[Culture Op-Ed] If Chinese entertainment pushes in with sheer scale, will K-pop collapse?

It is a “warning voice” that has been circulating for quite a long time. For roughly 10 years now, ever since Chinese entertainment companies began investing in Korean talent agencies one by one or collaborating with them to release products, these kinds of “warning voices” have periodically swept through the newspapers.

Taken at face value, it is not wrong. The scale of China’s entertainment industry is clearly incomparable to that of Korea. According to Touzijie, a Chinese investment news outlet, China’s entertainment management market was projected to expand to 100 billion yuan (about 17.059 trillion won) in 2020. It has also been forecast that within the next 3 to 5 years, China could produce 3 to 5 giant entertainment agencies valued at over 20 billion yuan (about 3.4 trillion won). As of February 2019, the market capitalization of SM Entertainment, the largest entertainment agency in Korea, was about 667 billion won, which says it all. In other words, within a few years China could produce multiple agencies more than twice the combined market capitalization of Korea’s three biggest agencies.

There is more. If Korea’s big three entertainment agencies are SM, JYP, and YG Entertainment, China’s big three are Yuehua, Huayi Brothers, and Huace Media. Of these, Yuehua, best known as a singer-centered agency, has “already” entered Korea. Founded in 2009, Yuehua signed Hangeng, who left the K-pop boy group Super Junior in 2010, and achieved major success in the Chinese market with products benchmarked on K-pop. Then in 2014 it teamed up with YG Entertainment to debut the Korea-China coed group UNIQ, thereby entering the Korean market as well. In 2016, it collaborated with Starship Entertainment to debut the girl group WJSN. And in 2019, it independently debuted the girl group Everglow in Korea.

Of course, while Yuehua is a representative case, it is far from the only one. A March 1, 2019 Maeil Business Newspaper article described the situation more concretely with a focus on Tencent: “Let’s Copy K-pop and Make C-pop... Tencent Pushes into Korea’s Entertainment Market.”

“Chinese investment in Korean entertainment companies is taking place on all fronts. Suning Universal Media, the second-largest shareholder of FNC Entertainment, home to FT Island, is also a Chinese company and holds a 22% stake in FNC Entertainment. The largest shareholder of Banana Culture, home to the girl group EXID, is Shanghai Banana Plan Culture Development Co. of China. (omitted)

This is not the only case of conflict between Korean entertainment firms and Chinese capital. Gold Finance Korea, the Korean branch of China’s JC Group, drew criticism after becoming the largest shareholder of the Korean entertainment company Fantagio and then dismissing founder and then-CEO Na Byungjun from the board in 2017. Music critic Hwang Sunup said, ‘We need to prepare for the pattern in which Chinese capital extracts only the planning know-how from K-pop content and later pushes out the joint venture partner.’”

Chinese entertainment firms began full-scale collaboration with and investment in Korean K-pop companies around 2012. By around 2014, when the K-pop wave in Japan had temporarily slowed, people in the industry casually said, “These days there isn’t a girl group without Chinese money in it.” In that sense, the “warning voices” above are not entirely baseless. Still, it is worth recognizing that this is not the only way to think about the matter.

The fundamental driver of cultural and artistic development is “cultural freedom,” which outweighs capital and know-how

Now let us turn to the most mysterious part. As noted, Chinese entertainment companies, led by Yuehua, began taking Korean “know-how” about 10 years ago. If so, by now, with capital several times or even dozens of times greater than Korea’s added to that know-how, they should normally have produced rival outputs capable of matching K-pop. So what does reality look like?

To be sure, Yuehua has continuously released idols similar to K-pop over the years. There have been many of them: YHBOYS, NEX7, UNINE, Xin Fengbao, Daylight, and others. But few people even know these names. They have some recognition within China, but not enough to shrink the market share of K-pop idols.

Strictly speaking, this is not true only in the idol sector. Film and broadcasting are much the same; in fact, so are nearly all entertainment sectors. There have been many cases in which Chinese firms invested in Korean companies and learned various forms of know-how from them. In film, this has been going on for about 20 years, and in broadcasting and other areas for around 15 years. By now, they should have been flourishing. Yet reality falls far short, and China is still endlessly copying Korean content. Related critical articles in Korea appear at least once a quarter. Why is China still so unable to “stand on its own,” spending 10 to 20 years focused only on copying Korea while continuing merely to invest in Korea?

