China has already taken steps to make marriage easier and divorce harder. Now North Korea has upped the ante, at least on a local basis, as one city party committee has begun giving women over the age of 28 the choice to either enter into an arranged marriage or be assigned to manual labor:
Now, it might be easy to dismiss this as the deranged act of the most outdated regime on the planet. North Korea is, after all, very, very far from pretty much anyone’s idea of an ideal society.
The problem with dismissing it is this: the policy is going to work. Not only that, but the policy is going to work much, much better than the liberal democratic ideal is working in South Korea, which has the lowest birthrates in the world, at 0.72 per woman in 2023, which is barely one-third of the replacement rate of 2.1 per woman.
The media and the women themselves, both being incapable of grasping the concept of either “the future” or “inevitable consequences,” tend to laugh this off as an unfortunate result of the combination of free will, human rights, and female empowerment.
