While Chinese people have started recognizing the value of soft power in expanding national interests, our neighbor to east, South Korea, has been using its TV plays to further its image for quite some time now.
With the Descendants of the Sun, a new South Korean series on KBS2, being a big hit with TV viewers on the Chinese mainland, people cannot but ask: Why cannot China, a country with a much larger audience, make such popular TV dramas? What's wrong with China's film and television plays and directors?
Some people attribute the popularity of South Korean TV series to their love-oriented stories, overflowing aestheticism, and romantic, sympathetic and suspenseful scenarios that seem to fit in with young women's fantasies. The pleasing personalities of the male and female protagonists, their vivaciousness, as well as the zigzagging plots and marvelous music, which meet young viewers' psychological demands, are also believed to be strong points of South Korean TV dramas.
But all these seem superficial factors if we believe some scholars who say the success of South Korean plays essentially stems from the success of the country's cultural policy and its cultural business model which consider the success of the performing arts sector only as a subordinate factor.
In my view, South Korean TV dramas have been successful because they benefit from the positive image of the country and its eagerness to integrate itself with the outside world. After all, a country's film and TV productions should be analyzed in the context of its broader national image.
According to Simon Anholt, a national brand expert, a country's reputation can be neither forged nor changed through communication. He says the national image can be lifted 80 percent by creative work, 15 percent with systematic coordination, and only 5 percent through communication.
In this sense, South Korean TV dramas also owe their success to the effective implementation of Seoul's "culturally-oriented" national strategy. On the one hand, the South Korean government has implemented policies and pumped in funds for the development of the cultural sector. On the other, it has taken measures to introduce non-governmental capital to the sector.
South Korea has also reframed its cultural industrial model and value chain, forging a "cultural industrial community" made up of the government, businesspeople and academic circles, which has helped establish a cultural pattern in which scriptwriters form the core of the series-making teams and TV dramas drive the development of related industries.
The Chinese government, too, attaches great importance to the development of the cultural industry, but some outdated concepts of decision-makers in China's TV play section, their conservative management style and the generation gap between them and the audience at large, especially youths, prevent the vitality and energy of Chinese TV plays from being fully released. And TV dramas made under obsolete concepts cannot gain market favor.
Scientific orientation and guidance have also contributed to the success of South Korean dramas. For example, South Korean cultural research institutions, subsidized by the government and businesses, are focused on studying the market for cultural competitions and offer data support for devising policies for the cultural industry, as well as for the changes it requires. These measures are like an effective guarantee for South Korean TV plays to realize their expected goal both at home and abroad.
TV dramas have become a special cultural commodity in these times of ever-deepening market segmentation. To engage with and influence the specific groups in different countries or regions, TV plays must base their contents and marketing tactics specifically on subjects the targeted audiences like. This gives hope to Chinese people who love South Korean TV dramas that Chinese TV plays can also play a similar role in improving our national image among the international community.
Bi Yantao, the author, is a professor in communication studies at Hainan Tropical Ocean University, China.
