Consuming Korean TV Dramas in China: Analysis of a new cultural flow, 'Hanryu', in the Asian context

초록

Recently Korean cultural products have been popular in East Asian countries, particularly China, Taiwan, and Vietnam. It is an extraordinary situation in history of the Korean culture. Because modern Korean culture was established mainly by being affected from foreign countries, particularly from Japan for a colonial period in the earlier 20th century, and the U.S. for a military dictator period in the later last century. Few Korean cultural products have entered other countries so far. Since 1997, however, Korean TV programmes have broadcast in Chinese TV as well as Vietnamese TV. They have been a great success. This situation spreads to popular music, and other popular cultural area. So Chinese journalists named this new cultural trend Hanryu(i.e. Korean wave). Media and cultural globalization processes have recently activated the intra-regional cultural flow in Asia. Hanryu is a very meaningful trend in terms of the reverse flow of cultural products. In this paper, we discuss the way in which Korean TV programmes get popularity from the Chinese audience, and a new approach to the cultures of globalization.