The great famine of 1996-99, which killed around half a million North Koreans, also delivered a fatal blow to the songbun system, a feudalistic system of hereditary privilege determined the life trajectories of nearly all North Koreans from around 1960 until the mid-1990s.

In those days, North Koreans knew that their chances of social advancement, level of income, and lifestyle were largely determined by their family's origin, or "chulsin songbun."