A rising Korean wave: If Seoul sells it, China craves it

By Norimitsu Onishi
The New York Times
TUESDAY, JANUARY 3, 2006

We know that the products at Korea City are made in China," said Wang Ying, 28, who works in sales for the local branch of a U.S. company. "But to many young people, 'Korea' stands for fashionable or stylish. So they copy the Korean style."

From clothes to hairstyles, music to television dramas, South Korea has been defining the tastes of many Chinese and other Asians for the past half decade. As part of what the Chinese call the Korean Wave of pop culture, a television drama about a royal cook, "The Jewel in the Palace," is garnering record ratings throughout Asia, and Rain, a 23-year-old singer from Seoul, drew more than 40,000 fans to a sold-out concert at a sports stadium in Beijing in October.

But South Korea's "soft power" also extends to the material and spiritual spheres. Samsung's cellphones and television sets have grown into symbols of a coveted consumerism for many Chinese.

Christianity, in the evangelical form championed by South Korean missionaries deployed throughout China, is finding Chinese converts despite Beijing's efforts to rein in its spread.

For a country that traditionally received culture, especially from China but also from Japan and the United States, South Korea finds itself at a turning point in its new role as exporter.

The transformation began with South Korea's democratization in the late 1980s, which unleashed sweeping domestic changes. As its democracy and economy have matured, its influence on the rest of Asia, negligible until a decade ago, has grown accordingly. Its cultural exports have even caused complaints about cultural invasion in China and Vietnam.

South Korea is also acting as a filter for Western values, experts say, making them more palatable to Chinese and other Asians.

Historically, Christianity made little headway in East Asia, except in South Korea, whose population is now about 30 percent Christian and whose overseas missionary movement is the world's second largest after the United States.

Today, in China, South Korean missionaries are bringing Christianity with an Asian face. South Korean movies and dramas about urban professionals in Seoul, though not overtly political, present images of modern lives centering on individual happiness and sophisticated consumerism.

They also show enduring Confucian-rooted values in their emphasis on family relations, offering Chinese both a reminder of what was lost during the Cultural Revolution and an example of an Asian country that has modernized and retained its traditions.

"Three Guys and Three Girls" and "Three Friends" are South Korea's homegrown version of the American television show "Friends." As for "Sex and the City," its South Korean twin, "The Marrying Type," a sitcom about three single professional women in their 30s looking for love in Seoul, was so popular in China that episodes were illegally downloaded or sold on pirated DVDs.

"We feel that we can see a modern lifestyle in those shows," said Qu Yuan, 23, a student at Tsinghua University in Beijing. "We know that South Korea and America have similar political systems and economies. But it's easier to accept that lifestyle from South Koreans because they are culturally closer to us. We feel we can live like them in a few years."

Jin Yaxi, 25, a graduate student at Peking University, said, "We like American culture, but we can't accept it directly."

"And there is no obstacle to our accepting South Korean culture, unlike Japanese culture," said Jin, who has studied both Korean and Japanese. "Because of the history between China and Japan, if a young person here likes Japanese culture, the parents will get angry."

Politics also seem to underlie the Chinese preference for South Korean-filtered American hip-hop culture. Messages about rebelliousness, teenage angst and freedom appear more palatable to Chinese in their Koreanized versions.

Kwon Ki Joon, 22, a South Korean who attends Peking University and graduated from a Chinese high school in Beijing, said his male Chinese friends were fans of South Korean hip-hop bands, like HOT, and its song "We Are the Future."

"It's about wanting a more open world, about rebelliousness," he said. "Korean hip-hop is basically trying to adapt American hip-hop."

Like many South Koreans, Oh Dong Suk, 40, an investor in online games in Beijing, said he believed South Korea's pop culture was a fruit of the country's democratization. "If you watch South Korean movies from the 1970s or 1980s, you could feel that it was a controlled society," Oh said.

Hwang In Choul, 35, a South Korean missionary in Beijing, also sees a direct link between South Korea's democratization and its influence in China. After restrictions on travel outside South Korea were lifted in the late 1980s, South Korea's missionary movement grew from several hundred into its current size of 14,000.

Hwang, who since 2000 has trained 50 Chinese pastors to proselytize, is among the 1,500 South Korean missionaries evangelizing in China, usually secretly. "Under military rule, it was simply not possible to come out of South Korea, and even our activities inside the country were monitored," Hwang said. "We had the potential to be missionaries out in the world, but we were constrained."

Until South Korea and China, enemies during the Korean War, normalized relations in 1992, North Korea had a stronger presence in Beijing, with its embassy, restaurants and shops. Back then, South Korea remained unknown to most Chinese, or suffered from a poor image.

The Korean Wave has been gathering for some time. Its roots are traceable to democratization, which kicked off with the South Korean elections in 1987, and the Seoul Olympics in 1988. Social changes that took decades elsewhere were compressed into a few years.

link to source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/02/news/korea.php

News gathered are purely for information purposes only. The author has no other objective but to update Rain fans on what is happening to their idol. Proper credits are given at the end of each article. Thanks!