People in North Korea also like music and TV series from the South. Anyone caught faces the death penalty. But even dictator Kim seems to have a weakness for the enemy’s culture.
Seoul – BTS and Blackpink instead of Brecht and Beethoven: While Germany uses public funds to support theater and opera, South Korea’s government primarily pumps taxpayers’ money into pop music. And with success. Hallyuthe Korean Wave, which featured globally popular pop groups, television series such as “Squid Game” and has become South Korea’s cultural flagship with the Oscar winner “Parasite”, has been sweeping the world for years. Behind the success is an industry that critics accuse of mercilessly exploiting its stars – and a well-thought-out strategy by the South Korean government.
“The government intends to promote the K-content industry as a national strategic industry so that it can become a leader in the competitive global market,” Yu In-chon, South Korea’s Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism, recently told the portal myKorea. On the one hand, it’s about money, of course. But South Korea has also recognized the value of cultural appeal. And that doesn’t just affect China, Japan, Europe and the USA. It also affects South Korea’s communist neighbors: North Korea is apparently full of K-pop fans.
“The older generation in North Korea prefers South Korean TV series and films”
According to a study, foreign television series are widespread in the otherwise isolated dictatorship. More than 83 percent of those surveyed – 6,351 North Koreans who fled to the South – said they had already seen television programs or films from South Korea, China or the USA. “There is a great fondness for foreign culture, with many North Koreans particularly admiring South Korean television series and expressing a strong desire to learn more about the outside world,” said an official from the South Korean Unification Ministry, which conducted the study, at a meeting in Seoul. “The older generation in North Korea prefers South Korean television series and films, while the younger generation also likes K-pop.”
South Korean music had already spread among North Korean youth in the 1980s, says the government official, who herself fled from the north to the south years ago. Later, students studying abroad secretly smuggled South Korean films and series into North Korea. From the early 2000s, CDs and DVDs were even sold on black markets. “Today, USB sticks with South Korean TV series, films and political information are widespread,” says the official.
North versus South Korea: Propaganda war with balloons
Some of the USB sticks come directly from the south across the border; activists tie the small data storage devices to hot air balloons and send them north. There, people are reacting to this cultural invasion in their own way: the Kim regime has been sending several thousand balloons with bags full of garbage hanging from them to the south for months. The regime is annoyed by the cultural influences from the enemy south. In 2020, the government in Pyongyang even passed a law that provides for re-education camps or the death penalty for people who spread South Korean cultural products.
According to reports, this draconian “law on reactionary thoughts and culture” is bein
g applied again and again. Two years ago, for example, a 22-year-old was executed for listening to South Korean pop music and watching and distributing films from the country. The case is mentioned in a recent report by the government in Seoul on the human rights situation in the north of the divided peninsula.
Also in 2022, two 16-year-olds were apparently sentenced to forced labor after sharing TV series from the South. A North Korean propaganda video that the BBC and was probably produced as a deterrent, shows the two young people being brought before their judges in front of hundreds of spectators. A few weeks ago, a report by the television station Chosun-TVaccording to which 30 schoolchildren were publicly executed in July for watching South Korean television series. However, this report cannot be verified.
“Malignant cancer”: Kim Jong-un condemns K-Pop and Co.
The dictator Kim Jong-il, who died in 2011, took tough action against the spillover of South Korean culture. His son Kim Jong Un has recently intensified the fight against the “malignant cancer,” as he calls it. A few years ago, things looked different: in 2018, during a brief thaw in relations between North and South, he invited a handful of K-pop stars to perform in Pyongyang. Under the motto “Spring is coming,” the rock band YB and the girl group Red Velvet, among others, played in front of Kim, his wife, and hundreds of invited guests in a concert hall in the east of the North Korean capital.
According to South Korean media, it was the first time that a North Korean leader had attended a performance by artists from the South. And Kim seemed to have enjoyed what he saw and heard: South Korea’s culture minister, who was also on the trip, later reported that the dictator had “shown great interest in the performance.”
The fact that the North Korean regime has been critical of cultural imports from the South for several years is of course not a sign of a change in dictator Kim’s taste in music or films. For the regime, it seems, Hallyu South Korea’s Unification Ministry believes that K-Pop and other forms of culture have what it takes to change the attitudes of people in North Korea: “This cultural change goes hand in hand with a change in values.” More than half of North Koreans now have a bad opinion of Kim Jong-un.
South Korean vocabulary: Kim Jong-un shocks his people
He seems to be aware of the threat. If South Korean culture were allowed to continue to enter the country, North Korea would crumble “like a damp wall,” state media warned three years ago. After all, the television series and films show how wealthy the South has become in the decades since the Korean War – while the north regularly struggles with famine.
The triumph of culture from the South seems unstoppable. “Watching K-dramas has even influenced the way couples address each other,” says the official from the South Korean Unification Ministry. Terms that are popular in the South, such as “jagi” (honey), are now also used as pet names in the North.
Not even dictator Kim Jong-un seems to be able to escape the influence of the South. At the beginning of August, during a visit to flood-hit areas in the north of the country, he is said to have addressed his subjects not as “comrades” but as “citizens”. He also used other terms that are much more common in the South than in the North, reported the US broadcaster Radio Free Asia citing sources from North Korea. The report says that those around him were shocked by the dictator’s choice of words.
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