South Korea, BTS and "soft power"

With BTS as special presidential envoys, South Korean President Moon Jae-in is currently delivering a masterclass in cultural diplomacy - and there is a lot to learn

Source: YouTube

On September 20, over a million people tuned in to watch a session of the, wait for it, UN General Assembly. This sudden surge of interest in the proceedings of a body that has in recent times been termed “irrelevant to ongoing world conflicts” had little to do with global diplomacy and everything to do with the star power of the seven young men scheduled to speak - Kim Namjoon (“RM”), Kim Seok-jin (“Jin”), Jung Ho-seok (j-hope”), Min Yoongi (“Suga"), Kim Taehyung (“V”), Park Jimin (“Jimin”) and Jeon Jeong-guk (“Jungkook”), who collectively form the South Korean pop sensation, BTS.

BTS were at the UNGA with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in their role as newly minted Special Presidential Envoys for Future Generations and Culture to promote the UN’s sustainable development goals. Their address, which included a video of their hit number “Permission to Dance” recorded inside the United Nations General Assembly Hall has been viewed more than 29 million times since, and it’s safe to say that this is the most online discussion we’ve seen in recent times on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

But BTS are not just any pop group. With at least 20 million fans (some estimates place this number at as high as 90 million) spread across the world, BTS stands at the very heart of the so-called Korean wave (“Hallyu”) - the global boom in Korean pop culture that has seen K-pop, K-dramas, Korean films, beauty regimens and food drive international pop culture discussions. Korean companies have been quick to capitalise on this wave, meeting this new demand for all things Korean. Hyundai Research Institute estimates that BTS alone brings about US$3.7 billion into the South Korean economy every year. Approximately 7% of foreign tourists who visit South Korea reportedly do so because of BTS.

And yet, as we in India know well, translating the star power of cultural icons into “soft power” is a whole different ballgame. Ham-handed attempts like the #IndiaTogether propaganda blitz from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (where a series of Indian celebrities tweeted near identical tweets in response to a ministry approved hashtag) for example, did far more harm than good. And far from using Bollywood, India’s best known cultural export, to extend Indian soft power, the current Indian government seems determined to wage war against it. From the ban on Pakistani artists working in Bollywood (which saw the departure of singers like Atif Aslam and actors like Fawad Khan, Mahira Khan) to the political outcry surrounding the death by suicide of actor Sushant Singh Rajput in 2020 and the recent widely publicised arrest of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan on a narcotics related charge, Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP led government seems determined to “clean up” Bollywood.

But in taking on Bollywood, Prime Minister Modi’s government might just be shooting itself in the foot.

Hallyu and the Asian Financial Crisis

While BTS is perhaps the pinnacle of the Korean wave, the story most certainly doesn’t start with them. To understand the impact of Hallyu, one has to return to the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997.

In the second half of 1997, South Korea suffered from its most serious economic crisis since the Korean war. An under-regulated financial sector and an over-leveraged “too big to fail” corporate sector dominated by a few extremely powerful family conglomerates or chaebols left the economy vulnerable to the larger Asian liquidity crisis. Triggered by a sudden reversal of capital flows by foreign creditors, foreign exchange reserves fell dangerously and a balance of payments crisis ensued. Combined with the bankruptcies of some major chaebols, real GDP growth fell to -5.8% and unemployment (which had hovered at around 2% pre crisis) rose to 6.8% in 1998 and 8.1% in the 1999.

It was an abrupt halt to the South Korean growth story of the previous three decades. In December 1997, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, South Korea and the IMF signed a rescue package that included financing for a total of US$58 billion from the IMF, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and a group of countries. This was the largest rescue package in the history of the IMF. As a part of this package, South Korea was forced to undertake a series of structural reforms mandated by the IMF. While the merits and demerits of the IMF reforms are debated to date, for many South Koreans, the crisis and this surrender of economic independence to the IMF were seen as a national humiliation on par with the 1910 annexation by Japan.

On certain metrics, recovery was relatively swift — by August 2001, South Korea had repaid its debt to the IMF and its currency was stable but the process of recovery took its toll. Ordinary Koreans took the repayment of the debt so seriously that they donated personal gold to help the government repay the IMF (some estimates placed the value of this donated gold at above US$ 2 billion). Post crisis interventions like maintaining high interest rates (part of the government push to attract foreign debt) were to financially devastate working class families. Unemployment rates remained relatively high (they are yet to return to their pre crisis levels), and investor confidence in South Korea remained severely shaken.

Taking office in 1998, President Kim Dae-jung’s government while looking to promote new industries to break the dependence of the Korean economy on the chaebols hit upon a fairly curious choice of industry to promote and fund - culture.

Kim Dae-jung’s idea wasn’t entirely without roots. As early as in 1992, Kim Young-sam, South Korea’s first civilian president dramatically reduced censorship. There was a growing realisation within government circles of the monetary potential of culture as an industry. For example, a white paper from from a presidential advisory board on science and technology, which noted that a single movie, Jurassic Park, earned the equivalent of selling 1.5 million Hyundai cars, generated quite the buzz in governmental circles and reportedly led to the subsequent formation in 1994 of a Cultural Industry Bureau.

By the late 1990s, Korean dramas and music were organically gaining popularity outside Korea. The Korean drama series What is Love All About? and Stars in my Heart both became big hits in China. Meanwhile, Asian music channel, Channel V (familiar to many 1990s Indian kids as well) began playing songs by the Korean boy band H.O.T, which quickly raced to the top of the charts in China and Japan. In 1999, the Korean big budget blockbuster Shiri (partially funded by Korean electronics giant Samsung) became a huge hit in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, well and truly launching popular Korean cinema in the region.

