Watching K-Pop Can Get You Killed in North Korea, and It May Be About To Get Worse

The execution was carried out at a mine. A 22-year-old man was shot by a firing squad in South Hwanghae Province in 2022 — not for violence, not for theft, but for listening to 70 South Korean songs, watching three South Korean films, and distributing them to others. His offense, documented from defectors’ testimony compiled by South Korea’s Unification Ministry, amounted to pressing play.The killings have only accelerated since then, with this young man’s case one of hundreds cataloged by the Transitional Justice Working Group, a Seoul-based human rights organization, in its report entitled “Mapping North Korea’s Executions Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic.”The landmark report, published in the spring, found that executions in North Korea surged 247 percent between 2020 and 2024 compared to the previous five-year period, with at least 153 people executed or sentenced to death during that time. The findings draw on interviews with 265 North Korean defectors, reporting from five media organizations with in-country contacts, and satellite imagery mapping 46 execution sites — the most granular picture yet of a state that has turned cultural consumption into a capital offense. Amnesty International has independently corroborated the findings, including accounts of high school students in Yanggang Province executed for watching Squid Game and others sentenced to labor camps for listening to Korean bands like international superstars K-Pop. As recently as late May, two university graduates in Haeju, South Hwanghae Province, were executed at a secret site on the city’s outskirts for distributing banned videos, including South Korean content — evidence the killing campaign is still active. “Outside information is the Achilles’ heel of North Korea’s political stability,” the chief executive officer of the Korea Risk Group, Chad O’Carroll, tells The New York Sun, adding that South Korean content is especially dangerous to the regime because it gives ordinary citizens a direct point of comparison with a world they are told does not exist.For Kim Jong Un, Mr. O’Carroll argues, suppressing that information “is not a side issue for Pyongyang. It is central to regime survival.”A Law Written to KillThe timing of the uptick in cultural executions was no accident. Executions had declined from 2015 to 2019 amid scrutiny from the United Nations Commission of Inquiry, but surged again after the COVID-19 border closure in 2020. With outside monitors cut off and internal movement restricted, Kim Jong Un moved to consolidate ideological control. What followed was a killing campaign with a cultural target.In 2020, North Korea adopted the Anti-Reactionary Ideology and Culture Act, banning its population from distributing, watching, or listening to any South Korean cultural content. Violations are punishable by years of hard labor for possession of small quantities of banned material, and death for larger amounts or distribution.In February, dozens of young coal miners in South Pyongan Province were arrested for watching and sharing South Korean videos; public denunciation sessions in April framed the violations as an existential threat to the state. “Yes, the new law aims to achieve a uniform standard of punishment,” the legal analyst at the Transitional Justice Working Group, Ethan Hee-Seok Shin, tells the Sun. “Prior to 2020, because there were no clear provisions to punish consuming or distributing South Korean cultural contents and the general provisions had carried relatively light sentences, those who were caught could seek ‘loopholes’ by using personal connections and/or bribing officials to get a slap on the wrist. With the new law, this becomes much more difficult.”Others see the 2020 law less as a turning point than an escalation of something already entrenched. “There was no fundamental change. There was simply an amplification of coercion, control, surveillance, and punishment that had been going on since the establishment of the DPRK in 1948,” the president and CEO of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Greg Scarlatoiu, tells the Sun. For Mr. Scarlatoiu, this violence serves a single overriding purpose: “regime survival.”Nearly three-quarters of executions documented by the Transitional Justice Working Group were carried out publicly, often at airfields, riverbanks, and marketplaces — performances staged to remind entire communities what awaited those who reached for the outside world.The group also found cultural-violation executions occurring deep inland, not just in border regions — suggesting South Korean media had spread far more widely than the regime had acknowledged. The crackdown was a map of its own failure. The number of executions for political crimes also rose sharply, climbing to 28 from just four in the previous five-year period. The working group documented 46 execution sites across the country, with the organization noting that half of the 10 sites identified at Pyongyang were located near Mr. Kim’s offices — a detail that speaks to how centrally the killing apparatus is managed.A follow-up United Nations human rights assessment in 2025 found the country’s economy, along with its killing record, had not improved over the preceding decade and had, in many respects, worsened. It cited food shortages, forced labor, and tighter restrictions on movement. ‘The Existential Threat is South Korea Itself’The regime’s fear of South Korean culture is not incidental — it is, analysts say, the defining anxiety of Mr. Kim’s rule. “The executions reveal the regime fears information more than weapons. South Korean dramas, music, and outside media expose Koreans in the north to alternative identities, prosperity, and freedom,” the vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy, David Maxwell, tells the Sun. “The Kim family regime understands that once people compare truth to propaganda, ideological control weakens.”Mr. Maxwell argues that it is not South Korea’s military that keeps Mr. Kim up at night — it is South Korea’s existence. “The existential threat to the Kim family regime is South Korea,” he explains. That pressure from outside information has forced the regime into an increasingly aggressive posture toward its own people, making South Korea an existential threat to the North’s population as well.