North Korea: Male University Students Required To Get Kim Jong-un Haircuts 110
An anonymous reader writes in with one more reason not to accept that full-ride scholarship to a North Korea University. "Male university students in North Korea are now required to get the same haircut as their leader Kim Jong-un, it is reported. The state-sanctioned guideline was introduced in the capital Pyongyang about two weeks ago, Radio Free Asia reports. It is now being rolled out across the country - although some people have expressed reservations about getting the look. 'Our leader's haircut is very particular, if you will,' one source tells Radio Free Asia. 'It doesn't always go with everyone since everyone has different face and head shapes.' Meanwhile, a North Korean now living in China says the look is actually unpopular at home because people think it resembles Chinese smugglers. 'Until the mid-2000s, we called it the "Chinese smuggler haircut",' the Korea Times reports."
Debunked. (Score:5, Informative)
The good news about being late to post stories (that aren't for nerds and don't matter), is that they've already been debunked:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com... [theglobeandmail.com]
Re:Debunked. (Score:5, Informative)
That article's a strawman - it's debunking a claim that nobody made.
North Korea has a restricted number of haircuts that barbers are allowed to perform - 10 for men, and 18 for women. That's not in doubt, that article even referenced the fact.
The new claim was that the number of allowed haircuts for men was being reduced to 1. That doesn't mean the everyone in the country had to rush out and get their hair cut, it means that the next time they get their haircut, they will be forced to take a Kim Jong-un cut.
So the fact that a bunch of visitors haven't seen a sudden growth in Jong-un-style haircuts neither proves nor disproves the original claim.
Re:Debunked. (Score:5, Informative)
That's not in doubt, that article even referenced the fact.
Yeah it references it by saying:
And photos of suggested hairstyles posted outside women’s hair salons — the kind of photos a customer points at to speed up the explanation process — are regularly depicted by foreign media as showing the only sanctioned styles North Korean women can choose from.
Not true. But don’t tell that to the Internet.
Emphasis added.
Re:Wait...they have universities? (Score:3, Informative)
Stalinist Communism is a really bizarre piece of double think.
Before the revolution you have evil aristocrats ruling over a mass of brutalised serfs.
Post revolution you have quite a New Class/Songbun which de facto aristocracy ruling over workers working on collective farms. And workers on collective farms have no right to change jobs, so their status is much more serf-like than it was pre revolution.
Just to make it even more Orwellian the pre revolutionary system wasn't actually like this. E.g. before the Russian revolution serfdom had been abolished pretty much everywhere
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
Not because capitalists are humanitarians but because it's actually more efficient for rich people to employ free labourers for a wage when they're working than to own serfs or slaves.
Of course if you grow up in Stalinist state you're told that before the revolution (and in capitalist states) evil aristocrats ruled over brutalised serfs and now things are much better even though that's the opposite of the truth. And most likely you know on some level that is false - that the status of workers under 'socialism' is much close to serfs than it was either pre revolution or in evil capitalist states and even worse the ruling class is much closer to being a hereditary aristocracy.