North Korea Orders Overseas Students to Return for ‘Political Indoctrination’

South Korea’s Unification Ministry reported on Thursday that North Korea has ordered all of its overseas students to return home for “political indoctrination.”

The indoctrination sessions will be held at the Grand People’s Study House in Pyongyang in July and will focus on “reinforcing allegiance to leader Kim Jong-un,” according to South Korean officials whom Radio Free Asia (RFA) quoted.

The Grand People’s Study House is the central library in Pyongyang, dedicated in 1982 to honor the seventieth birthday of the grim Communist nation’s first tyrant, Kim Il-sung. The library was billed as a “center for the project of intellectualizing the whole of society and a sanctuary of learning for the entire people.” Its collection includes some foreign books, but subjects of the Kim dynasty must obtain special permission to read them.

The structure boasts ten floors, six hundred rooms, and more than one million square feet of floor space, so a very large number of people can be indoctrinated there. Exact numbers of North Korean students studying in other countries are difficult to come by, but the U.N. believes there are about 1,100 of them, largely studying in China and Russia.

The South Korean Unification Ministry said the student indoctrination session is among the measures North Korea “halted due to the Covid-19 lockdown,” but it is now resuming. The last mass indoctrination session for overseas students was held in 2019. North Korea completely sealed its borders during the pandemic.

South Korean media quoted North Korean sources who said some of the overseas students are worried they will be forced to stay home if they are “caught dating, neglecting their studies, or [engaging in] other behavior deemed unpatriotic.”

Korea JoongAng Daily speculated on Thursday that Kim Jong-un wants to “tighten control over the younger generation in their 20s and 30s to prevent ideological deviations” and might be worried about “defections among young elites.”

North Korean defections tripled in 2023 when the regime began reopening its borders. The defectors reported growing discontent with the Kim dictatorship as living conditions under his rule deteriorated.

The surge of defectors included an exceptionally large number of young people and higher-ranking political elites. They were also notably more willing to risk their lives to escape from North Korea, using risky methods such as fleeing to South Korea by sea.

South Korean officials said they were keenly interested in monitoring the effects of the regime’s indoctrination order on students abroad, presumably wondering if some of them might be motivated to make a long-delayed bid for freedom because they fear what will happen to them if they return home.

The political indoctrination imposed on returning students will most likely include renewed hatred of South Korea and especially its current president, Yoon Suk-yeol.

North Korea’s “Socialist Patriotic Youth League” observed 2024’s June 25 anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War by urging young people, especially North Korean youth traveling abroad, to call for Yoon’s impeachment. The youth league has reportedly been distributing anti-Yoon indoctrination materials in North Korean classrooms, including information about South Korean student activists who want Yoon impeached.

“The lectures based on this materials begin with criticism of Yoon, the president of puppet South Korea, as a warmonger and fascist dictator, along with propaganda that the struggle of youth to impeach him is becoming a mass struggle,” North Korean sources said.