How South Korea became a new cultural powerhouse

Leaving Japan and China trailing in its wake, South Korea has established itself as a global exporter of culture. How did we get here?

Seoul street

Have you seen Squid Game? Do you listen to BTS or any K-Pop? The closest I’ve come to hearing Korean music is Psy’s Gangnam Style in 2012. But unless you, dear reader, have been living under a moon-sized rock, you would know that South Korean culture is rapidly becoming one of the new, great global exports.


The powerhouse of South Korea stems from its position as a country consistently oriented towards exporting. And its close Asian compatriots, namely China and Japan, have been left scratching their heads as to why their enormous investments into original content have only been minor in the wake of the lower part of the Korean peninsula. 

But it’s a misnomer to label South Korea’s explosion onto the global cultural scene as an overnight wonder. It’s a success story over 20 years in the making.

South Korean artist PSY performs his famous dance

The History

It is important to briefly look back at the history of South Korea to see how we’ve got to this point. 

Korean society has experienced a massive amount of change over a short period. Until 1945, Korea was under Japan’s barbaric colonial rule until a US-backed move split the peninsula in half. From 1963 to 1980, the newly baptised South Korea experienced tremendous economic growth, known as the Han River Miracle.

Though it seemed that South Korea in the 80s and 90s was a peaceful, developed place, the country fell into total abyss during the 1997 Asian crisis. Society was ripped apart, and the government finally made the decision to borrow around $30 billion from the IMF. After the money was somehow repaid and the debt was overcome, the people near the top of the political and economic spectrum harvested the fruits of success.

This is a large simplification, but essentially, it became a society where the people who fell behind did not know how to move forward. There was no safety net in society, with high rates of homelessness and unemployment. As usual, the rich got richer, and the poor got poorer. But the deprivation of the bottom rungs of society was not the worst problem. Rather, the problem was how that same deprivation made way for alienation.

This alienation is something that is dealt with in the latest Netflix true crime series, The Raincoat Killer, which follows the very first South Korean serial killer. It is also largely dealt with in Bong Joon-ho’s global smash, Parasite, about the cycle of generational and class-based degradation. They are themes that return over and over to South Korean cinema.

Yet it was out of the bruising experience of this 1997 Asian financial crisis that the successive South Korean governments were convinced to invest heavily in the country’s digital infrastructure and the promotion of its cultural exports. The rise of South Korea’s entertainment industry bears many of the hallmarks of the country’s success stories in manufacturing sectors like the automobile sector and consumer electronics. There is an “active state involvement, a willingness to absorb and finesse foreign influences, and a near-pathological export-oriented mindset.”

“The financial crisis convinced policymakers that there was a limit to what could be achieved through the manufacture of physical goods,” says Yong Kwon of the Korea Economic Institute of America.

Perhaps more importantly, intending to tackle an impending onslaught of its former colonial ruler’s Japanese movies, anime, manga, and J-pop, the South Korean Ministry of Culture made a request for a substantial budget increase, which allowed the creation of 300 cultural industry departments in colleges and universities nationwide. These departments and cultural bureaus produce most of the Korean music and cinema content we see now on a global scale.

A street in Seoul South Korea

Seoul in 1910

Modern Seoul

Seoul in 2021

The Korean term for this global phenomenon of the Korean Wave is Hanryu, more commonly romanized as Hallyu. There have been several iterations of Hallyu, from the first to now that of Squid Game and BTS and Psy, known as Hallyu 3.0.

The astounding success of Hallyu raises the question of how Korea has managed to break into the global mainstream in ways that others — including its much larger neighbours China and Japan — have not. 

This week, the FT interviewed a Korean executive who clearly delineated the difference between this great trio of East Asian cultural powers: “For the Japanese, foreign markets were an afterthought. The Chinese cut their platforms off from the rest of the world. 

“But for the Koreans, it has always been about exports … the Japanese had the right idea when Sony bought into Hollywood. Their misfortune is that they peaked too early… Japan’s cultural moment occurred in the age of the video cassette … the Koreans had YouTube. There’s no contest.”

Japan’s cultural moment occurred in the age of the video cassette … the Koreans had YouTube …

Perhaps the reason that a show like The Raincoat Killer is so much better than the classic Netflix true crime fare is that through its veering interviews with members of the Seoul police force – some of whom look like noir detective characters with dark overcoats on their shirt and tie and speaking through puffs of cigarette smoke and dark sunglasses – they are brutally honest about their failings and the failings of society.

(It’s important to mention how some of these police detectives dress because I suspect it is a Western way of dressing the cinematic ‘detective’ that has been assimilated into Korean police culture.)

It’s refreshing to see people who work for an institution who aren’t trying to defend it but who sometimes actually laugh at how comically bad the ways government forces can carry out their duties. They are honest about how sex workers are seen as sub-human. They are honest about how class affects the way police officers make decisions. You would never see this in a documentary about Western police forces. They would always be masquerading under a PC (ha!) answer. I think that is what has made the South Korean cultural export so popular. From music to food to film, they pull no punches.

A character from Netflix The Raincoat Killer Seoul South Korea

The South Koreans are also very good at making film and TV that is not overtly political but can be unpacked as such if desired. Yeon Sang-ho’s 2016 Train to Busan, for example, is, on the surface, an entertaining zombie film, and it can be just that if you want it to be. But it also injects subtleties of class tension that you simply do not get in something like Shaun of the Dead

The Netflix sensation Squid Game – the streaming service’s most-watched show ever – gives global exposure to these traditional Korean fixations with economic precarity and social violence. They’re themes that we’re all concerned about but constantly simmer below, usually invisible, Western societies.

What about the future?

In 2021, Netflix will spend $500 million on Korean movies and TV series, an understandable feat since South Korea is the third largest market for the company based on sales figures. As Steven Yeun, lead actor of Minari, said, the rise of the Korean Wave is an important milestone in global entertainment because, after a long period, popular culture from the East can compete on an equal footing with that of the West.

Next year, the Victoria and Albert Museum will conduct an exhibition from September 2022 to June 2023, showcasing the Korean Wave’s unprecedented rise on a global stage.

A character in Squid Game

Even already in the UK, during the early lockdowns, Hallyu became the new cool among young Britons, with BTS breaking the record of most Top 10 hits by any K-pop artist in UK Singles Chart by this May. It’s plausible that some of the reasons for this piqued interest in Korean pop music are the great production value, high visual quality and maybe even the modest video girls. In 2019, BTS sold out two shows at Wembley Stadium within minutes. 

For goodness’ sake, even sales of Gochujang sauce and ready-to-eat Korean fried chicken saw 200 per cent growth in sales at Marks and Spencers.

But what is perhaps most intriguing about the future of South Korean culture is their ever-rolling plans to move up the value chain. They hope that by investing in metaverse platforms and new-wave streaming services, the country can repeat the trick of the late 1990s and steal the march by adopting next-gen technology more enthusiastically and earlier than everyone else. In May, the South Korean government launched a “Metaverse Alliance” of over 200 companies and institutions and earmarked almost $8bn from its 2022 budget for the country’s next digital transformation.

Will this be the entertainment bet of the century? I think so.


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