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Kim Jong-un is cracking down on pop music fans in the DPRK.
Amid growing cultural influence from South Korea, the 37-year-old North Korean leader is imposing tougher penalties on citizens caught listening to “deviant” K-pop music.
The clandestine campaign against K-pop emerged through internal documents smuggled from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by the Seoul-based news source Daily NK, the New York Times first reported on Friday. Then it was announced by South Korean lawmakers.
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The recently downsized DPRK despot has dubbed southern cultural imports an “evil cancer” that corrupts North Korean youth’s “clothes, hairstyles, speeches, and mannerisms” similar to the dance in the 1980s movie “Floating Ones” – but in a much darker form. bent.
In an apparent attempt to launch his own brand of cancellation culture, Kim introduced new laws in December that stipulate that anyone caught watching or possessing South Korean content could be sentenced to up to 15 years of hard labor. The previous maximum sentence for fans of popular acts like BTS was five years.
If that wasn’t tough enough, K-pop smugglers could face execution while those caught singing, speaking or writing “in a “South Korean style” could be sentenced to two years in a labor camp, according to the smuggled documents.
Last May, a citizen was shot dead for promoting illegal South Korean music and other entertainment activities.
South Korean entertainment has long been smuggled across the DPRK border, initially in the form of cassette tapes and eventually as flash disks from China. However, the “Hermit Kingdom” has stepped up anti-capitalist rhetoric in recent months as he sees his nation becoming more vulnerable to cultural patterns from the South, the Daily Mail reports.
Meanwhile, in February, Kim – whose family has ruled the country for three generations – ordered the country’s provinces, cities and counties to clamp down on growing capitalist influence.
Even North Korea’s state media warned that the popular type of music could make the nation “crumble like a wet wall” if nothing was done.
Indeed, the K-pop ban comes at a difficult time for the rogue regime, whose COVID-19 shutdown has crippled an economy wracked by decades of mismanagement and US-led sanctions over Kim’s nuclear weapons program.
South Korean girl group Red Velvet appears after their performance in Pyongyang, North Korea, Sunday, April 1, 2018 (Korea Pool via AP)
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Amid the turmoil, experts say, young North Koreans are likely to adopt outside habits and challenge Kim’s authority.
“For Kim Jong-un, the cultural invasion from South Korea has gone beyond the level that can be tolerated,” said Jiro Ishimaru, editor-in-chief of Asia Press International, a Japanese website that reports on North Korea. “If this is left unchecked, he fears his people will start to see South Korea as an alternative to North Korea.”
North Korean millennials who grew up during the famine of the 1990s are especially disillusioned with the country, which has long pushed the idea that South Korea was full of beggars. By watching smuggled Korean content, they learned that while they were starving to death, their southern brethren were trying to shed their pounds through dieting.
The problem is not just listening to K-pop. Recently, slang Korean language has begun to creep into everyday conversation, with North Korean women increasingly calling their boyfriends “oppa” – a common term in South Korean dramas – rather than a state-mandated “companion”.
In order to stamp out the “deviant” phenomenon, state officials have been ordered to search South Korean-language computers, text messages and notebooks, while people caught imitating a “dummy accent” can be banished from cities, according to top-secret newspapers.
However, it may be too late to hold back the trend. The New York Times reported that a South Korean study of 116 recent defectors found that nearly half of them “repeatedly” enjoyed southern content while living in the DPRK.
“North Korean youth think they owe nothing to Kim Jong Un,” said Jong Gwang-il, a North Korean defector who smuggles K-pop to his home country. “He must reassert his ideological control over the youth if he does not want to lose the foundation for the future ruling family.”
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This is not the first time that Kim has cracked down on so-called anti-socialist tendencies.
Last April, the mushroom-haired dictator, infamously, banned mullets and skinny jeans in an effort to cut back on “decadent” Western fashion trends.
Click here to read more on the New York Post.
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