[Culture Op-Ed] Is National Cultural Development Unrelated to Economic Prosperity?

It is a surprisingly widespread belief. It seems to stem from the romantic notion that “only poor artists create true art,” and, surprisingly enough, that mindset still lingers even in the 2000s, when nearly every part of culture and the arts has been industrialized.

Of course, in common-sense terms, it makes no sense. Cultural products, like many other products, can improve in quality through intense competition. For that to happen, a “market” first has to be active enough to spur such competition, and for that, the public’s purchasing power must support it. That is why economically prosperous countries generally also see cultural development.

The “Korean Wave,” which symbolizes the international competitiveness of Korean popular culture, is itself a case in point. Hallyu emerged around 1997 as Korean TV dramas and pop music gained popularity, especially in Greater China. The term itself was first coined not in Korea but in Taiwan. The reason is simple as well. It was built on Korea’s economic strength after years of recording growth rates of over 7 percent. Its indicators also track exactly with the flow of popular culture.

The explosive success of Seo Taiji and Boys in 1992 signaled the birth of the so-called “allowance market,” which emerged as a middle class formed through rapid economic growth. Likewise, the period when Korean cinema broke away from its heavy concentration on melodrama and erotica and greatly expanded its genres into romantic comedy, action, and science fiction was also between 1990 and 1995. That was when Korea began reaping the fruits of high growth. Through this process, competition piled upon competition, quality improved, and the domestic market expanded. And, as the saying goes, “when water boils inside, it spills over outside”: after bubbling up within the country, the market finally secured space overseas, and that was the beginning of Hallyu in the late 1990s.

Yet, as Hallyu progressed, the oddly persistent belief described above also began to take root—that the development of a country’s popular culture has little to do with its economic prosperity. China’s situation, for one, encouraged that belief. As events unfolded, Korean popular culture succeeded in putting down roots across Asia, but Chinese cultural products—from a superpower with an enormous consumer market—failed to draw much notable attention abroad in any field.

There is another example. When Psy’s “Gangnam Style” reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2012, media outlets also pointed out that the last Asian singer and song before Psy to break into the Billboard Hot 100 top 10 had been Filipino rocker Freddie Aguilar’s “Anak.” “Anak” had climbed as high as No. 5 in 1978 and became a huge hit, exported to 23 countries and selling roughly 8 million copies worldwide.

The Philippines. Even now it is regarded as a developing country, and at the time conditions were not much different. Yet from such a country came a song that reached No. 5 on Billboard and sold 8 million copies around the world.

Before that, there had also been the shock of the documentary film Buena Vista Social Club, which was released in Korean arthouse theaters in 2001 and generated enormous buzz and popularity. The film follows American music producer Ry Cooder as he visits Cuba in search of the bossa nova musicians who had played at the Buena Vista Social Club, one of Havana’s representative social clubs in the 1940s and 1950s. The renowned German director Wim Wenders documented the process, and the film was even nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Again, this was Cuba—a poor communist country in Latin America. Yet as soon as those musicians were rediscovered by Ry Cooder and Wim Wenders, the newly recorded album became a million-seller worldwide and even won a Grammy, America’s most prestigious popular music award. Some of the members even came to Korea, where the film had built a large fan base, to perform. In other words, being a poor country does not mean that the level or quality of its popular culture is low. The argument, rather, became that such culture simply had not been “discovered.”

The common thread linking the Philippines and Cuba: both were countries that had once been wealthy

So what is the reality? Is the widely held premise described above—that the level of development in a country’s cultural and artistic sectors has nothing to do with its economic prosperity—actually true? Let us begin with the Philippines.

Of course, by 1978 the Philippines was well on its way down the road of poverty. After Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, the country had been heading toward collapse under a brutal dictatorship. But it is more accurate to view Freddie Aguilar and the success of “Anak” as the delayed overseas arrival of capabilities built up during the Philippines’ so-called glory days.

Up through the 1960s, the Philippine economy was formidable. According to the Economic Survey of Asia and the Far East published by the UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, the Philippines posted an average annual growth rate of 14.5 percent from 1946 to 1954, the highest in Asia at the time. Malaysia’s per capita GDP in the 1960s ranged from $287.44 to $380.68, and Korea only surpassed it in 1969.

What about culture? Consider the description in Namu Wiki’s “Philippines/Economy” entry:

“Even in the early 21st century, the parents’ generation of South Korean teenagers and college students remembers those days. It was considered nearly on par with Japan; at one point, people even said, ‘The twin pillars of Asian rock are the Philippines and Japan.’ Since people had no real trouble making a living, they naturally took a strong interest in popular culture as well. (The country even began color TV broadcasting in 1966, the second earliest in Asia after Japan, which began color broadcasting in 1960. That was earlier than even top-tier powers such as the Soviet Union, West Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.)”

Freddie Aguilar was a musician who defined an era on the basis of the cultural foundation built during the peak of Philippine popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Befitting its reputation as Asia’s second-richest country, the Philippine economy boomed in the 1950s and 1960s, and in that affluent environment cultural consumption also expanded. It was in the mid-1960s that the number of record labels reportedly reached around 1,000.

