North Korean Girl Band’s Concerts Canceled In Beijing

Kim Jong-un and his wife Ri Sol-ju applaud the Moranbong band in Pyongyang.

While South Korean K-Pop girl bands such as Girls’ Generation and 2NE1 are all the rage south of the 38th parallel that divides the two Koreas, separated and hostile since the end of the Korean War (1950-53), north of the border Moranbong, also known as Moran Hill Ensemble, are, erm, the bomb. Their scheduled performance at the National Center for Performing Arts in Beijing would have been their first overseas show.

Chinese analysts who spoke to Yonhap agreed the Moranbong cancellation would have little influence on bilateral relations, but Yang Xiyu, director of the Foreign Ministry’s Korean Peninsula affairs office, said the leaders of China and North Korea still need to meet, and that it is hard to ascertain when that could take place.

“The sudden cancellation of the Moranbong Band performance is a show bad diplomatic manners, and it will worsen ties between China and the North”, Cho Bong Hyun, a senior researcher at IBK Economic Institute, said. Chinese media said they were due to give three Beijing concerts.

He merely cited a state-run Xinhua news agency report which stated that performance was cancelled because of “communication issues at the working level”. With members handpicked by North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un himself, the Moranbong Band is an all-female music group that performs covers ranging from Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” to the theme from Rocky, according to The Guardian.

Both groups perform music extolling the North Korean state and its leadership.

But Chinese officials insisted. Korea’s spy agency said Tuesday that the cancellation may have come after Beijing chose to send lower-ranking officials to the event after seeing that the show would contain propaganda praising the North Korean leader. “We would like to work with DPRKfor all round cooperation including in the cultural area”, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hong Lei told reporters, playing down the abrupt pull out of the band. Hong insisted, however, that “China pays great attention to cultural exchanges with North Korea”.

The concert had been seen as a fresh sign that ties between the allies were getting warmer after years of strain over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. However, they appeared to be improving following a visit by high-ranking Chinese official Liu Yunshan to Pyongyang in October.