Part of South Korea's rapid reach stems from how Americanized its modern culture is. I am not just talking about global corporations like mcdonalds. It's everything, even the choice of coffee over tea, a rarity for an asian country. Easy for western nations to embrace.

For China, the same game plan wouldn't work not without heavy alterations. It does however have substantial ability to influence those not already heavily Americanized.

It has started to happen in ASEAN - Chinese Pop Music has really taken off in Vietnam+Thailand (along with the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia+Indonesia+SG).

Chinese media will probably be increasingly exported over the next 20-30 years, and tbf - PRC right now is roughly at the same comparative level economically+social development wise with Taiwan+SK in the 1980s.

Both those countries soft power exports only really took off in the 90s and 2000s respectively, so it's reasonable to assume a similar media push happens in the late 2020s/early 2030s.

This has already started with Thailand (who's developmental indicators are comparable with SK in the late 1990s/early 2000s) and their media+music exports within ASEAN+SK+JP. For example, for higher education most middle class families in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos prefer sending their kids to study at Thai universities now if they can't afford Australia/SG/JP/SK.

And a similar impact has occurred with Turkiye's (similar developmental indicators to SK in the mid-late 2000s) media and soft power exports within the Balkans+Ukraine+Russia+Levant+Central Asia.

That said, I doubt the age+racial/cultural demographic on HN are the type that consume Asian media, so I'll probably be downvoted by China Hawks for the soft power statements and Wumaos for the 1980s statement.

Heavily censored popular media makes it hard to become a cultural powerhouse.

That's true. Korea itself only developed its cultural industry abroad when the government relaxed censorship rules.

Media is horribly neutered because of censorship, but cultural exports like food are seeing increasing traction.

That’s crazy, my city alone has more than 1/100 the population!

Edit: 10x to 1/10

Edit 2: 1/10 to 1/100

Are you sure?

Is that a city on Planet Earth?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities

Your city has 400 million people?

Coruscant

The largest city in the world is Tokyo which is about 40M people.

Yea no, C-pop is not has good as K-pop. It’s a nonstarter.