Can South Korea's Pop Culture Make a Comeback in China? Beijing's Soft Ban and the Road to Normalization
The relationship between Beijing and Seoul is warming up, with South Korea's left-leaning president, Lee Jae Myung, making a high-profile trip to China last weekend. This marks the second meeting between Mr. Lee and Chinese President Xi Jinping in less than three months, with the pair taking smiley selfies on a Chinese Xiaomi smartphone.
The summit has raised hopes in South Korea that improved ties will lead to the lifting of wide-ranging restrictions on the country's pop culture in China. Beijing imposed a de facto ban in 2016 after the US announced the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-missile system to South Korea, aimed at defending against North Korea, China's ally. Since then, South Korean artists have been barred from lucrative tours in China, and Chinese authorities have imposed limits on the screening of South Korean films and the appearance of its celebrities in advertisements or other broadcasts.
However, the relationship between the East Asian neighbors further deteriorated under right-wing president Yoon Suk Yeol, who now faces a raft of criminal charges after briefly imposing martial law in 2024. Yet, over the weekend, the governments of Mr. Lee and Mr. Xi signed US$44 million worth of trade deals and dozens of memorandums of understandings.
On Chinese social media platform Weibo, one user asked: "Does this mean the Korean Wave can come back into China?" The Korean Wave, or Hallyu, refers to the stratospheric rise in global popularity of Korean popular culture since the 1990s, promoted by an explicit soft power strategy from Seoul. Its success is undeniable, with Squid Game being Netflix's most-streamed non-English language series of all time, and the Korean film Parasite becoming the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars in 2020.
Korean girl group Blackpink are the most-streamed female band on Spotify, and K-pop and K-drama are powerful instruments of soft power, according to media lecturer and K-pop expert Sarah Keith. "K-pop idols are strong promoters for many types of Korean goods, whether fashion, beauty, food, or tourism," she said.
However, the Beijing office of the Korea Creative Content Agency reported last year that "in China, no Korean dramas have aired since March 2023." Despite this, Chinese consumers can still access Korean dramas, films, and music online by using a VPN. The 2025 Overseas Hallyu Survey found that the average Chinese person surveyed was spending more than 15 hours a month consuming Korean cultural products, around three times longer than respondents in Japan.
After the weekend's leaders' summit in Beijing, Korean officials said China maintained no such ban exists. Instead, the two countries agreed to less politically contested cultural exchanges, including in sport. President Lee was quoted by Korean media as saying the issue would be "resolved gradually, step by step."
According to Mr. Lee, his Chinese counterpart, Mr. Xi, likened the situation to the process of ice melting or ripe fruit falling from a tree. And there have already been signs of thawing. Despite a number of K-pop concerts being cancelled in China last year, the Korean hip-hop group Homies managed to play a concert in the Chinese city of Wuhan in April. After a bilateral summit in November, Kim Young-bae from South Korea's ruling Democratic Party said Mr. Xi "responded positively" to the idea of a major K-pop performance taking place in Beijing.
A full lift of the Hallyu ban would be a major domestic political victory for Mr. Lee, boosting economic confidence in South Korea, especially in sectors reliant on China such as the semiconductor industry. As Macquarie University's Dr. Keith said, "Popular culture, easily dismissed as trivial, has real political significance."
