ABSTRACT

North Korea’s Great Famine of the mid-1990s is estimated to have killed 2.8 million to 3.5 million North Korean citizens and led many famine survivors to cross the North Korean–Chinese border in search of food (Noland et al. 2001). Famine survivors had no conception of the outside world because they were ordinary citizens from the most closed country in the world, with no freedom to travel to other countries. In the early stages of the Great Famine, North Koreans defected from their home country “temporarily,” and had no intention of leaving permanently. Thus, they illegally traveled back and forth between North Korea and China to feed themselves and their family members. However, years after the Great Famine, their frequent visits to China exposed them to a wide range of new elements from foreign cultures, including South Korean television dramas, movies and K-pop music (Lee 2016). These cultural products increasingly entertained North Koreans and triggered their curiosity about the outside world. They began to smuggle foreign media products into North Korea on USBs and DVDs and sell them in the North Korean black market called Jangmadang (Tudor and Pearson 2015). In the Jangmadang, South Korean items are in high demand because they mirror the desirable lifestyle and culture of South Koreans sharing the same language, history and traditions that remain inaccessible since the Korean War (1950–1953). With the growing popularity of South Korean media products, the Korean Wave (Hallyu in Korean) has infiltrated into North Korea after the Great Famine.