North Korean authorities have ramped up efforts to stamp out South Korean popular culture — also known as Hallyu
— which has been spreading through mobile phones. While the mobile phones themselves are legal, younger people
have been using Bluetooth or SD memory cards to disseminate Hallyu content, deemed illegal according to North Korean penal code.
“Young people who have mobile phones use
Bluetooth to receive music files, but recently the crackdown
on this has become more severe,” a source in North Hamkyung Province told Daily
NK on Sunday. “They usually covertly listen to [illicit foreign] music with their earphones on
the street, but now officials will abruptly approach them and go through their
belongings to find their mobile phones.”
The authorities are concerned not only with
music from just below the border, but also TV dramas and movies from the
South trickling in through the porous border with China. “As a result, the
trend of passing on such dramas via mobile phones has seen a severe decline,”
she explained.
Young North Koreans have
been quick to incorporate their mobile phones as devices to share dramas and
movies from below the 38th parallel in addition to the longer, more established practice of utilizing flash drives for the job. Bluetooth and SD memory
cards are paramount for easy, swift swapping and storage of this media content among the younger generation.
“They used to pass on music via the Bluetooth
function, while transferring movies and TV series was generally reserved for USBs;
this has become exponentially harder in the face of sudden searches by security
officials to either confiscate people’s phones or search through the content
stored on them,” she said, adding that inspection teams are particularly
focused on rooting out thumb drives packed with South Korean programming
content circulating at the markets.
As a result, many young people are
refraining from watching content from the South for the time being to avoid the potential repercussions. As previously reported, spotting vendors
secretly hawking South Korean clothes at the markets has become a far less
common sight as of late.
However, in the midst of such severe
monitoring, children of Party cadres enjoy relative freedom, watching South
Korean television programs and films at their leisure, according to the source.
“People with no power face harsh
punishments if they get caught, but these same rules do not apply to Party
cadres,” she asserted. “They are punished sometimes to set an example for
others, but that’s limited to rare occasions, so Party cadres’ kids are growing increasingly bold.”
Predicated on the past, the source reported that most speculate such
stringent monitoring will fizzle out again in the near future, finding hope in
the belief that they will be back to enjoying an array of South Korean media content again soon.
