Paradox of Korean soft power

The world wants a piece of Korea.

It wants the music, the dramas, the skin care, the fashion, the food — and increasingly, the language itself. A country once associated primarily with its industrial transformation has become a cultural force whose influence extends far beyond its borders.

Yet there is a paradox at the heart of Korea’s global success. The country that captivates the world with its beauty, creativity and aspirational lifestyles is also a society grappling with the pressures of competition, conformity and an increasingly demanding definition of success.

This is not to suggest that Korea’s cultural appeal is an illusion. Its creative achievements are real, and its global influence has been hard-earned. But the image of a country that travels abroad through its cultural exports is necessarily selective. What the world sees is often the finished product, not the social conditions, personal sacrifices or contradictions that exist behind it. Nor does an appreciation of a country’s cultural products necessarily translate into an understanding of the people who create them, or the society in which they live.

The tension becomes clearer when Korea's success is measured not only by what it produces or how it is perceived abroad, but also by how its people experience everyday life. OECD’s 2026 report on well-being in Korea recognized the country's substantial achievements in education, life expectancy, public safety and material living standards. Yet it also identified persistent challenges involving young people's transition from education to employment, mental health, social connectedness and gender equality. So the picture that emerges is neither one of unqualified success nor of widespread failure, but of a society whose remarkable progress has not resolved every question about what it means to live well.

From this perspective, it is evident to us that national success and individual well-being are not interchangeable. A country can become increasingly influential abroad while its people continue to navigate difficult questions about opportunity, belonging and the expectations placed upon them.

For Koreans who have grown up outside Korea, the distance between the country’s global image and the reality of its people can feel particularly personal. We are both Korean by nationality and heritage, but one of us was raised in Brazil and still lives there, an upbringing that has shaped, and continues to shape, how that Koreanness is felt and understood. As Korean culture has become more visible around the world, growing up in Brazil has also meant repeated encounters with expectations of what being Korean is supposed to mean.

The image of Korea that travels internationally is often recognizable and remarkably coherent, but personal identity is rarely so neat. A Koreanness formed in Brazil cannot be separated from the environment that shaped it, the relationships built there or the values embraced along the way. Yet as Koreanness becomes increasingly associated with a particular set of cultural references and expectations, it is hard not to wonder where someone raised this way fits into that picture.

At times, Korea’s growing visibility has brought a feeling of being less Korean rather than becoming more connected to the country. This is not because Koreanness is any less real in an objective sense, but because the version gaining international recognition can feel distant from an identity built over a lifetime somewhere else. In those moments, the pull toward a Brazilian identity grows stronger, not necessarily as a rejection of Korean heritage, but as a way of finding belonging in an identity that feels more immediately familiar and more authentically lived.

This is, of course, one personal experience, not a claim about how every Korean raised abroad feels. But it raises a broader question: When a country becomes globally recognizable through its cultural exports, do the people who belong to it also find themselves measured against the image that has come to represent it?

Perhaps this is one of the limitations of cultural attraction. The image that draws people toward a country can also become the lens through which they expect to understand it. Cultural exports give audiences an entry point, but they cannot encompass every way of living, thinking or identifying within a society. Nor should they be expected to.

The question, then, is not whether Korea deserves its cultural influence. It is whether the country can translate that influence into something deeper than admiration for its products and aesthetics. And perhaps, an equally important question is whether we, as audiences, are willing to look beyond the image that first attracted us.

Korea must be understood as much more than the sum of its most successful exports. Its people are not all represented by the same ideals, and their experiences cannot be reduced to a single image of what it means to be Korean. That includes those who live in Korea, those who live abroad and those whose identities have been shaped by more than one culture.

Ultimately, the measure of cultural influence may not be how perfectly a country is admired, but how much room that admiration leaves for the complexity of the people behind it.

Chyung Eun-ju (ejchyung@snu.ac.kr) is a tech research associate at Donghyun ASP. She earned both her bachelor's in business and master's in marketing from Seoul National University. Joel Cho (joelywcho@gmail.com) is a practicing lawyer specializing in intellectual property and digital law.