“Since maintaining a complete information blockade is difficult, and because North Korean youth are eager to learn what occurs in the rest of the world, the Kim Jong Un regime has come up with even stronger measures to suppress information, in particular stricter legislation and reliance on more severe punishments,” the co-chair emeritus of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Roberta Cohen.“Outside information is considered a national security threat that can weaken the political obedience required to sustain the regime,” Ms. Cohen said.Not everyone accepts the working group’s data at face value. The professorial research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, Hazel Smith, raises methodological questions about the findings.“To my knowledge, no one has figures for the number of people suffering capital punishment,” Ms. Smith tells the Sun, noting that defector reports have historically been contradictory and often indirect, with recent accounts describing executions they heard of rather than witnessed firsthand. “As far as I know, there is no credible evidence that North Koreans are being executed for watching South Korean media.”Many others dismiss that skepticism. Ms. Cohen argues that evidence — satellite imagery, United Nations documentation, defector networks, and testimony from former North Korean officials who have fled abroad in recent years — is only growing, and that efforts to cast doubt on it have come primarily from Pyongyang’s closest allies.“A read through the UN’s latest 2025 update on the human rights situation provides extensive information based on hundreds of witnesses and experts, which continues to show that the human rights situation in North Korea is one of crimes against humanity unparalleled in the contemporary world,” Ms. Cohen says.Succession and the Next WaveWhat rights researchers fear most now is not the killing that has already taken place — it is what a leadership transition could unleash next.North Korea’s Ninth Workers’ Party Congress — the country’s most important political gathering, which convenes only once every five years — opened in February. Mr. Kim’s 14’ish-year-old daughter, Kim Ju Ae, was conspicuously absent from the congress despite expectations she might be named to the party’s number two post. The Transitional Justice Working Group has warned that the situation could worsen as the regime prepares for a potential fourth-generation succession. It notes a high risk of increased executions, which could be used to strengthen cultural and ideological control during a transition period.Signs of that transition are already visible. In early 2026 state media showed Ms. Kim at a shooting range alongside senior officials after her father gifted sniper rifles to top commanders. One widely circulated photo of her firing the rifle was later flagged as potentially AI-manipulated. Within days, however, South Korean intelligence reported she had been elevated to a role akin to director within North Korea’s Missile Administration, the body overseeing Mr. Kim’s nuclear forces, with generals reportedly briefing and in some cases taking orders from her.Some reports cited an unconfirmed name change, from Ju Ae to Ju Hae — mirroring her father’s own path to power — and state media have applied the honorific hyangdo, or “guidance,” a term historically reserved for a supreme leader or designated successor. On March 19, she was photographed operating a battle tank during a military drill at Pyongyang’s 60th Training Base.South Korea’s National Intelligence Service reportedly told lawmakers the intelligence was “credible” and that Ms. Kim “can be considered” the designated successor. In April 2026, the intelligence service went further, publicly announcing that Kim Ju Ae is being actively groomed as her father’s successor — the most definitive assessment yet that a fourth generation of Kim family rule is being prepared.Mr. Maxwell, however, is unconvinced that Ms. Kim’s elevation is as straightforward as it appears. “I remain very skeptical that Kim Ju Ae is being groomed for succession,” he tells the Sun. “I subscribe to the assessment that the public presence and the image being presented are to project Kim Jong Un as a beneficent father figure to enhance his legitimacy and reinforce regime ideology.”Still, he argues, the question of whether the succession is real changes little about the repression it will produce.“If Kim Ju Ae is being prepared as successor, the regime will likely intensify loyalty campaigns, information controls, and punitive measures,” he says. “Hereditary dictatorship requires manufactured reverence because no democratic legitimacy exists.”History suggests the bloodletting that accompanies any power transfer in Pyongyang is not a side effect, it is the point.“Kim Jong Un is a totalitarian ruler, so if he feels that the dynastic succession is at risk, he could order a mass purge of his real or perceived enemies,” Mr. Shin says. “The leadership change in Pyongyang was always followed by a bloody purge of those deemed to be closer to the previous supreme leader, and the historical pattern is likely to repeat itself.”The prospect of a female successor adds another layer of volatility to an already fraught transition. Mr. Scarlatoiu argues that Ms. Kim, were she to inherit power, would face a military hierarchy that has never answered to a woman, and she will demonstrate her authority accordingly.“A first woman leader of North Korea would have to be much tougher than her male predecessors, as she would have to prove herself and establish her grip on power,” he asserts.The testimony base for documenting whatever comes next, however, has eroded sharply. The number of defectors reaching South Korea collapsed from 1,275 in 2015 to just 224 in 2025 — a direct consequence of the pandemic-era border shutdown, shoot-to-kill orders along the frontier with China, and Beijing’s accelerated repatriation of defectors caught on Chinese soil since 2023. The result is a narrowing window into a country whose capacity for violence shows no sign of diminishing.Mr. Maxwell acknowledges the constraint yet refuses to let it become an alibi for inaction. “Limited visibility affects precision in our analysis, not the overall assessment that repression, ideological crackdowns, and human rights abuses are systemic and severe,” he adds. “And I fear they are getting worse.”

Watching K-Pop Can Get You Killed in North Korea, and It May Be About To Get Worse

Watching K-Pop Can Get You Killed in North Korea, and It May Be About To Get Worse

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