Listening to K-pop music and distributing South Korean films led to the public execution of a 22-year-old man in Pyongyang.
South Korea's Ministry of Unification on Thursday June 27 made public the case detailed in the 2024 North Korea Human Rights Report. It contains testimony from 649 North Korean defectors, tells CNN Greece.
As an anonymous defector, a young man from South Korea's Hwanghae Province testifies publicly executed in 2022 for listening to 70 South Korean songs, watching three films and distributing them. He became a victim of North Korea's 2020 law banning “reactionary ideology and culture.”
The report details extensive efforts by North Korean authorities to control the flow of information, particularly targeting young people. Other instances of crackdown include punishments for “reactionary” practices: brides wearing white dresses, grooms carrying the bride, wearing sunglasses or drinking alcohol from wine glasses are considered South Korean customs.
Mobile phones are often checked for spellings of contact names, expressions and terms that are considered to have South Korean influence, the report said. The two Koreas use the same language, but subtle differences have emerged since the division following the 1950-53 Korean War.
The K-pop ban is part of a campaign to protect North Koreans from the “malign” influence of Western culture that began under former leader Kim Jong Il and intensified under his son Kim Jong Un.
In 2022, US government-funded Radio Free Asia claimed the regime was cracking down on “capitalist” fashion and hairstyles, targeting skinny jeans and T-shirts with foreign words, as well as dyed or long hair.
Experts say allowing South Korean popular culture to penetrate North Korean society could threaten an ideology that demands absolute loyalty to the “infallible” Kim dynasty that has ruled the country since its founding in 1948.
*K-pop is a musical genre that originated in South Korea and incorporates elements of Western electropop, hip-hop, dance music and modern rhythm and blues. Having originally appeared as a musical genre, K-pop has grown into a large-scale music subculture with millions of fans around the world.
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