Kim Jong-un has been filmed crying while appealing to North Korea’s women to have more children and raise them to love the authoritarian state. Citing state media, the news agency Associated Press said on Monday that Kim’s appeal was made during North Korea’s National Mothers Meeting, the first of its kind in 11 years, amid rising concerns over a fall in the reclusive state’s birth rate.

The North Korean leader was spotted dabbing his eyes with a white handkerchief while addressing thousands of women gathered at a national mothers meeting in Pyongyang. Many in the audience wept alongside him during the carefully choreographed event.

Kim Jong Un CRIES while telling North Korean women to have more babies.

The dictator shed tears while speaking at the National Mothers Meeting as he urged women to boost the countries birth rate. pic.twitter.com/J354CyVnln

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) December 5, 2023

“Stopping the decline in birthrates and providing good child care and education are all our family affairs that we should solve together with our mothers,” said Kim, who is speculated to have three children.

The Supreme Leader’s comments come as the United Nations Population Fund estimates that as of 2023 the fertility rate stood at 1.8, a steep fall from the previous years. North Korea is not the only country in the region that saw a fall. Its neighbor South Korea’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.78 last year, while Japan saw its figure drop to 1.26.

Fertility rate is the average number of children born to women during their reproductive years.

Not only Kim, many women in the audience were seen weeping when the leader spoke. They later greeted him with applause.

“We are confronted with a host of social tasks that our mothers should join to tackle. These tasks include bringing up their children so that they will steadfastly carry forward our revolution, eliminating the recently-increasing non-socialist practices, promoting family harmony and social unity, establishing a sound way of cultural and moral life, making the communist virtues and traits of helping and leading one another forward prevail over our society, stopping the declining birth rate, and taking good care of children and educating them effectively,” Kim added.

According to North Korean state media reports this year, the country has introduced a set of benefits for families with three or more children, including preferential free housing arrangements, state subsidies, free food, medicine and household goods and educational perks for children.

In the 1970s-80s, North Korea implemented birth control programmes to slow post-war population growth. Seoul-based Hyundai Research Institute said in its report this August that the country’s fertility rate recorded a major decline following a famine in the mid-1990s.