Rare footage obtained by BBC Korean shows North Korea publicly sentencing two teenage boys to 12 years of hard labor for watching K-dramas, a South Korean entertainment banned in the country.
The video, filmed in 2022, depicts the boys being reprimanded and reveals a harsher stance against accessing South Korean entertainment.
“The rotten puppet regime’s culture has spread even to teenagers,” says the narrator.
“They are just 16 years old, but they ruined their own future,” it continues.
The punishment for watching or distributing South Korean entertainment in North Korea was enacted to be punishable by death in 2020, reflecting the regime’s fear of weakening its ideology.
The spread of K-dramas and K-pop is seen as a threat to the monolithic ideology that reveres the Kim family.
Sand CEO Choi Kyong-hui said, “Admiration for South Korean society can soon lead to a weakening of the system… This goes against the monolithic ideology that makes North Koreans revere the Kim family.”
Despite the ban, South Korean entertainment continued to reach North Korea through China, and it is considered a “drug” that helps North Koreans forget their difficult reality.
A North Korean defector said, “If you get caught watching an American drama, you can get away with a bribe, but if you watch a Korean drama, you get shot.”
“For North Korean people, Korean dramas are a ‘drug’ that helps them forget their difficult reality,” they added, according to the BBC.
“In North Korea, we learn that South Korea lives much worse than us, but when you watch South Korean dramas, it’s a completely different world. It seems like the North Korean authorities are wary of that,” explained another defector.
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