The world’s most extreme cancel culture

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. North Korea’s rulers have always had strong views on art. Kim Il Sung, the regime’s founding despot, said artists should “arouse burning hatred for the enemy through their works".

His son and successor, Kim Jong Il, was such a cinema enthusiast that he kidnapped a South Korean director and his actress ex-wife and forced them to make propaganda films, including a (surprisingly good) revolutionary Godzilla-style monster flick. Kim Jong Un, the current ruler, demands “masterpieces pulsating with the sentiment of the times", by which he means praise for himself. The president of South Korea probably has views on the arts, too.

But because it is a democracy, its artists do not have to care what he thinks. Which helps explain why South Korean pop culture has spread joy across the world, whereas North Korean “people’s culture" has not. On YouTube “Gangnam Style", a South Korean rap video, has been viewed 5bn times—nearly 60 times as often as “Kiss", a popular children’s song from the North.

On IMDb, an online film database, the top South Korean films have hundreds of thousands of ratings; the top northern ones, hardly any. The gulf is so vast that only a logarithmic scale can illustrate it (see charts). Cultural success translates into cash.

Half of the top ten bestselling albums in the world last year were South Korean, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group. The country’s pop-culture exports were a whopping $13bn in 2022, up from just under $5bn in 2013. This sum dwarfs North Korea’s official exports of all goods and services combined.