South Korean popular culture and North Korea

Over recent decades South Korea’s vibrant and distinctive populist culture has
spread extensively throughout the world. This book explores how this “Korean
Wave” has also made an impact in North Korea. The book reveals that although
South Korean media have to be consumed underground and unofficially in North
Korea, they are widely watched and listened to. The book examines the ways in
which this is leading to popular yearning in North Korea for migration, defecting
to the South or for people to just become more like South Koreans. Overall, the
book demonstrates that the soft power of the Korean Wave is having an undermining impact on the hard, constraining cultural climate of North Korea.