At first glance, it may seem puzzling, but the reality is simple. China is “China.” It is a communist state, a totalitarian control state. It is a country without “freedom,” and naturally one where “cultural freedom” does not exist either. Some may ask what is so important about that. But in the field of culture and the arts, “freedom” occupies a position so important that it is practically incomparable to capital or know-how; in many respects, it could even be called the core driving force of culture and the arts.

Let us take an easy example of what happens when this “cultural freedom” does not exist. A representative case is the “guhanling” of March 2019.

On March 25, 2019, Chinese state-run media including the Global Times and Hong Kong’s Ming Pao reported that China’s National Radio and Television Administration had temporarily banned the screening of historical dramas on TV, web-drama platforms, and in theaters. In 2018, the administration had already addressed the historical drama format, which inevitably contains a certain degree of fiction, saying that it “firmly opposes historical nihilism” and that “history must not be arbitrarily trivialized or distorted for entertainment.” The measure appears to have come from the same line of thinking.

In China, this is called the “guhanling” (古限令), a restriction order on costume dramas, or period dramas. When this sparked strong backlash, the administration hurriedly gathered officials from China’s three major web-drama platforms and proposed a compromise, but it is still said to be severe enough to damage the production of historical dramas. In short, it became possible to watch period dramas online, but from planning and production to broadcasting and promotion, every stage had to be reported in advance to the administration and approved. Naturally, this reduces the number of works aired and inevitably discourages the production of period dramas itself.

Naturally, China’s infringement on and control of “cultural freedom” does not stop there. The popular music industry has also seen countless censorship cases. In 2015, China’s culture administration publicly listed 120 songs it deemed “violent, crime-inciting, and socially harmful,” and announced that websites would be punished if they did not delete them. But the actual cases were absurd. One issue was the line “I don’t like Chinese women; I like Taiwanese girls” in rapper Chang Csun Yuk’s song “Wo Ai Taimei.” Another was the line “Some people like to spout nonsense while doing nothing” in the song “Fangpi.” There were even cases in which songs were banned simply because the lyrics were considered vulgar. In April 2019, the theme song “Renjiandao” from the film A Chinese Ghost Story II was banned on various platforms because the lyrics, “A young man’s fury makes the ghosts of heaven and earth weep. Why has the land and rivers become a sea of blood? Why has the old land become a place one can never return to?” were said to evoke the Tiananmen Square incident.

A culture industry controlled by the public concept inevitably stops growing and contracts

A question may arise again. If they are merely trying to censor subversive(?) “messages,” then what great message is there in idol songs that would cause contraction? But that is not the case. If a powerful overseas artist in a certain musical genre has ever mentioned the Tibet issue even once, all influence associated with that artist can be negated. Simply doing a similar genre can itself become problematic. And when Xi Jinping was mocked online for resembling Winnie the Pooh, the environment became one in which all references to and images of Winnie the Pooh were banned. That says it all.

When people are placed in an environment where even they themselves cannot be sure “what is allowed up to what point and what is not,” the creative field itself inevitably shrinks. This is even more true in a place like China, where the standards of censorship effectively change every year. Far from attempting any meaningful creative risk, people become reluctant even to try what they simply “want to do,” and proceed only by watching the central government’s mood and aligning everything to it.

Here, the easiest practical breakthrough is to copy foreign content. As noted, because even they themselves do not know “what is allowed up to what point and what is not” (indeed, even government officials say they cannot be sure what will happen a few months later), they cheaply import music, dramas, and variety shows from places such as Korea and try airing them first. If those seem to pass, they then make only similar things. Conversely, if they import and air Korean content and it becomes a problem, then they have only wasted the cost of importing that content, which is far less wasteful than the total cost of producing and selling original content themselves and then running into trouble. So they keep copying foreign works without end.

The Chinese idols mentioned earlier are no different. They endlessly copy only concepts that appeared in Korea, were imported into China, and caused no problems. Once the creative sphere becomes so stifled that it effectively starts to die, from that point onward people actually “cannot even copy properly.” No amount of capital changes that. At best, the result becomes a derivative of K-pop; more often, it becomes a bizarre hodgepodge inferior even to that. Naturally, the same applies to other fields such as dramas and variety shows.

