Editing Caste (section)

==== North Korea ====
{{Main|Songbun}}
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."<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/9313174/North-Korea-caste-system-underpins-human-rights-abuses.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220111/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/9313174/North-Korea-caste-system-underpins-human-rights-abuses.html |archive-date=11 January 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live |title=North Korea caste system 'underpins human rights abuses' |work=[[The Daily Telegraph]] |location=UK |date=6 June 2012 |access-date=3 November 2013}}{{cbignore}}</ref> Called ''[[Songbun]]'', [[Barbara Demick]] describes this "class structure" as an updating of the hereditary "caste system", a combination of [[Confucianism]] and [[Communism]].<ref>{{cite book |first=Barbara |last=Demick |author-link=Barbara Demick |title=Nothing to Envy: Love, Life and Death in North Korea |publisher=Fourth Estate |location=London |date=2010 |pages=26–27}}</ref> 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 [[Workers' Party of Korea|Korean Workers' Party]] and [[Korean People's Army]] officers' corps, the wavering class included peasants, and the impure class included [[Collaboration with Imperial Japan|collaborators with Imperial Japan]] and [[Land tenure|landowners]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Cha |first=Victor D. |url=http://archive.org/details/impossiblestaten0000chav_j2c1 |title=The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future |publisher=Ecco |others=Internet Archive |year=2013 |isbn=978-0-06-199850-8 |location=New York |page=186 |language=en}}</ref> She claims that a bad family background is called "tainted blood", and that by law this "tainted blood" lasts three generations.{{sfn|Demick|2010|pp=28, 197, 202}}