CHINA, NATIONAL, POPULAR CULTURE, Analysis: “Korea Wave” Catches China Off Guard
By Lou Li
Song Feifei, an office lady who is well accustomed to her workday from nine to five, recently found her life in a total mess. She was late for work several times, which had never happened to her before. "It is all Dae Jang Geum's fault. I watch it every day till midnight. Then it is hard for me to get up the next morning."
What Feifei referred to as Dae Jang Geum is a Korean TV series currently airing on the Hunan Satellite Television Network. Also known as The Great Jang Geum or Jewel in the Palace, Dae Jang Geum is a 2003 television soap opera produced by South Korean TV channel MBC, winning the highest ratings in South Korean television history at 54 per cent. It has been sweeping across much of the Chinese-speaking world, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese communities in San Francisco, Chicago, as well as in Malaysia.
On the Chinese mainland, it proved to be on another good run, with an average rating of 8.6 percent on its debut, which ranked it as the most watched TV program in the country's 12 biggest cities during its time period.
The big hit, starring the famous South Korean actress Lee Young-Ae, tells the true story of Jang-Geum, the first female royal physician who lived in ancient southern Korea, with its main theme being the heroine's perseverance against a backdrop of traditional Korean culture, such as its royal court cuisine and medicine.
"Korea wave," or "Han liu" in Chinese, refers to the popularity of Korean pop music, TV dramas, movies, fashion, food, and celebrities in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and other regions in Asia. The term "Korea Wave" was first used by the Chinese press in the late 1990s, when Korean TV dramas and Chinese-language remakes of Korean pop music began to gain ground in mainland China and Hong Kong. As we all witness, it's recently reached a new climax with the airing of Dae Jang Geum.
However, the Dae Jang Geum phenomenon is not only about this formidable Korea Wave, or the Hunan TV station, renowned for its recently concluded TV singing contest Super Girls--because it is not its only promoter. CCTV, China's state-owned television monopoly, started the tradition of importing Korean TV series as early as 1997 when it aired a family-themed series called What is Love. Last year, Miss Mermaid, another family-themed long-running Korean TV series, with a rating of 1.63 percent on CCTV-8, was widely considered a miracle for its after midnight broadcasting period, which usually receives extremely low ratings. It topped the most watched TV series' list on its second re-run on CCTV-1 over the past summer vacation.
Right now, in the same time slot as Hunan TV's showing of Dae Jang Geum, CCTV is passionately broadcasting Be Strong, Geum-Soon, a family-themed TV drama about a young widow's strength in the face of misfortune and her steadfast determination for a better life, who is regarded by the audience as the modern version of Jang-Geum. In spite of the intense pressure from Dae Jang Geum, Be Strong, Geum-Soon is also very well received by the Chinese audience, especially among elder women.
China is not alone in the heartland of the Korea Wave; so is Japan, Vietnam, and many other Asian countries. An article from a Japanese newspaper began like this, "Korean actor Bae Yong-joon did what some of his countrymen have dreamed of for decades: He conquered Japan." Bae Yong-joon is the hero of a Korean TV drama called Winter Sonata, which scored huge ratings and drew a large group of wannabes in Japan, including Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
* * *
One day after work, you are invited by a friend to a restaurant featuring Korean cuisine. She suggests going for a Korean movie after the meal. You hear Hope, the theme music for Dae Jang Geum from a record shop on the way. At a street corner, a teenager with Korean style baggy trousers playing on a skateboard bumps into you. Then, you wonder, how come everything in one's daily life has turned Korean all of a sudden?
Experts offer several reasons for the Korea Wave phenomenon. Among them are the facts that most Asian countries share Confucian culture, that Korean culture professes nonviolence, and that the quality of Korean culture and communications have increased sharply in the past few years. In other words, fans embrace Korean cultural products because they convey similar Asian cultural sentiments in sophisticated packages.
But the interesting point here is that China is the very birthplace of Asian culture centering on Confucianism, which almost all Asian countries look up to. In Dae Jang-geum, the heroine learned Chinese classics and Chinese characters as a child and later studied traditional Chinese medical science to be a physician.
Liu Changle, the board director of Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV, said, "What South Korea does is to sell the essence of our culture to us. It is as if the user is charging the inventor."
Yin Hong, a professor with Tsinghua University explained, "The Chinese culture and the Korean culture overlap in many ways, which lays the foundation for mutual communication. On the other hand, compared with Korean pop culture which had early on borrowed good elements of Western culture, Chinese pop culture lacks originality, a weak point at which Korean pop culture breaks through."
