses that the North’s fertility rate has declined steadily for the past 10 years. That is a concerning development for a country that depends on mobilized labor to help keep its broken, heavily sanctioned economy afloat.

Kim’s latest appeal for women to have more children was made Sunday during the country’s National Mothers Meeting, the first of its kind in 11 years.

According to South Korea’s government statistics agency, North Korea’s total fertility rate, or the average number of babies expected to be born to a woman over her lifetime, was at 1.79 in 2022, down from 1.88 in 2014. The decline is still slower than its wealthier rival South Korea, whose fertility rate last year was 0.78, down from 1.20 in 2014.

“Many families in North Korea also don’t intend to have more than one child these days as they know they need lots of money to raise their kids, send them to school and help them get jobs,” said Ahn Kyung-su, head of DPRKHEALTH.ORG, a website focusing on health issues in North Korea.

Ahn, who has interviewed many North Korean defectors, said the smuggling of a vast amount of South Korean TV dramas and movies in the past 20 years that showed an elevated social status for women has also likely influenced women in North Korea not to have many children.

North Korea implemented birth control programs in the 1970-80s to slow a postwar population growth. The country’s fertility rate recorded a major decline following a famine in the mid-1990s that was estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people, the Seoul-based Hyundai Research Institute said in a report in August.

“Given North Korea lacks resources and technological advancements, it could face difficulties to revive and develop its manufacturing industry if sufficient labor forces are not provided,” the institute report said.

According to North Korean state media reports this year, the country has introduced a set of benefits for families with three or more children, including preferential free housing arrangements, state subsidies, free food, medicine and household goods and educational perks for children.

Let’s look at all these data points in total. There were birth control programs in the 70’s and 80’s to slow population growth – so children that would have been born then, and would have children of their own now, never existed. There was a famine that greatly reduced the population in the 90’s, which means a lot of people died, and a lot of people weren’t having babies at that time. Those children that should have been born during the famine would be prime childbearing ages right now. And then there is the knowledge being brought in from South Korea that there’s a world outside of Yonkers, Barnaby, which is VERY non-socialist and probably is spurring on comments from Kim Jong Un about “eliminating” all the things that would keep the children from being good little communists and laborers in a crappy economy.

And if you look at the faces in the crowd in the above video – all those women in traditional dress – there are a significant number of women there whose childbearing days are long behind them. Yes, there are some there who are probably able to still have a baby, but take it from me (an Asian woman) – there are a WHOLE lot of over 35’s in that crowd. The odds of the women who actually attended this propaganda rally actually going home and getting pregnant? Very, very low.

And speaking of women of childbearing age who should be pumping out little communist babies, what about Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s ice queen sister? She is allegedly married with two children, though nothing has ever been confirmed. If Kim Jong Un is serious about calling upon the women of North Korea to produce more children for the “cause,” then his sister should lead by example, right? And maybe Kim Jong Un should tell the country how many children HE has, because the only one who has ever been seen in public is a daughter, Ju Ae, who is probably around ten years old.

Will Kim Jong Un actually convince some women to have another baby? Possibly. But there are no guarantees, and it could end up being absurdly lonely at the top for Kim Jong Un and any successor he picks, if the military that likes to put on grand parades and the economy that depends on a socialist labor force begins to visibly dwindle in the years to come. And crying in public isn’t going to convince anyone to have another baby.

Featured image: Kim Jong Un via Vika_Glitter on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license