Korea's Cultural Juggernaut is a Soft-Power Strategy Worth Copying

Steven Kim

Politics, Asia

Conquering the world, one K-pop hit at a time.

In seeking to raise its international profile and influence, Taiwan can take lessons from South Korea’s growing soft power. Its soft power has been expanding through the growing appeal and attraction of its popular culture (a.k.a. Korean Wave or Hallyu) worldwide. As a result, the government has vigorously promoted Korean popular culture, taking advantage of its growing popularity to enhance Korea’s international standing and national image, as well as shape foreigners’ attitudes and preferences on issues of importance to Korea.

The urgent lessons of Korea’s growing soft power for Taiwan are twofold. While smaller countries cannot surpass larger countries in terms of hard power, the former can not only increase their soft power, but even surpass that of the latter. Increasing the ability to shape the attitudes and preferences of foreign peoples and their governments through cultural attraction can offset a country’s limited hard power. As in the case of Korea, Taiwan can expand its soft power to counterbalance its limited capabilities and constricted international space. More importantly, there is no limit to Taiwan’s expansion of soft power, as there is in the acquisition of hard power.

The second lesson is that the most cost-effective and potent means for smaller countries to increase their soft power is to promote popular culture, in order to gain greater recognition, respect and status in the international community. In this regard, Taiwan enjoys many of the same advantages as Korea in being able to successfully launch its own “Taiwan Wave” or Tairyu. Just as greater personal and artistic freedom, made possible by democracy, has led to a renaissance of popular culture in Korea, Taiwan is well situated, as a vibrant democracy, to encourage its people to freely use their creative talents to develop innovative cultural content that can appeal to a global audience. That Taiwan has the capacity to export its popular culture was made evident in the early 2000s, when its TV dramas and pop music became popular in East Asia for a time. Taiwan also shares Korea’s expertise in highly developed information technology, which has enabled Korean entertainment companies to effectively spread Korean pop music (K-pop) worldwide by uploading K-pop content on YouTube and marketing it aggressively through social media.