"Our generation is fond of such family-themed Korean TV series because the stories remind us of the past and the traditional ethical values people adhered to at our time, which we cannot find in our domestic TV and theatres," a retiree from Beijing said.
"Of course I know the pure perfect love conceived in South Korean TV dramas is impossible in reality. But I just can not stop dreaming about it," said Chen Ying, a big fan in her twenties who indulges in South Korean romances day and night. "Compared to the instant love in Western movies and TV dramas and even in contemporary Chinese ones, I prefer the implicit way of love in South Korean dramas," she added.
At the Shanghai International Film Festival in 2002, renowned Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang told the audience, "As a filmmaker, I have to say we all need to be vigilant of the fact that Korean films are coming. We must spare no efforts to catch up with them."
Feng's words deserve serious thought. Three years later, also in Shanghai, South Korea was the biggest winner at the Shanghai International TV Festival, having been awarded the top honor, "Best TV drama," and successfully sold dozens of films and TV dramas to China. At the festival, China bought one hundred million RMB worth of programming while selling only 80 million RMB worth, showing an obvious trade deficit between China and foreign producers.
Despite the traditional cultural atmosphere featuring truth, goodness, fidelity, solidarity and patriotism, the success of South Korean drama productions also owes to their televisual technique, screenwriting, genre distinctiveness and popular stars, all areas in which Chinese productions lag behind. The Korean Prime Minister once said in a televised interview with CCTV that "Korean TV producers regard TV dramas as refining artistic works. They pursue every bit of perfection."
However, whenever you turn on the TV you will find it brimming over with Chinese dramas which are mainly concerned with conspiracies, corruption, crime and indecent affairs, or emperors and princes' lives in ancient dynasties. On September 12, China's People's Daily reported that several TV dramas were denied the license of airing due to their low taste in theme and low quality of production. Most of these TV dramas are about royal families' private life.
"Korea Wave helps us to discover a new market demand," Phoenix TV's Liu Changle said, "The audience is actually longing for products featuring traditional culture. But what we provided them before is so scarce and monotonous."
Zhang Xinjian, the deputy director of the culture market department with the Ministry of Culture (MOC), said China is not sophisticated in developing and marketing its cultural products.
"Most exported Chinese TV plays are old fashioned and poorly packaged by international standards, which doom them to fail," he said.
For ordinary Chinese audiences, their explanation of the difficulty of Chinese television programs entering foreign markets is that Chinese television shows focus narrowly on national and local affairs, instead of taking a broader view of humanity. "However, it's only by adopting a universal perspective that a TV drama can attract people from different backgrounds," said Zhang Chen, a college student who turned his interest in TV into his major.
In 2004, overseas sales of Chinese television series amounted to 100 million RMB. But the series sold overseas were, in the main, those adapted from the four classic works of Chinese literature.
Since 1996, China's copyright imports have increased 57 percent annually, compared with a sluggish increase rate for exports. In 2003, the ratio of copyright import and export reached a record high of 10.3:1, the Yearbook of China's Publishing Industry 2004 said.
A scholar from Hong Kong observed that Dae Jang Geum is a political declaration of South Korea's rise in East Asia and a cultural ID card for Korea to walk in the world arena boastfully. He believes its aim is to compete with China for the right to explain the essence of Confucianism.
Ma Xiangwu, a professor with Renmin University of China, who was a visiting scholar in South Korea for two years, is more optimistic. "Compared with Korean culture, Chinese traditional culture has accumulated over longer years. Besides, Chinese culture has the tradition of adopting the good points of other excellent cultures to make self-improvements," he said. "I believe with the further development of Chinese culture, the economical progress of China and the strengthening of China's national power, Korea Wave will ultimately be marginalized or cleared up in China."
Song Feifei, an office lady who is well accustomed to her workday from nine to five, recently found her life in a total mess. She was late for work several times, which had never happened to her before. "It is all Dae Jang Geum's fault. I watch it every day till midnight. Then it is hard for me to get up the next morning."
What Feifei referred to as Dae Jang Geum is a Korean TV series currently airing on the Hunan Satellite Television Network. Also known as The Great Jang Geum or Jewel in the Palace, Dae Jang Geum is a 2003 television soap opera produced by South Korean TV channel MBC, winning the highest ratings in South Korean television history at 54 per cent. It has been sweeping across much of the Chinese-speaking world, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese communities in San Francisco, Chicago, as well as in Malaysia.
