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

SEOUL, South Korea — North Koreans living in the authoritarian state have little access to the world, but despite the government’s iron-fisted control over information, leader 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 in the fortress state are bright spots in a situation that is otherwise “not favorable,” according to Sohn Kwang-joo. 

Mr. Sohn is the chairman of the upcoming 2025 Seoul World Convention on North Korean Human Rights, set for Seoul’s city-center plaza and an adjacent hotel, next week.

“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 fact that the conservative government of Donald Trump and the liberal Lee Jae-myung administration are, respectively, disinterested, and actively against.

Washington has put human rights advocacy on the back burner and defunded a range of organizations that formerly broadcast into the fortress state —  such as Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, Mr. Sohn noted.

Seoul has unplugged its own propaganda speakers in the demilitarized zone, and pressured private activists to cease flying balloons, freighted with anti-regime propaganda, north across the frontier.

Nor is Seoul likely to join global critiques of Pyongyang.

“They are more interested in dialog,” said Mr. Sohn — and when it comes to Pyongyang’s human rights abuses, 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 the third most authoritarian state on earth, 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 that there have been some improvements made in the treatment of incarcerated persons, but otherwise, conditions are “dire.”

Orphans and street children are forced to work in “shock brigades” — the term comes from the military —  in mines and other hazardous environments. School children 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” compared to a decade prior, the U.N. 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 new laws enacted since 2015 stipulate execution for vaguely defined “anti-state” propaganda, the U.N. reported.

North Korea, during the COVID pandemic, 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, then his corpse burned with fuel.

Post-pandemic, 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 and last week’s military parade, have been allowed in.

However, North Koreans clearly want two formats of banned content, despite the risks entailed in obtaining it. That indicates the regime’s attempts to wall off outside information is not entirely successful.

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

Mr. Sohn noted that three specific laws take aim at South Korean content: The Anti-Reactionary Ideology Law, the Pyongyang Cultural Protection Law and the Law on Protecting Youth Civilization.

The laws were all 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 at next week’s conference is 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.

Earlier, Mr. Lim said, a network of underground churches was 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, so high is demand that poor North Koreans without access to paper have painstakingly reproduced Biblical texts on flattened cornstalks, he said. Some have been smuggled out 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 persons, speaking separately from Tuesday’s press event, agree on chinks in North Korea’s armor.

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, while also extracting defectors, via the “Underground Railroad” through China and Southeast Asia, to South Korea.  

Due to this secretive work, he maintains contacts with Christian networks in northeast China and in 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,” Rev. Peter said. “That is coming partly from the underground Christian community in North Korea, the more educated ones.”

Lee Hyun-sueng, a North Korean defector, insisted that 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 frontiers 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 at present.    

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

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