Why K-Pop Took Off When C-Pop Didn’t

It’s not often that an 18^th century folk song can be said to be the inspiration for a pop concert. But those who attended the finale of BTS’ “ARIRANG” North American concert tour at Los Angeles’ giant SoFi Stadium earlier this month will long remember the tens of thousands of fans who waved South Korean flags and sang along to the traditional Korean melody.

The four-night run in LA was the finale to a tour of 31 sold-out shows, with combined attendance of approximately 1.92 million, according to figures released by the band’s agency. For comparison, Beyoncé’s 2023 Renaissance tour sold about 1.73 million tickets across 35 North American shows. 

Those performances and prizes will have brought smiles to the faces in Seoul’s foreign-policy circles, where there is a keen appreciation for the soft power that K-Pop brings South Korea. In Beijing, it will have led to much gnashing of teeth.

For more than a decade, China has looked on with undisguised envy as its Korean neighbor has accumulated soft power through cultural exports. As far back as the 2014 National People’s Congress, the Communist Party heavyweight Wang Qishan marveled at the reach of Korean culture, citing popular TV dramas like My Love for the Star and the breakout dance hit Gangnam Style by Psy, arguably the first K-Pop star to break big worldwide. 

The interest went beyond public musing: Beijing resolved to learn from Seoul’s example. China’s culture ministry signed an agreement with its South Korean counterpart, providing for annual cultural-industry forums and cooperation in marketing cultural products abroad. 

But it is one thing for Beijing to study Seoul’s cultural outreach, and quite another to match it. China, despite possessing a vastly larger population, an extensive diaspora, and the world’s fourth-largest recorded-music market, has failed to produce a music machine comparable to the international following of the marquee K-Pop acts. And while Taiwan’s Mandarin-language stars and Hong Kong’s Cantopop veterans have their own histories, they haven’t as yet spawned an act as ubiquitous as Blackpink or Stray Kids.

The audience Wang wondered about now extends well beyond America and Europe. Blackpink’s leading Spotify markets in 2024 included Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Brazil, spanning across the Global South, where Beijing has invested billions in the pursuit of soft power. These audiences' affection for K-pop reaches across linguistic and political boundaries, giving Seoul a welcome that its diplomats would struggle to arrange. 

One obvious reason for China’s failure to produce pop stars of global reach is the sheer size of the domestic market. “A concert tour of 10 Chinese cities is probably as big as if they go around the world,” Anthony Fung, professor of journalism and communications at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the Financial Times. Why spend years trying to understand Brazilian teenagers when there is so much money to be made in familiar surroundings? Chinese musicians have perfectly sound commercial reasons to focus on the home market, regardless of their government’s geopolitical ambitions. Korean companies, with fewer customers at home, had more reason to take on the risks and costs of finding fans abroad.

That incentive would have achieved little without companies willing to adapt to foreign tastes. Korean agencies combined intensive training with production and promotion, recruited performers internationally, and hired foreign songwriters and choreographers. They built acts whose appeal survived the loss of the lyrics. For instance, fans didn’t need to understand Korean to dig Psy’s dance moves. The resulting music would not satisfy a purist’s definition of national, but its borrowings helped it travel: Korea’s entertainment industry learned to please people elsewhere.

Those listeners could also help find the next audience. YouTube let fans share performances without waiting for local broadcasters to discover them; viewers could join in by making videos of their own. When Gangnam Style passed a billion views in December 2012, YouTube reported that it had already drawn at least a million views in nearly 75 countries. Fourteen years later, KPop Demon Hunters shows how much further this can go. The Sony Pictures Animation film distributed by Netflix made Korean pop culture its selling point. In other words, American businesses now have their own reasons to keep the world interested in Korea.

Chinese performers, on the other hand, face greater difficulty getting that circulation started. YouTube and Instagram are blocked at home, separating their domestic following from the platforms where potential foreign fans congregate. They can release music overseas, of course. But their most enthusiastic supporters cannot pass it along as easily, so a hit on a Chinese platform has further to travel before it reaches a Mexican listener. Beijing’s determination to police what enters the country complicates its ambition to export what comes out.

The policing also reaches into the relationship between performers and fans. In 2021, China’s internet authorities abolished online rankings of entertainers and tightened supervision of fan accounts. Broadcasting regulators banned idol-development shows and demanded political correctness from entertainers, expressing special disdain for supposedly effeminate men. Some restrictions addressed legitimate concerns about children being induced to overspend. But a state that prescribes acceptable masculinity is doing much more than protecting young consumers: It is claiming jurisdiction over the tastes that pop music exists to indulge. 

This is an expensive preference for a government seeking friends. Joseph Nye, the political scientist who developed the concept of soft power, wrote that “popular entertainment often contains subtle images and messages about individualism, consumer choice, and other values that have important political effects.” The messages themselves—lyrics about youthful love and angst—needn’t concern foreign policy to help a foreign minister. A country that others around the world have encountered as a source of pleasure has a better chance of receiving a sympathetic hearing when it asks for support. Seoul still needs persuasive policies, but K-pop gives it an advantage over governments whose principal introduction to foreign publics is a dispute or a threat.

China itself has supplied a demonstration of how stubborn that affection can be. Beijing’s unofficial restrictions on Korean entertainment, imposed after Seoul agreed to host an American missile-defense system, have not prevented Chinese fans of K-Pop from traveling abroad to see the performers they love. 

Seoul has good reason to encourage an industry capable of sustaining such loyalties. Chinese officials might point to the Korean government’s support for entertainment companies to argue that the state has a useful role in cultural exports, but public assistance doesn’t entitle officials to supervise the relationship with the audience. Foreign listeners bring tastes no ministry can predict, and successful performers need room to accommodate them. China can afford the studios, the training, and the promotion. Its leaders must decide whether they can tolerate a pop star whose first obligation is to please the fans.