On the Chinese mainland, it proved to be on another good run, with an average rating of 8.6 percent on its debut, which ranked it as the most watched TV program in the country's 12 biggest cities during its time period.
The big hit, starring the famous South Korean actress Lee Young-Ae, tells the true story of Jang-Geum, the first female royal physician who lived in ancient southern Korea, with its main theme being the heroine's perseverance against a backdrop of traditional Korean culture, such as its royal court cuisine and medicine.
"Korea wave," or "Han liu" in Chinese, refers to the popularity of Korean pop music, TV dramas, movies, fashion, food, and celebrities in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and other regions in Asia. The term "Korea Wave" was first used by the Chinese press in the late 1990s, when Korean TV dramas and Chinese-language remakes of Korean pop music began to gain ground in mainland China and Hong Kong. As we all witness, it's recently reached a new climax with the airing of Dae Jang Geum.
However, the Dae Jang Geum phenomenon is not only about this formidable Korea Wave, or the Hunan TV station, renowned for its recently concluded TV singing contest Super Girls--because it is not its only promoter. CCTV, China's state-owned television monopoly, started the tradition of importing Korean TV series as early as 1997 when it aired a family-themed series called What is Love. Last year, Miss Mermaid, another family-themed long-running Korean TV series, with a rating of 1.63 percent on CCTV-8, was widely considered a miracle for its after midnight broadcasting period, which usually receives extremely low ratings. It topped the most watched TV series' list on its second re-run on CCTV-1 over the past summer vacation.
Right now, in the same time slot as Hunan TV's showing of Dae Jang Geum, CCTV is passionately broadcasting Be Strong, Geum-Soon, a family-themed TV drama about a young widow's strength in the face of misfortune and her steadfast determination for a better life, who is regarded by the audience as the modern version of Jang-Geum. In spite of the intense pressure from Dae Jang Geum, Be Strong, Geum-Soon is also very well received by the Chinese audience, especially among elder women.
China is not alone in the heartland of the Korea Wave; so is Japan, Vietnam, and many other Asian countries. An article from a Japanese newspaper began like this, "Korean actor Bae Yong-joon did what some of his countrymen have dreamed of for decades: He conquered Japan." Bae Yong-joon is the hero of a Korean TV drama called Winter Sonata, which scored huge ratings and drew a large group of wannabes in Japan, including Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
One day after work, you are invited by a friend to a restaurant featuring Korean cuisine. She suggests going for a Korean movie after the meal. You hear Hope, the theme music for Dae Jang Geum from a record shop on the way. At a street corner, a teenager with Korean style baggy trousers playing on a skateboard bumps into you. Then, you wonder, how come everything in one's daily life has turned Korean all of a sudden?
Experts offer several reasons for the Korea Wave phenomenon. Among them are the facts that most Asian countries share Confucian culture, that Korean culture professes nonviolence, and that the quality of Korean culture and communications have increased sharply in the past few years. In other words, fans embrace Korean cultural products because they convey similar Asian cultural sentiments in sophisticated packages.
But the interesting point here is that China is the very birthplace of Asian culture centering on Confucianism, which almost all Asian countries look up to. In Dae Jang-geum, the heroine learned Chinese classics and Chinese characters as a child and later studied traditional Chinese medical science to be a physician.
Liu Changle, the board director of Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV, said, "What South Korea does is to sell the essence of our culture to us. It is as if the user is charging the inventor."
Yin Hong, a professor with Tsinghua University explained, "The Chinese culture and the Korean culture overlap in many ways, which lays the foundation for mutual communication. On the other hand, compared with Korean pop culture which had early on borrowed good elements of Western culture, Chinese pop culture lacks originality, a weak point at which Korean pop culture breaks through."
"Our generation is fond of such family-themed Korean TV series because the stories remind us of the past and the traditional ethical values people adhered to at our time, which we cannot find in our domestic TV and theatres," a retiree from Beijing said.
"Of course I know the pure perfect love conceived in South Korean TV dramas is impossible in reality. But I just can not stop dreaming about it," said Chen Ying, a big fan in her twenties who indulges in South Korean romances day and night. "Compared to the instant love in Western movies and TV dramas and even in contemporary Chinese ones, I prefer the implicit way of love in South Korean dramas," she added.
