The Caesarean birth of Korean cool

By John Burton

“The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture” by Euny Hong is just one of a recent spate of books that also includes “Korea: The Impossible Country” and “A Geek in Korea” by Daniel Tudor and “Modern Korea“ by Andrew Salmon. Their appearance underscores the fact that Korea has indeed become “cool.”

But what separates “The Birth of Korean Cool” from its competitors is Hong’s rather audacious claim that the Korean wave, or hallyu, was the result of an effort by the Korean government to push for soft power influence in Asia and even the West.

In Hong’s telling, Korean officials came up with the cagey strategy to woo foreign customers with an attractive mix of K-pop, TV dramas and video games. The pay-off would be that foreigners, particularly those in emerging markets, would feel so good about Korea that they would snap up Samsung smartphones, LG televisions and Hyundai cars. She even talks about how “the Korean government is now taking definite and expensive steps to ensure that the 21st century becomes known as Korea’s century.”

That breezy assertion (which matches the tone of the book) may come as a surprise to those of us who have witnessed Korean bureaucrats fumble and stumble in trying to promote their country overseas ― from rather insipid tourism campaigns to ham-fisted and expensive attempts to win over foreigners to the delights of Korean cuisine.

And if the business goal of the Korean wave strategy is to sell more Korean products overseas, it now appears to be running into a few problems. Just ask Samsung, which has seen sales of its smartphones in China and India start to collapse this year as savvy local rivals suddenly emerge as the dominant players.

What I found most disturbing about Hong’s portrayal of the rise of the Korean wave is that it serves as justification for the top-down, government-led management model that is clearly losing its effectiveness and indeed may be posing a threat to Korea’s future prosperity.

Hong argues that the roots of hallyu could be found in Korea’s financial crisis of 1997 when the government of Kim Dae-jung suddenly realized that Korea needed a culture-exporting machine to balance its reliance on manufactured exports. The result was that government poured money into IT and entertainment companies to achieve this goal.

Hong, who spent several years in Korea as a teenager in the 1980s and is a former TV columnist for the U.S. weekend edition of the Financial Times, doesn’t offer much evidence to support this view besides accepting at face value interviews with Korean bureaucrats who claim credit for the K-wave.

Unfortunately, Hong doesn’t appear to have been living in Korea during this critical turning point and thus may have missed the fact that the rise of Korean culture phenomenon really began in the mid-1990s with the onset of democratization and gained momentum when the financial crisis unleashed a burst of creativity in society as the establishment tottered. It was only later that government decided to jump on the bandwagon once it appeared that popular Korean culture had international appeal.

It is Hong’s apparent endorsement of the manufactured and packaged nature of the K-wave that rankles since she suggests that there was no alternative. She believes that a band like the Beatles could never have been formed in Korea because the country was too poor and Korean kids weren’t allowed to goof off by experimenting with music. “If a Korean music industry was to form, it didn’t have time for the Korean John, Paul, George and Ringo to magically find each other,” she says. It was up to entertainment corporations and the government to do that.

Such sentiments do a disservice to the vibrant Korean artistic scene that ranges from the country’s ground-breaking contemporary art to the highly professional but unappreciated bands that can be seen in small clubs in Hongdae, for example.

The success of Psy, the only Korean musician to have achieved worldwide fame, would appear to undermine Hong’s argument. The “class clown” of the Korean pop scene would never have been included in the K-wave strategy. His cheeky mocking, in “Gangnam Style,” of many of the elements that embody hallyu ― such as glamour, money and physical attractiveness ― represent a potent criticism of the whole phenomenon.

It is the corporatization of Korean culture that eventually could prove to be the Achilles heel of K-wave’s future growth. Many K-pop groups, for example, have captured attention because of a skillful packaging of dance, catchy songs, fashion and beauty, but they lack the authenticity needed to maintain staying power and attract a wider international audience. It is time now for Korea to rediscover its genuine artistic passion rather than rely on the manufactured cultural products it offers the world.

John Burton, a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Seoul-based independent journalist and media consultant. He can be reached at john. burton@insightcomms.com.