ILLICIT TV GIVES LIE TO KIM'S PARADISE By Anna Fifield
Monday, November 26, 2007
At night, after hanging around doing little at work all day, Oh Man-bok would often go home and do what many television viewers around Asia do – switch on one of the South Korean dramas that in recent years have swept across the region as part of a “Korean wave”.
But Mr Oh was watching them in North Korea, where Kim Jong-il has for years restricted access to outside information as part of his efforts to convince the reclusive state's 23m people that they live in a socialist paradise.
North Koreans are increasingly discovering that this is far from the truth.
“Yeah, I've watched so many South Korean DVDs – they're great,” says Mr Oh, who fled the North Korean city of Rajin two months ago and is now hiding in China. “They are smuggled in and we secretly circulate them among our friends.”
Watching, copying or distributing South Korean films is a political crime and “offenders” make up as many as 10 per cent of inmates in North Korean prisons, according to escapees from the country.
So Mr Oh and a friend – never more than one, for fear of attracting attention – would keep the volume low and use a special battery pack so that he could take the disk out of his player during power cuts, when police often mount raids to catch people watching illicit programmes.
The hard line is ironic in a country run by a film buff. Mr Kim's fondness for South Korean movies is so well-known that his Southern counterpart, Roh Moo-hyun, presented him with a box set of one of South Korea's most popular TV dramas, Jewel in the Palace, at last month's inter-Korean summit.
To try to keep North Korea isolated from the outside world, Mr Kim's regime bans anything other than state TV and radio and tries to jam South Korean broadcasts. Foreign newspapers are illegal and the internet is simply unavailable to all but a handful of the elite.
However, news has seeped around the restriction and into North Korea for years.
In recent interviews with the Financial Times along the border with China, North Koreans who have fled the country indicated the flow of information is becoming significantly stronger as economic hardships force Mr Kim's regime to tolerate more trade with the outside world.
The interviewees' names have been changed to protect their identity. The increasing trade between China and North Korea is landing not only clothes and goods in North Korean markets but also DVDs from South Korea and news about vibrant China.
The southern films are particularly threatening for Mr Kim's regime. Pyong-yang's propaganda machine insists life is better in the North, where hunger is widespread and citizens think themselves lucky if they have electricity for a few hours a day.
The dramas make a mockery of such claims. They feature well-dressed Koreans living in high-rise apartments and shopping at department stores selling everything from Louis Vuitton dog carriers to talking rice cookers.
South Korean culture is also permeating the demilitarised zone separating North Korea from the South.
“There were some songs that we used to sing but it wasn't until I came out that I realised they were South Korean,” says Kim Sook, another North Korean escapee now secretly living in northern China. “The soldiers who serve near the DMZ hear South Korean music and then they keep singing them when they move to other parts of the country.”
This alternative “Korean wave” is beginning to change attitudes, says Song Mi-ok, a Korean-Chinese who has visited the North Korean border city of Hoeryong several times in the last year. “There used to be a lot of hostility towards South Korea but now that's gone,” she says. “People now know that South Korea is a very rich country and they hope that South Korea can help them.”
This concerns Mr Kim's regime. “North Korea is not ready for political change,” says Gao Jingzhu, professor of Korean studies at Yanbian University, near the Chinese border with North Korea.
After last month's summit, Mr Gao says, the North's leaders convened a ruling Workers' Party conference in Pyongyang to discuss how to stem South Korea's growing influence while pursuing economic co-operation. “They want South Korea's money but the new closeness is a challenge.”
North Koreans also surreptitiously watch Chinese programmes.
Chinese television, which itself is tightly controlled by the communist regime in Beijing, used to offer subtitled broadcasts in North Korea. With western-style capitalism gaining ground in China, these days even Chinese programmes are too dangerous for North Korea's liking and have been banned.
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