Korean Culture Case Study

Yujie WANG
M1—LCAI
Culture Studies: Asia Pacific Region
Instructor: C.Tournu
15 March 2016

The popularity of South Korean Culture In Eastern Asia

In 1990s, an increasing number of Korean popular cultural contents, including television soap operas, movies, pop music, and the celebrities who made by the Korean industrialised entertainment companies, has gained immense popularity in Eastern Asian region. In 1999, medias have recognised the rise of Korean popular culture in Asia by rendering it as ‘Korean Wave’. From food to music , all things Korean prevail across Asia, where Tokyo and Hollywood has long been the centre of the Asian pop culture (Visser, 2002).
Since ‘What is Love All About’ ,'Stars in My Heart' and 'Model' in the late 90s,

The post-1997 Asian Financial Crisis that savaged the Korean national economy contributed to the stepping-up of the exporting of Korean pop culture as part of the national export industry. The same crisis had led television industries in the other affected expensive Japanese Dramas. The confluence of these two separate industry strategies led to the rapid importation and screening of Korean TV dramas in the rest of East Asia, except Japan, creating the so-called ‘Korean Wave’ in the region.
When Korean drama initially made its entry to China, it didn't rely on large-scale propaganda to open Chinese market, which is nowhere near as aggressive as those Korean automobile and technologic product brands did. Even so, Korean drama’s influence and high penetration rate are hardly to match with. Both in China and Japan, families and people from different occupations, genders and ages, who may don't have Samsung or Hyundai, are unexpectedly so familiar with all the Korean dramas and the actors. In order to watch those soap series, they would rather endure endless and annoying

A popular culture could be accepted by domestic audience, but in order to gain a regional and global influence, it need to have more effort and power to hybrid with other country culture, even more defeating the pre-existing popular culture.

Culture Hybridisation,Globalisation and Korean Entertainment Industry
Globalisation is understood as an outcome of the workings of the project of modernity (Giddens, 1991). According to Tomlinson, it is ‘the spread of the culture of modernity itself. This is a discourse of historical change, of “development”, of a global movement towards . . . capitalism’

Conclusion
Since the establishment of China-South Korea diplomatic ties in 1992，especially in recent years, South Korea’s influence on China is increasing

Reference:
Hong, Euny :The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture
Iwabuchi, Koichi; Huat, Chua Beng (2008): East Asian pop culture
Jung, Eun-Young (2009): Transnational Korea: A Critical Assessment of Korean Wave in Asia and the United