In 1998, Kim Dae-jung’s government introduced the Basic Law for Cultural Industry Promotion “providing for matters necessary for supporting and fostering cultural industries” and earmarked US$ 148 million to support cultural industries. The government, which saw cultural industries as integrated with the ICT and electronics industries that they were also trying to push, provided tax breaks for the industry as well as other financial support to make the industry internationally competitive in terms of production quality. This is a policy that subsequent governments have remained committed to across party lines to date.

But unlike the propaganda machines that come to mind when we think of state funded entertainment, Korean state investment in entertainment has been different in its outlook. Perhaps due to the long years of censorship endured during the military governments that ruled the country from 1962-1992, civilian Korean governments have not sought to use cultural exports to promote blatant national propaganda. Instead, they have tended to see the industry from a slightly neoliberal lens- as businesses that are expected to generate export revenue for the home country.

And so far, they have. In New Korean Wave, Dal Yong Jin points out that in 2008, driven by the rise of social media sites and user generated content sites (the so called Hallyu 2.0), Korea achieved its first “surplus” in cultural products - they exported US$2.33 billion worth of cultural goods, while importing $1.98 billion. By 2019, this export number had risen to US$12.3 billion.

Soft power

This is not to say that Korean governments have not used Hallyu to their diplomatic benefit - they most certainly have. But they have tended to do so with a careful understanding of what Joseph Nye first termed “soft power”. Nye defines “soft power” as:

the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals, and policies… When you can get others to admire your ideals and to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction.

For Nye, everything that made people around the world imitate or replicate America contributed to American soft power - from wearing Levi’s jeans to drinking Pepsi to listening to American music or watching American movies.

And if you’re wondering how this “soft power” might work for Korean foreign policy today, let me give you an example - in his television appearances with BTS in America, President Moon Jae-in spoke about tensions in the Korean peninsula. For decades few Americans could place South Korea on a map and fewer still cared particularly about the consequences of a conflict. By putting BTS and discussion on the Korean peninsula in the same TV frame, Moon Jae-in changed all of that. Today, I can guarantee that BTS’s ARMY at least would be extremely worried about the fate of their boys in such a scenario. And getting tens of millions of vocal young people across the globe to worry about the fate of your country is a foreign policy achievement of no mean proportions.

While President Moon Jae-in has ostensibly focussed on the UN’s sustainable development goals, he’s accomplished something far more important diplomatically - he has managed to put seven very popular faces to his country in the minds of young Americans. BTS’s ARMY might or might not grasp all the intricacies of the geopolitics of the Korean peninsula but they are very unlikely to remain indifferent to the possibility of conflict.

Sidestepping pitfalls

And yet, soft power can be a tricky thing to deploy. As Nye points out:

But attraction can turn to repulsion if we act in an arrogant manner and destroy the real message of our deeper values.

In other words, soft power must never seek to dominate or bully or even come across as arrogant. It must be deployed with soft hands. The Koreans are careful not to use Hallyu to stir up regional confrontation or resentment, focussing instead on building cultural exchanges. And while the success of Hallyu in the early days led to some pushback from neighbouring countries that felt their content was being driven out of the market by Korean content, Hallyu has done much to heal fractured relationships in East Asia. This is particularly interesting in the context of Korea-Japan relationships that are often fraught given the painful history of the Japanese annexation of Korea.

The young stars of Hallyu also seem to be very aware of their role in this respect. They tend to be far more diplomatic than their American counterparts. Watch any interview of BTS and the striking impression one takes away is of seven extremely polite and fundamentally decent young men. They speak of positivity and mental health and it is difficult to find anything to really dislike about them (After all how many artists get their lyrics reviewed by a women’s studies professor after past complaints about misogyny?).

President Moon Jae-in on his tour with BTS has been equally careful - while speaking about the sustainable development goals, his rounds of the American TV shows have been remarkably non-confrontational despite speaking on topics like climate change that can be extremely polarising within the US.

Now what can Bollywood do for us?

Entertainment and cultural industries in India are naturally very different from the Korean cultural industries. To begin with, movie industries like Bollywood are far older and larger with massive domestic fan bases that have developed organically over generations. And while Bollywood (and other regional cinema) movies can be popular abroad, until recently this has been driven predominantly by a slightly homesick diaspora. But this may be changing - in 2017, the Aamir Khan starrer, Dangal became incredibly popular in China (which has a negligible Indian diaspora) where it became the highest grossing non Hollywood foreign movie of all time. In 2017, Bollywood film Secret Superstar (also produced by Aamir Khan) starring newcomer Zaira Wasim opened on 11,000 screens in China compared to only 1,800 at home. It grossed over nine times more in China than it did in India.

And while the Chinese love for Bollywood might be new, Bollywood has old roots in other parts of the world - and while these might not account for much revenue, the emotional link to Bollywood from Afghanistan to Egypt to Algeria is an extraordinary source of soft power. For example, Vijay Prashad writes in the Hindu of sitting in an encampment of fighters in Syria and being asked about his favourite Bollywood star and of a fighter from Algeria singing the hit song “Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na” from the 1973 film Aa Gale Lag Ja for him.

Unlike the Korean government that has pretty much had to develop Hallyu top down, Indian governments have, with Bollywood (and other regional cinema industries), access to a readymade international fan base. This is a source of soft power. Deploying this soft power is not difficult but it will require the government to resist the urge to micromanage or censor the industry.

The soft power lessons for any government from Hallyu are simple - support the industry, but don’t seek to control it, let popularity drive content and not ideology, deploy soft power to build bridges in the region not to drum up hatred, and finally, use soft hands - cultural influence must never be seen as too pushy.

With its multinational and multi-generational appeal, Bollywood can be an extraordinary soft power asset. It would be wonderful if the Indian government could see that and use it instead of using Bollywood controversies to drum up hatred to win local votes.