Can Chinese pop music’s soft power push ever match K-pop’s success?
- South Korean boy band BTS was invited to White House in May and UN in September
- Jackson Wang made history in April as first solo Chinese performer at Coachella
Many successful C-pop festivals, packed with fans from the Chinese diaspora and beyond, have been staged in the US in the past five years in a sign that Chinese artists are going global on an unprecedented scale. However the genre remains unfamiliar to most Americans, and its soft power potential is equally unexplored.
Last year, China ranked fourth overall and 12th in terms of media and communications on a global soft power index published by Brand Finance, an international market consultancy headquartered in London.
Cao Xuenan, an assistant professor of cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said: “China’s soft power has not really taken on the pop culture or entertainment industry, and it doesn’t follow the formula that we see in K-pop, which relies heavily on an industrial chain.”
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She said building infrastructure, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia, remained the focus of China’s soft power projection.
Using music as a currency of influence was a rather Western trait, Cao said, as the West branded pop culture as “containing new ideas related to the youth, and political ideals that challenge the status quo”. She said South Korea had become quite successful lately in appropriating that strategy.