A North Korean university in Wonsan, Kangwon province, held a mandatory ideological lecture on Feb. 1 instructing faculty and students to view South Korea as an enemy state, ahead of the upcoming Ninth Party Congress.
The Kangwon provincial party committee ordered the lectures at the end of January, directing institutions to prioritize sessions on “hostile relations with South Korea” and the supposed triumph of Pyongyang’s strategy against Washington and Seoul. A source in the province, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told Daily NK recently that Wonsan Medical University held the session for faculty and students in its auditorium.
During the lecture, the university’s party secretary raised the recent visit to South Korea by U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby. Regarded as the architect of the Trump administration’s security policy, Colby was in Seoul on Jan. 25–27 to present the updated U.S. National Defense Strategy and seek Seoul’s cooperation with American plans.
The party secretary offered the following commentary on the visit: “The other day, the head of the U.S. Department of Defense flew into South Korea with a cocky attitude and made asinine comments about changes to the 2026 defense strategy. At a time when anyone who challenges our Republic ends up humiliated and led around by the nose, the American imperialists have been like moths to a flame since the beginning of the year. They are basically raising the white flag now that our Republic’s nuclear arsenal is complete.”
The secretary then turned to South Korea directly. “South Korea is no longer part of our nation — it’s our number-one enemy, a state that we must pacify through force of arms. Despite the brief pause in its war with us, South Korea remains a belligerent state,” the party secretary said.
Maps replaced, unification references scrubbed
The secretary also announced that all Korean Peninsula maps displayed at the university had been replaced with ones labeling the southern half as “South Korea,” and that all references to a commonplace description of the peninsula as “three thousand leagues embroidered with mountains and rivers” had been removed because the phrase implies a longing for unification.
The party secretary instructed the university’s branch of the Socialist Patriotic Youth League to “never forget, not even for a moment, that each and every young person must be ideologically inculcated in the fact that Korea is a hostile state and a belligerent state.”
The secretary also stressed that students should abandon any hope of peaceful reunification. “There will be no unification — only conquest,” the secretary said, with students in the auditorium lowering their heads and writing down the slogan while avoiding eye contact with one another.
The source said the lectures “appear designed to lay the political groundwork for removing language about ‘one Korean nation’ and unification from the party’s bylaws during the upcoming Ninth Party Congress.”
After the session ended, students gathered in small groups for hushed conversations. Some admitted they “couldn’t make heads or tails of the sudden condemnation of talk about unification as being reactionary when they’d been taught since their childhood that ‘our dream is unification,’” the source said.
The party secretary concluded by urging students to keep statues, portraits of leaders, and study rooms clean ahead of a Feb. 16 ceremony marking the completion of 10,000 homes in the fourth stage of the Hwasong development project in Pyongyang — an event Kim Jong Un is expected to attend in person.
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