North Korea has recently added Chinese films and dramas to its list of prohibited media, marking an unusual shift in its censorship policies. Unlike its stringent crackdowns on South Korean media, North Korea had previously shown little interest in restricting Chinese content.
According to Radio Free Asia (RFA) on August 28, North Korea’s latest list of “impure recordings,” designated between late May and early June, includes not only South Korean songs, movies, and dramas but also films and dramas from China, India, and Russia.
The regime has reportedly issued orders prohibiting the viewing or distribution of recordings related to Chinese historical perspectives.
The banned Chinese videos include titles such as “The Love Eterne,” “The Charm of Man,” “A Man Who Came to Shanghai,” and “Detective Police.” These films and dramas, produced in Hong Kong or China, were immensely popular in North Korea, to the point where hardly anyone had not seen them.
A source from South Hamgyong Province told RFA, “This is the first time a ban on Chinese media has been issued. We were surprised to see Chinese movies and series, which we thought were safe to watch, now classified as impure recordings.”
The source also confirmed that a recent directive was issued to various party organizations and judicial agencies, instructing them to prevent residents from listening to or disseminating recordings related to “China’s historical views.”
The directive is believed to have come directly from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, following discussions among military committee officials about China’s historical distortions. Since the 1990s, China has been accused of distorting the history of Goguryeo, a Korean kingdom, as part of its “Northeast Project,” which aims to claim the history of the region as that of a Chinese minority group.
Meanwhile, North Korea has continued to crack down on the spread of South Korean culture, citing laws such as the “Anti-Reactionary Thought and Culture Rejection Act.”
According to the 2024 North Korea Human Rights Report published by South Korea’s Ministry of Unification on August 27, the enactment of laws like the Anti-Reactionary Thought and Culture Rejection Act (2020), the Youth Education Guarantee Act (2021), and the Pyongyang Culture Language Protection Act (2023) has led to increasingly severe punishments for those caught accessing South Korean media.
A North Korean defector from South Hwanghae Province testified that in 2022, a 22-year-old farm worker was publicly executed for listening to 70 South Korean songs and watching three movies, which he then shared with seven others.
BY YOUNGNAM KIM [kim.youngnam@koreadaily.com]
