It’s not often that an 18th century folk song can be said to be the inspiration for a pop concert. But those who attended the finale of BTS’ “ARIRANG” North American concert tour at Los Angeles’ giant SoFi Stadium earlier this month will long remember the tens of thousands of fans who waved South Korean flags and sang along to the traditional Korean melody. The four-night run in LA was the finale to a tour of 31 sold-out shows, with combined attendance of approximately 1.92 million, according to figures released by the band’s agency.
For comparison, Beyoncé’s 2023 Renaissance tour sold about 1.73 million tickets across 35 North American shows. The flag-waving scenes from the SoFi capped a banner year for Korean pop, following BTS’s World Cup final halftime performance. Earlier in the year, Golden, from KPop Demon Hunters, collected a Grammy, followed by an Academy Awards performance and the Oscar for best original song.
Those performances and prizes will have brought smiles to the faces in Seoul’s foreign-policy circles, where there is a keen appreciation for the soft power that K-Pop brings South Korea. In Beijing, it will have led to much gnashing of teeth. For more than a decade, China has looked on with undisguised envy as its Korean neighbor has accumulated soft power through cultural exports.
As far back as the 2014 National People’s Congress, the Communist Party heavyweight Wang Qishan marveled at the reach of Korean culture, citing popular TV dramas like My Love for the Star and the breakout dance hit Gangnam Style by Psy, arguably the first K-Pop star to break big worldwide. The interest went beyond public musing: Beijing resolved to learn from Seoul’s example. China’s culture ministry signed an agreement with its South Korean counterpart, providing for annual cultural-industry forums and cooperation in marketing cultural products abroad.
But it is one thing for Beijing to study Seoul’s cultural outreach, and quite another to match it. China, despite possessing a vastly larger population, an extensive diaspora, and the world’s fourth-largest recorded-music market, has failed to produce a music machine comparable to the international following of the marquee K-Pop acts. And while Taiwan’s Mandarin-language stars and Hong Kong’s Cantopop veterans have their own histories, they haven’t as yet spawned an act as ubiquitous as Blackpink or Stray Kids.
The audience Wang wondered about now extends well beyond America and Europe. Blackpink’s leading Spotify markets in 2024 included Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Brazil, spanning across the Global South, where Beijing has invested billions in the pursuit of soft power. These audiences' affection for K-pop reaches across linguistic and political boundaries, giving Seoul a welcome that its diplomats would struggle to arrange.
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