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North Korea

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea reported that "Every North Korean citizen is assigned a heredity-based class and socio-political rank over which the individual exercises no control but which determines all aspects of his or her life." Called Songbun, Barbara Demick describes this "class structure" as an updating of the hereditary "caste system", a combination of Confucianism and Communism. It originated in 1946 and was entrenched by the 1960s, and consisted of 53 categories ranging across three classes: loyal, wavering, and impure. The privileged "loyal" class included members of the Korean Workers' Party and Korean People's Army officers' corps, the wavering class included peasants, and the impure class included collaborators with Imperial Japan and landowners. She claims that a bad family background is called "tainted blood", and that by law this "tainted blood" lasts three generations.