Early last year, the South Korean government blared K-pop – Korean pop music – across its border with North Korea in what seemed to be a playful, almost mocking gesture. Amidst a tense, perennial standoff, songs such as “Just Let Us Love” by Apink and “Bang Bang Bang” by Big Bang blasted into the northern airspace right after starkly political messages. At first glance, inserting frivolous pop music in between denunciations of Kim Jong-un seems unprofessional and misplaced, but when looking behind the lyrics, sweeping political implications can be unearthed: Jang Jin-sung, a former North Korean propaganda official, said that the loudspeaker broadcasts were “akin to a peaceful version of the nuclear bomb.”
In past decades, K-pop, along with South Korean dramas, has successfully seeped into North Korea, mostly through radio broadcasts, CD-filled balloons, and USB drives. The North Korean hunger for South Korean entertainment has only continued to grow, despite the country’s unparalleled cultural, political, and ideological isolationism: it is reported that approximately 70% of North Koreans consume foreign media in their homes. Through this cultural surge, North Korea’s hegemonic barriers have become porous; the country became vulnerable to its southern neighbor’s soft power – a power based on aesthetic appeal, rather than military strength, which fosters co-optation into, in this case, South Korea’s agenda of reconciliatory politics. The effects of soft power, best exemplified through the United States’s global brand dominance with companies such as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, are unquantifiable, but cannot be understated in establishing political sway. As a result, South Korea has masterfully wielded K-pop as a political conduit of soft power, transcending unbreakable historical-political divisions with its northern neighbor through a clandestine cultural flow.
K-pop did not become a sweeping global phenomenon through chance—rather, its current popularity was carefully fostered by the Korean government, which valued it for its western aesthetic ideals. In the 1990’s, the Korean government funneled millions into a Ministry of Culture, including a department solely for K-Pop, and it paid off: a pseudo-cultural imperialism called the Korean Wave, or Hallyu, arose in countries like Japan, China, and even North Korea. Korean pop culture assumed an invasive, Asian Carp-like position: in Japan, K-pop groups like Big Bang and Girls’ Generation dominated the charts, and in China, one episode of the Korean melodrama “Descendents of the Sun” racked up 2.3 billion Chinese views in two days. Overall, despite fraught socio-political relationships between East Asian countries, economic-cultural relationships have continued to prosper, serving as what Kushal Dev calls an “effective lubricant that keeps the Asian economy going.”
The situation is no different between North and South Korea. Korea’s pan-Asian soft power serves to steer North Koreans to envy the prosperity of its southern neighbor, changing long standing political conflict through cultural means. The power to co-opt North Korea into adopting (or at least becoming familiar with) South Korean views is critical, as the Kim Jong-un regime has made no real attempts at political reconciliation. In September, North Korea carried out its fifth nuclear test, and in response, South Korea announced a plan to assassinate Kim Jong-un in case of nuclear emergency. In this trench-warfare-like military standoff, where chances of political reconciliation have become moot, cultural understanding is critical to easing tension. Park Geun-hye summed it up in her inauguration address: “In the 21st century, culture is power.”
Currently, entertainment from South Korea, although punishable by death in North Korea, is widely available, especially among the elite, helping erode the North Korean government’s glorification of itself and demonization of South Korea. A researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification stated that in recent years, she could not recall a single defector who had not seen or listened to foreign media before entering South Korea. A defector known only as Min Jun reflects this North Korean hunger for South Korean media, stating, “in our generation, young people get together quietly in each others’ homes, put on South Korean K-pop on a speaker, and have a little dance party.” Another defector, Kim Heung Kwang, remarked that “even if you can’t eat and have to skip a meal, you’d rather spend the money to get your hands on this stuff [foreign media] to watch.” These relatively minor, yet highly telling, transgressions of North Korea’s ban on South Korean entertainment reveals the slow but sure erosion of the North Korean government’s cultural isolationism. Through consistent exposure to “how the other half lives,” the first step to collective action – awareness of one’s situation relative to others – the seeds of discontent are slowly germinating within North Koreans.
North Koreans’ collective appetite for entertainment has led to the creation of illegal entertainment black markets, where smuggled CDs and DVDs sell at the equivalent of US $3.75. North Korean defectors have also helped push foreign media into their former country: Lee Kwang-baek devotes time in his North Korean radio station to K-pop (interspersed with messages about human rights) and Park Sang-hak claims to have sent two million balloons filled with, among other things, K-pop, into North Korean airspace. Again, the North Korean government has publicly executed individuals for consuming and distributing foreign media, even claiming to have killed 80 individuals across 7 cities in one day for doing so. Yet, the majority of North Koreans accept this risk and play Korean dramas and music on their small nototels (laptop-television hybrids). Even North Korea’s previous dictator, Kim Jong Il, loved South Korean cinema, kidnapping South Korean film director Shin Sang-Ok and his wife Choe Eun-Hu in 1978. As a result, the dissemination of Korean pop culture, whether it be music or television, has created civil stirring and unrest within North Koreans, who, through K-pop and other media, are increasingly seeing the immense disparities between the quality of their lives and the lives of their southern neighbors. It is this deep-seated unrest, especially among the elite, that might one day induce tangible social change in North Korea.
But as much as the K-pop phenomenon has to do with Korea’s relationship to North Korea, there is another important actor at play: China, North Korea’s dominant economic and political partner. Most of the flow of K-pop CDs into North Korea actually comes from China, as the North Korea-China border is much more relaxed than that of North and South Korea, and the vast majority of North Korean defectors escape through China. China has one of the biggest markets for Korean pop culture as well, investing 275 million dollars in it in 2015 alone. However, China has recently launched a political pushback against Korea’s soft power in response to the US-Korea joint announcement of the THAAD (Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense) program and harsher US penalties on countries that do business with North Korea. For example, a Chinese company was fined for trying to promote a K-pop performance without government approval; the Chinese government began delaying visa processing for Korean stars without explanation; a Korean TV show displayed in China was canceled out of the blue. The message is clear: China considers Korea’s cultural influence a threat to its own global power plays, and how better to mitigate that threat than to leverage its own influence over North Korea to jointly push back against South Korean culture? Without support from China, South Korea’s prospects of influencing North Korean politics become heavily diminished; however, the prospects of Chinese support on Korean reconciliation remain grim.
The current relationship between North and South Korea is that of post-Sunshine policy politics, in which former semblances of political agreements have been replaced with terse militaristic standoffs. Amidst threats of nuclear war, K-pop brings with it a shared sense of humanity between North and South Korean citizens. For North Koreans, K-pop undercuts the grossly dehumanizing propaganda the government drills into its citizens minds, like how South Koreans grow devilish horns on their heads and arbitrarily beat up civilians on the streets. For South Koreans, who are becoming increasingly opposed to reunification (only 20% support immediate reunification), the northward embrace of K-pop may bring with it a lessened alienation felt by its young population from North Korea’s young population, and a feeling that reunification is indeed worth its estimated $500 billion to 1 trillion price tag. Thus, with its grasp on soft power, South Korea may find surprising benefits to its utilization of K-pop as means of cultural communication; if North Koreans’ envy of the of the glitzy South Korean lifestyle seen in songs such as Psy’s “Gangnam Style” transform into more tangible desires for social change, the Koreas may be one step closer to the nebulous idea of reunification.
