How K-pop and Christianity have managed to punch holes through North Korea’s information wall

SEOUL, South Korea — North Koreans living under iron-fisted control have little access to the world, but Kim Jong-un’s information wall is consistently breached by two powerful outside cultural forces: K-pop and Christianity.

Human rights advocates say the enduring popularity of South Korean entertainment and the hunger for spirituality are bright spots in an otherwise “not favorable” environment, Sohn Kwang-joo said.

Mr. Sohn is chairman of the 2025 Seoul World Convention on North Korean Human Rights, which will be held next week at Seoul’s city center plaza and an adjacent hotel.

“The circumstances we are currently facing are the most challenging for 25 years,” he told Seoul-based foreign reporters Tuesday. The challenge stems from the disinterest of President Trump’s conservative government and the active opposition of South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s liberal administration.

Washington has put human rights advocacy on the back burner and defunded various organizations, such as Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, that once broadcast into the fortress state, Mr. Sohn said.

Seoul has unplugged its propaganda speakers in the Demilitarized Zone and pressured private activists to cease flying balloons, freighted with anti-regime propaganda, north across the border.

Seoul is not likely to join global critiques of Pyongyang.

“They are more interested in dialogue,” said Mr. Sohn, and when it comes to Pyongyang’s human rights abuses, they are “turning a blind eye.”

There is much to turn a blind eye to.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2025 found North Korea to be the world’s third most authoritarian state, behind Myanmar and Afghanistan.

A U.N. report released in September, based on interviews with 314 defectors who have left the country since 2014, found some improvements in the treatment of incarcerated people, but otherwise, conditions are “dire.”

Orphans and street children are forced to work in “shock brigades,” a term that comes from the military, in mines and other hazardous environments. Schoolchildren are often used as forced labor in “backbreaking” work in the agricultural field.

The death penalty is “more widely allowed by law and implemented in practice” than a decade ago, the United Nations found.

Among criminals subject to execution are those found to be engaged in prostitution or pornography, as well as those caught distributing unauthorized media, including South Korean popular culture. Six laws enacted since 2015 stipulate execution for vaguely defined “anti-state” propaganda, the United Nations reported.

During the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, North Korea sealed its borders to the point of deploying special force sniper units to prevent crossing attempts. One would-be South Korean defector who attempted to cross north via the Yellow Sea in 2020 was shot in the water, and his corpse was burned with fuel.

Cross-border trade with China and Russia has resumed, but openings to human traffic remain slow. Just a trickle of Russian tourists and a tiny handful of foreigners to events such as the Pyongyang Marathon in April and the military parade last week have been allowed into the country.

North Koreans clearly want two formats of banned content despite the risks involved in obtaining it. This indicates that the regime’s attempts to wall off outside information are not entirely successful.

South Korean popular culture, most notably its melodramatic TV soap operas and catchy eye-candy pop music, has wowed the world, and North Korea is no exception. Various media formats containing the content, such as thumb drives, are smuggled into North Korea from China and distributed via secret back channels.

Mr. Sohn noted that three specific laws target South Korean content: the Law on Rejecting Reactionary Thought and Culture, the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act, and the Youth Education Guarantee Act.

All were enacted under Mr. Kim, who took power in 2011.

“North Korea faces unprecedented threats in terms of information inflow,” he said. “Outside information has been flowing into the country like never before.”

The other banned content is Bibles.

Lim Chang-ho, who heads the conference’s organizing committee, said a keynote speaker will be Kim Kang, a former North Korean diplomat who has never spoken publicly before. Previously a member of Pyongyang’s elite, he defected in shock after his aunt was found in possession of a Bible in 2016 and punished.

Mr. Lim said earlier that a network of underground churches had been uncovered in the country’s north in 2011. So spooked were authorities that new directives were sent to police and state security offices advising them on how to track down clandestine Christians.

Yet demand is so high that poor North Koreans without access to paper have painstakingly reproduced biblical texts on flattened cornstalks, he said. Some have been smuggled out of the country and will be displayed in Seoul next week.

All this suggests that “movements are happening underground, behind the scenes, at a massive level,” he said.

Other people, speaking separately from Tuesday’s press event, agree on chinks in North Korea’s armor.

The Rev. Tim Peters is an American pastor who heads civic group Helping Hands Korea, which covertly sends seed packages to underground churches deep inside poverty-struck rural North Korea. It also extracts defectors via the “Underground Railroad” through China and Southeast Asia and then to South Korea.

Because of this secretive work, he maintains contact with Christian networks in northeastern China and North Korea.

“I would agree that [South Korean popular culture and Christianity] are helping to accelerate greater awareness of the outside world inside the North,” he said.

“In Pyongyang and [the capital’s port of] Nampo, there are indications of distaste and disaffection for Kim sending troops as cannon fodder into Russia,” Mr. Peters said. “That is coming partly from the underground Christian community in North Korea, the more educated ones.”

Lee Hyun-sueng, a North Korean defector, said information vulnerabilities should be exploited.

“To create cracks in North Korea’s seemingly ironclad regime, flooding the country with external information to dismantle Kim’s deification is essential,” he said.

Various activists and defectors have smuggled information and media through and over North Korea’s borders in small-scale, independent and uncoordinated efforts. A strategically planned, tactically organized and appropriately resourced campaign of information and cognitive operations would demand government backing.

That looks impossible.

Mr. Sohn noted that the last major international conference on North Korean human rights was held in 2005, and it was supported by the U.S. State Department and Freedom House. This time, the three-day event is led by civic groups, and 76 nongovernmental organizations from nine countries will join.

Mr. Sohn said he hopes for a “practical and actionable declaration” to result. “We will work to increase solidarity … to explore ways to enhance the cause through enacting legislation and expanding civil society networks.”