East Asia: Culture 3: Pop Culture and the Entertainment Industry

The traditional cultures of China, Japan, and Korea are extremely similar. Chinese culture, with Confucianism at its core, is long-standing, broad, and profound. But when the gaze turns toward pop culture, the scene becomes very different: in terms of overall influence, Korean entertainment is greater than Japanese entertainment, which is far greater than domestic Chinese entertainment. The popularity of Japanese entertainment has its own historical background, enough for a separate essay, so I will set it aside for now. This essay compares and discusses Chinese and Korean pop culture.

Korean entertainment has swept the globe in recent years because of the high degree of industrialization in Korea's cultural industry. Korean entertainment companies led by YG, Blackpink and Bigbang; SM, EXO and NCT; HYBE, BTS; and JYP, Twice, mass-produce idols and works through assembly lines. This assembly line comes from the professional "idol trainee" system, high-quality internationalized film and television production and distribution, and the government's emphasis on the cultural industry.

The first time I encountered the concept of "idol trainee" was Cai Xukun's self-introduction on the Chinese talent show Idol Producer in 2018:

"Hello, national producers. I am Cai Xukun, an individual trainee who has practiced for two and a half years. I like singing, dancing, rap, and basketball."

This opening, serious in tone and slightly deliberate in expression, together with the following hypnotic dance performance and the lyric that sounded like the meme "ji ni tai mei," spread virally across the internet and became an enduring meme for the next several years. Only this May, with the release of Cai Xukun's excellent new work Deadman, did the meme's spread gradually weaken.

The "two and a half years of practice" Cai Xukun mentioned here refers to high-intensity training in singing, dancing, language, performance, and so on at a trainee base in Korea. The meme's popularity reflected the awkwardness of Korean audition-show culture when it first entered China. Viewers could naturally conclude from this clip: "After two and a half years of training, this is the awkward dance and hypnotic lyric you get? That is hilarious." As the meme spread, many Bilibili uploaders began imitating Cai Xukun's basketball and dance moves, but very few could capture the spirit. I also tried to do the classic move "iron mountain lean," only to discover that my limbs were uncoordinated and I could not imitate it. These later phenomena reveal something: the "two and a half years" of Korean-style training really did improve Cai Xukun's performance ability enough to distinguish him from untrained ordinary people.

For Korea's idol assembly line, however, "two and a half years" is not long at all. By comparison, Bigbang's G-Dragon trained at SM and YG for a total of eleven years. Although Cai Xukun's progress can be seen from Just Because You Are Too Beautiful to Lover and then Deadman, even Deadman only amazed me on first listen and then entered my playlist as one of many good songs. In other words, Deadman should be the standard an artist ought to have at debut. Under the circumstances that Cai Xukun had insufficient training time, weaker performance and singing ability than many Korean trainees, and had sung an awkward song like Just Because You Are Too Beautiful, he still won first place on Idol Producer that year and debuted in the C position as the leader of the boy group Nine Percent. This clearly shows the gap between domestic entertainment and Korean entertainment in the industrial assembly line: even the defective products of Korea's assembly line are enough to sweep through the Chinese market.

Once an assembly line capable of producing large numbers of high-quality idols and works exists, the next question is how to spread the products that already exist.

In the last century, works by phenomenal stars such as Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson were mainly disseminated through traditional media such as radio, television, records, and magazines. These media spread slowly and cost a great deal, so most companies at the time lacked the funds to industrialize idol production. Only a few singers and actors with extraordinary talent and excellence could enter global view. Entering the twenty-first century, the popularization of the internet brought an information revolution, and streaming media became the new mainstream medium. Internet companies entered the entertainment industry, raising the speed and lowering the cost of cultural dissemination.

Take Korean entertainment as an example. Behind the major entertainment companies there are often investments and cooperation from local Korean internet giants such as Naver and Kakao, similar to Tencent and Baidu in China. In overseas dissemination, Korean film, television, songs, and dance use Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube for free meme-based spread, then earn revenue through cooperation with paid OTT platforms such as Netflix. Some IP that generates strong revenue even moves from the internet into offline spaces; the physical promotions for Squid Game around the world are a classic example. Major stars also have merchandise of all sizes, and without exception it is heavily overpriced.

In this way, Korean entertainment companies seized the emerging technology of the "internet," used industrialized production to generate revenue, and that revenue in turn encouraged them to explore and create more high-quality IP and products. From the perspective of industrial development alone, this virtuous cycle is very much worth learning from for domestic Chinese entertainment.

Although in the internet era, China's cultural export can roughly be summarized by the word "failure," the recently rising technology of "artificial intelligence" may perhaps trigger a new round of transformation in the cultural industry. In 2025, China has performed excellently in the AI field. Whether it can make good use of this technology to lead a new round of cultural dissemination involves the last and most important point: policy and censorship.

As early as 1998, the Korean government proposed the policy of "building the nation through culture," requiring the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to receive an annual budget equal to 1% of the national budget. In 2009, the Korean National Assembly merged five cultural institutions into the Korea Creative Content Agency, vigorously assisting the overseas promotion of the cultural industry.

China has similar policies. The Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Party Congress proposed building a "cultural power" by 2035. But in concrete implementation, the two countries differ greatly. China's cultural departments include the Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the National Radio and Television Administration, and internet-communication departments such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Cyberspace Administration. These departments are notorious in literary and artistic circles, mainly due to their strong ideological orientation and strict censorship. In contrast, although South Korea also has censorship, for example strict restrictions on pornography, it is relatively relaxed and allows diverse and modern values to coexist.

China has already achieved technological catch-up in the internet era, but its cultural industry has not developed in step. If the authorities have not realized that censorship is too strict, which is not very likely, or if they realize it but do not change, then even in an AI era where China may achieve technological leadership, the failure of the cultural industry will remain inevitable.