This is exactly the point at which one can immediately understand why China, despite its enormous domestic market and capital strength, has still not dominated Asian entertainment. People often assume that a huge market and massive capital are the absolute foundations of cultural development and stronger competitiveness, but in fact what matters even more is securing cultural freedom. From our standpoint, this has simply not been easy to feel, because for at least the past quarter century we have taken it so naturally.

A culture industry controlled by the public concept inevitably stops growing and contracts. Cultural imagination and the spirit of challenge themselves become paralyzed. This is true even for products unrelated to political or social messages. No one knows when or how restrictions will suddenly extend “that far.”

No matter how much it proclaims “Chinese-style reform and opening,” China is, in the end, a communist state. And as with communism and every ideological system that runs against human nature, “control” cannot be a side effect but must be a fundamental force that drives the system itself. Therefore, to maintain even the current system, control over culture and the arts will not diminish in the future either. If anything, the only remaining possibility is that it will intensify.

A growing atmosphere of mass dictatorship: control and oppression are not only such when imposed by the public concept

People often say that in Asia, the path of global cultural trend hegemony has moved from Japan to Hong Kong to Korea. Roughly speaking, Japan stood at the center of global trends in film and music during the 1950s and 1960s, Hong Kong swept through the 1970s and 1980s mainly through film, and Korea has effectively been moving into an atmosphere of long-term dominance since the 2000s.

The usual interpretation of this pattern is “the order in which their economies grew.” Japan broke out first, Hong Kong gained momentum as a free-trade port and advanced, and Korea joined the ranks of advanced countries later. So it is not entirely wrong.

But this logic always breaks down in the case of China. People often forget that in the overwhelming majority of countries, as economic power grows, “political, economic, social, and cultural freedom” is also won together. China is such an unusual case that it actually completes the logic. Fundamentally, cultural and artistic development follows a complex logic: along with the economic strength to create a sufficiently large market, the securing of “cultural freedom” must also come simultaneously.

Obscured by China and therefore less visible, Taiwan was in fact not so different. Up through the 1980s, it strongly carried the image of being “a country wealthier than Korea,” yet the reason its cultural and artistic sectors failed to develop and Korean culture instead came to take root as the mainstream was also largely a matter of “cultural freedom.”

Taiwan remained under martial law for a full 40 years after its first president, Chiang Kai-shek, declared martial law in 1948. Martial law was lifted in July 1987, and strictly speaking the timing at which “cultural freedom” began expanding was not very different from Korea’s. But in Taiwan’s case, the ease of talent outflow worked against it. Until just before the 1990s, most of the creative talent in culture and the arts seeking “cultural freedom” flowed out to Hong Kong. In Korea’s case, there was at least a mood of trying to adapt because there was “nowhere else to go,” but Taiwan, being in the broader Chinese-speaking sphere, had another option, and that made the damage from talent outflow severe.

By contrast, Hong Kong, which had been able to absorb high-quality creative talent from Taiwan for decades, was able to thrive and be called “Asia’s Hollywood” right up until the 1997 handover of Hong Kong. The realities of the cultural industries in some other countries, such as Singapore, which up through the 1980s also had the image of being “wealthier than Korea,” can fundamentally be seen as cases shaped by similar causes.

Of course, this does not mean Korea can simply expect to keep thriving indefinitely. Control from the public concept has receded considerably, but an atmosphere of mass dictatorship in the culture and arts sector, driven by certain political agitators, is slowly becoming perceptible. In many places, one can detect a tendency to block the production of content people dislike before it is even freely judged by the market. The intent is to shut the mouths of creative workers with diverse thoughts and positions. This too is an infringement on “cultural freedom.” Control and oppression are not only such when carried out by the public concept. At present, this is the risk factor Korean popular culture must guard against most carefully.

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Original title: [문화칼럼] 중국 엔터가 ‘규모’로 치고 들어오면 K팝은 무너진다?

Author: Mun-won Lee

Date: 2020-03-02

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=9&idx=22438