North Korea’s premier pop group, the all-girl Moranbong band reportedly formed by leader Kim Jong-Un, has cancelled its first concert overseas, China’s National Centre for the Performing Arts said today.
Advertisement
According to Xinhua, the performances “cannot be staged as scheduled due to communication issues at the working level”.
The abrupt pull-out from a performance in China by Moranbong Band, North Korea’s answer to South Korea’s head-turning girl groups, is likely to strain ties between Pyongyang and Beijing, but the degree of which remains heavily disputed. The chorus left Beijing for Pyongyang by train Saturday night.
However the cancelled ‘friendship’ concerts which were supposed to showcase improving relations between North Korea and China have had the opposite effect.
North Korea analysts offered a range of reasons to explain the band’s sudden return to Pyongyang.
The Communist Party of China’s International Liaison Department, which invited Moranbong, deleted photos on its website of its director, Song Tao, shaking hands with North Korean Workers Party secretary Choe Hui, who accompanied the performers and abridged related text. Critics of North Korea see the band as another example of the isolated nation’s attempts at soft power.
As to the scheduled party congress to be attended by more than 3,000 officials, the KINU said it would introduce more new faces in the ruling elite rather than fresh policies.
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and an unidentified woman watch a performance of the Moranbong Band in Pyongyang in July 2012. Chinese state media said they were due to give three concerts in Beijing.
KCNA even cited a report from China’s Global Times newspaper quoting Lu Chao, a researcher of the Liaoning Provincial Academy of Social Sciences, as saying that the performance tour “goes to prove that China and the DPRK [have] made a substantial progress in the field of high-level cultural exchange”.
Although Kim Jong Un may have hoped that the Moranbong Band would help defuse tensions, it’s hard to imagine that a hit single like”Our Dear Leader!”. Ties between the sides have been noticeably cooler since Kim assumed power in 2011.
China has traditionally been North Korea’s sole regional ally and main provider of trade and aid, but ties have become strained in recent years as Pyongyang has pressed ahead with internationally condemned nuclear tests.
Advertisement
In October, in a sign of improvement the number-five ranking functionary in Beijing, Politburo member Liu Yunshan, was the most important guest of honour at a military parade in Pyongyang marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia.
