PremiumKim Jong Un, the supreme leader of North Korea has reportedly described K-pop music as a "vicious cancer", corrupting the younger generation of the country.
Consequently, the leader has declared a new cultural war to stop the spread of South Korean music and movies (the K-dramas and K-pop videos) to his citizens through a secretive anti-K-pop campaign, according to a report by the New York Times.
The NYT report cited a South Korea- based news source, called Daily NK that first learned about this new culture war from leaked internal documents from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
In December 2020, Kim Jong introduced a series of new laws that increased the level of punishment for owning or watching South Korean entertainment. In North Korea, if someone will watch a South Korean drama or video or listen to K-pop music it would result in up to 15 years of jail in hard labour camps.
The Kim family dynasty has ruled North Korea for more than 70 years. Now, as Kim Jong worries that the South Korean entertainment has loosened his grip on the youth, he plans on imposing worse punishments for those found guilty of smuggling such content, including the death penalty.
Kim believes the popular culture of the South is corrupting the “attire, hairstyles, speeches, behaviour" of North Korea's youth.
"Young North Koreans think they owe nothing to Kim Jong-un," Jung Gwang-il, a North Korean defector who runs a network that smuggles K-pop into the North told the daily. "He must reassert his ideological control on the young if he doesn’t want to lose the foundation for the future of his family’s dynastic rule," Gwang-il added.
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