North Korea is cracking down on a flood of South Korean pop culture permeating the hardline communist state, intelligence sources have said.
They confirmed a Yonhap news agency report that a campaign began this year against videotapes, CDs and other material smuggled into the reclusive nation.
"This year North Korean authorities waged what they call 'psychological warfare' against 'exotic lifestyles' by cracking down on South Korean pop culture," an unidentified South Korean official was quoted by Yonhap as saying.
Videotapes or CDs of South Korean films, music or TV soap operas enter the North via neighbouring northeast China.
The South's culture has become so popular that a lead actress's line in the hit movie "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" became a household phrase in the North, Yonhap quoted sources as saying.
It said some North Korean youths are glued to mega-hit TV dramas such as "Fall Fairy Tale" and "Immortal Admiral Yi Sun-Shin." The youths also sport South Korean hairstyles and other fashions.
North Koreans for decades had access only to state-run domestic media which extolled the virtues of "Great Leader" Kim Il-Sung and his son and successor Kim Jong-Il, known as the "Dear Leader".
Very few private homes had telephones and calls were connected through operators, while radios were sold with tuning knobs fixed to official stations.
But new technology is breaking down barriers, observers say. Mobile phones with pre-paid cards have been smuggled in from China.
And as households in northeast China upgraded to DVD machines starting early this decade, smugglers bought their discarded VCR players cheaply and smuggled them across the border into North Korea.
This made VCRs affordable to a large number of North Korean households, according to analyst Andrei Lankov in a recent article in the Korea Times.
"Against the dull background of the official arts, the VCRs were a vehicle for accessing good entertainment," he wrote.
"Hallyu," a craze for Korean popular culture which has spread across East Asia, became part of North Korean life also.
"Young North Koreans enthusiastically imitate the fashions and parrot the idioms they see in South Korean movies. And this does not bode well for the regime's future," wrote Lankov, an associate professor at Seoul's Kookmin University.
The VCRs are also undermining North Korean propaganda claims that life in the South is far inferior, according to Lankov.
While viewers did not believe everything they saw in the films, some things could not be faked -- such as Seoul's affluent cityscape.
"It is gradually dawning on the North Koreans that the South is not exactly the land of hunger and destitution depicted in their propaganda."
A survey of North Korean refugees in China by the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea showed 82 percent do not believe that the South's economy is in worse shape than the North's.
Jeung Young-Tae of the Korea Institute for National Unification said the North views fads from the outside as a threat to its socialist system.
"North Korea has been expanding trade and exchanges with the outside world in order to improve economic conditions, but such a policy always entails fallout in the form of what it perceives as negative foreign influence on its people," Jeung told AFP. —
source: TodayOnline
sitelink: http://www.todayonline.com/articles/169375.asp