At the Shanghai International Film Festival in 2002, renowned Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang told the audience, "As a filmmaker, I have to say we all need to be vigilant of the fact that Korean films are coming. We must spare no efforts to catch up with them."
Feng's words deserve serious thought. Three years later, also in Shanghai, South Korea was the biggest winner at the Shanghai International TV Festival, having been awarded the top honor, "Best TV drama," and successfully sold dozens of films and TV dramas to China. At the festival, China bought one hundred million RMB worth of programming while selling only 80 million RMB worth, showing an obvious trade deficit between China and foreign producers.
Despite the traditional cultural atmosphere featuring truth, goodness, fidelity, solidarity and patriotism, the success of South Korean drama productions also owes to their televisual technique, screenwriting, genre distinctiveness and popular stars, all areas in which Chinese productions lag behind. The Korean Prime Minister once said in a televised interview with CCTV that "Korean TV producers regard TV dramas as refining artistic works. They pursue every bit of perfection."
However, whenever you turn on the TV you will find it brimming over with Chinese dramas which are mainly concerned with conspiracies, corruption, crime and indecent affairs, or emperors and princes' lives in ancient dynasties. On September 12, China's People's Daily reported that several TV dramas were denied the license of airing due to their low taste in theme and low quality of production. Most of these TV dramas are about royal families' private life.
"Korea Wave helps us to discover a new market demand," Phoenix TV's Liu Changle said, "The audience is actually longing for products featuring traditional culture. But what we provided them before is so scarce and monotonous."
Zhang Xinjian, the deputy director of the culture market department with the Ministry of Culture (MOC), said China is not sophisticated in developing and marketing its cultural products.
"Most exported Chinese TV plays are old fashioned and poorly packaged by international standards, which doom them to fail," he said.
For ordinary Chinese audiences, their explanation of the difficulty of Chinese television programs entering foreign markets is that Chinese television shows focus narrowly on national and local affairs, instead of taking a broader view of humanity. "However, it's only by adopting a universal perspective that a TV drama can attract people from different backgrounds," said Zhang Chen, a college student who turned his interest in TV into his major.
In 2004, overseas sales of Chinese television series amounted to 100 million RMB. But the series sold overseas were, in the main, those adapted from the four classic works of Chinese literature.
Since 1996, China's copyright imports have increased 57 percent annually, compared with a sluggish increase rate for exports. In 2003, the ratio of copyright import and export reached a record high of 10.3:1, the Yearbook of China's Publishing Industry 2004 said.
A scholar from Hong Kong observed that Dae Jang Geum is a political declaration of South Korea's rise in East Asia and a cultural ID card for Korea to walk in the world arena boastfully. He believes its aim is to compete with China for the right to explain the essence of Confucianism.
Ma Xiangwu, a professor with Renmin University of China, who was a visiting scholar in South Korea for two years, is more optimistic. "Compared with Korean culture, Chinese traditional culture has accumulated over longer years. Besides, Chinese culture has the tradition of adopting the good points of other excellent cultures to make self-improvements," he said. "I believe with the further development of Chinese culture, the economical progress of China and the strengthening of China's national power, Korea Wave will ultimately be marginalized or cleared up in China."
2 Comments:
At 11:12 PM , davesgonechina said...
Hey, great article. One thing that struck me, though, is that a couple of people you interviewed seem to see the Korean Wave as being a winner-take-all zero-sum competition. For example:
A scholar from Hong Kong observed that Dae Jang Geum is a political declaration of South Korea's rise in East Asia and a cultural ID card for Korea to walk in the world arena boastfully. He believes its aim is to compete with China for the right to explain the essence of Confucianism.
Can't there be Korean Confucianism and Chinese Confucianism? The quote makes it sound like there can be only one Confucianism, when obviously each country has a different interpretation and there is no reason that they can't live side by side.
Korea Wave will ultimately be marginalized or cleared up in China.
That sounds like a bad thing! Again, why can't you have both? Many people say there is a Japan Wave in the U.S.; Japanese animation, for example, is huge among younger people. But no one in the U.S. feels this is a cultural threat. If the Korean Wave was hurting investment in Chinese TV, then I'd say it was a threat - but it sounds like the Korean Wave is encouraging Chinese TV, not taking away from it.
The points about Chinese production values are well taken, but it sounds like there is a confusion between the competition of quality and the competition of ideas.
At 8:23 AM , jaz said...
Interesting article. But I just wanted to point out that Korea has no "Prime Minister." I assume you meant the President?
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