Kim Jong Un Calls K-Pop a ‘Vicious Cancer,’ Calls for Fans to Receive Hard Labor or Death

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North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is cracking down on the popular music emanating from South Korea known as K-pop.

As a result, according to documents smuggled out of the country by South Korea’s Daily NK and translated for Western media by The New York Times’ Choe Sang-Hun, the country passed a law in December to impose five to 15 years of hard labor on citizens convicted of watching or possessing South Korean entertainment. The law imposes up to two years of hard labor on those who “speak, write or sing in South Korean style,” and authorizes the death penalty for anyone accused of smuggling it into the country.

Kim, the so-called “Hermit Kingdom’s” 37-year-old leader, has referred to the music as a “vicious cancer” and blamed it for influencing the “attire, hairstyles, speeches, [and] behaviors” of younger Koreans. The country already executed one man last month for allegedly selling USB devices and CDs containing bootleg copies of South Korean films, music, and other entertainment.

The move is part of a broader effort by Kim to eliminate signs of foreign influence. He warned last year that the country was seeing a “serious change” in the “ideological and mental state” of its young people.

“Young North Koreans think they owe nothing to Kim Jong-un,” North Korean defector Jung Gwang-il, who oversees a network that smuggles K-pop into the country, told The Times. “He must reassert his ideological control on the young if he doesn’t want to lose the foundation for the future of his family’s dynastic rule.”