Consumption of South Korean and Western cultural content is strictly prohibited in North Korea.
2024 report on human rights in North Korea released this Thursday June 27 by South Korea’s Unification Ministry accuses North Korea for publicly executing a 22-year-old man for listening and sharing K-Pop music.
The news is chilling. He was 22 years old and a “fan” of South Korean culture. Which was not to the taste of Kim Jong-Un, who publicly executed the young North Korean “for watching, sharing, and listening to South Korean music”the new report claims. For some time, Pyongyang has been “desperately” trying, to stem the flow of information and culture from outside.
70 songs listened to
This case was detailed in the 2024 annual report on human rights in North Korea, published by the Ministry of Unification of South Korea, which compiles 649 testimonies from North Korean defectors. One of them, anonymous, says that the young man, originally from the province of South Hwanghae (North Korea), was publicly executed in 2022. The cause ? He would have listened to more 70 South Korean Songswatched three films in addition to having distributed them illegally, since the North Korean law adopted in 2020 prohibits “reactionary ideology and culture”.
The hunt for skinny jeans
For some time now, the North Korean authorities are working hard to stem the flow of external information et young people are particularly targetedAt the same time, Pyongyang is waging other battles and imposing other sanctions for the wearing of white dresses by brides, the wearing of bridal gowns by grooms, the consumption of alcohol in wine glasses and… wearing sunglasses, these practices being deemed “South Korean”. The authorities are also hunting “hairstyles and ‘capitalist’ fashion (skinny jeans, t-shirt displaying foreign words, dyed and long hair)”, Radio Free Asia reported in 2022.
Fighting the “malignant influence of Western culture”
The North Korean government intends, through this fight, to protect the North Koreans “of the evil influence of Western culture”. Popular culture would be “a threat to the ideology that demands absolute loyalty to the infallible dynasty of Kim Jong Un”, which tightened the screw even more on the import of foreign culture into his country, after taking power in 2011.
Influenced “at lightning speed”
The government’s fight against external influences is all the more likely to be undermined by “South Korean culture influencing North Korea is spreading at a lightning speed”explained a woman who fled North Korea during a press briefing in Seoul (South Korea), reported The Guardian. “Young people follow and copy South Korean culture, they really love everything south koreanshe continued. After watching foreign films, we ask ourselves why we have to live like this? Of course we cannot speak ill of Kim Jong Un in public, but among close friends we say these words.”she indicated.
These last weeks, North Korea sent thousands of balloons over border containing wastein retaliation the launching of balloons from the South whose cargo included anti-Pyongyang leafletsdollar bills and USB sticks loaded with K-pop and K-dramas.