With that solid economic base, a wide range of production companies competed again and again, so high-quality output was bound to emerge. In popular music in particular, as the Namu Wiki passage notes, the country became good enough for people to say that “the twin pillars of Asian rock are the Philippines and Japan.” In the end, even the “exception called the Philippines” leads to the conclusion that the later musician who enjoyed the glory of reaching No. 5 on the Billboard chart ultimately did so on the strength of capabilities accumulated during an earlier period of economic boom.

Next comes Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club. Here too, the situation is not much different. Cuba was also a very prosperous country economically between the 1930s and 1950s. During this period, Cuba had the highest per capita consumption of meat, vegetables, and grains in Latin America, as well as the highest per capita penetration of automobiles, telephones, and radios. Its GDP per capita was similar to Italy’s and significantly higher than Japan’s. It was during this economically flourishing period that the Buena Vista Social Club, one of Havana’s most famous social clubs, existed in 1940s Cuba.

But everything changed with the Cuban Revolution of 1953. The economy collapsed, and Manuel Urrutia Lleó, who became president in 1959, even implemented policies to control pleasure-seeking cultural life. After Fidel Castro fully consolidated power, Cuba’s traditional music effectively entered a stage of extinction.

It was this very scene of Cuban traditional music—represented by the Buena Vista Social Club—that was revived by producer Nick Gold of the American label World Circuit Records and the aforementioned American musician Ry Cooder. It was an event in which Cuban musicians, buried for nearly 40 years after 1959, around the time Cuba’s economic boom was ending, were finally introduced to the world through American economic power and capital amid Cuba’s prolonged economic decline.

Cuba’s economic collapse not only drove its own music products—products of genuine global value—toward extinction because they could no longer form a market, but also left the country unable to properly sell even what it already had. Put differently, only the private systems of countries with a certain level of economic strength, and thus a corresponding mastery of cultural creation and distribution, acquire the know-how to introduce and sell such excellent “products” abroad.

Even so, the basic foundation of cultural development is, first of all, “cultural freedom”

Then how should China be understood? In fact, the answer is simple. The biggest problem is the absence of so-called “cultural freedom.” The most recent example is the absurd regulation imposed last spring known as the “gohallyeong” (古限令).

Last April, China’s National Radio and Television Administration imposed a temporary ban on the screening of historical dramas on TV, web-drama platforms, and in theaters. Last year, the same agency, referring to the historical-drama format, which inevitably incorporates at least some fiction, said it “firmly opposes historical nihilism” and warned that “history must not be arbitrarily trivialized or distorted for entertainment purposes.” This latest measure appears to have emerged from the same line of thinking. In China, it is being called the “gohallyeong” (古限令), a restriction order on costume dramas (古装剧, period dramas).

This makes it immediately clear why China still has not conquered Asian entertainment. Massive capital and market size alone are not the absolute foundation of cultural development and stronger competitiveness. In fact, even more important is securing cultural freedom. That is only natural. It is simply hard for us to feel it, because from our standpoint it has been something so natural over at least the past quarter century.

A cultural industry controlled by public concepts inevitably stops growing and shrinks. That is because cultural imagination and the spirit of challenge themselves become paralyzed. This applies even to products unrelated to political or social messages. No one knows when or how restrictions might extend “that far.” As a result, creative capacity and will decline, and in the end the only remaining method becomes the steady copying of foreign products that have already proven themselves.

Of course, if one goes further, there are many cases outside China that could be raised as objections. The Nordic countries, for example, might be presented as counterexamples. Why, one might ask, have the popular cultures of high-GNI-per-capita countries such as Finland and Denmark not developed? But on closer inspection, the answer is simple. As mentioned earlier, culture is honed and refined in the domestic market before going abroad; it has to “boil inside the pot before it can spill over.” But the domestic markets of these Nordic countries are simply too small in terms of population. Norway has 5.17 million people, Denmark 5.66 million, Finland 5.48 million, and even Sweden—the most populous of the Nordic countries—has only about 10.27 million.

Because the market is so small, it is difficult to find homegrown films or musicians, and in some cases the content centered on domestic culture is content directly produced with taxpayer money by the state in order to protect national culture. Such “bureaucrat content” is hardly likely to be competitive in the market, and most of these countries consume imported foreign content instead. There is a reason why a common benchmark for a “developed country that really feels like a developed country” is a country with per capita gross national income above $30,000 and a population above 50 million. And at present, it is the popular cultural products of precisely those countries with over $30,000 per capita and over 50 million people that seem to dominate the global popular culture scene. China, of course, remains an unusual exception even here.

Only countries that can inspire “economic admiration” can send culture downward along the “staircase”

There is, of course, an even colder truth here. This discussion begins as a rebuttal to the position that culture cannot be ranked as better or worse, that cultures are merely “different.” Then why is it that some products can be sold abroad while others cannot? The answer is simple—but devastating. The following is part of a February 27, 2012 Seoul Economic Daily article titled “[People Met by Seoul Economic Daily] Na Yoon-sun, Jazz Vocalist”:

“I studied in France starting in 1995, and at some point I began seeing more and more things like LG TVs, Hyundai cars, and Kia cars around me. That was the first Hallyu I felt—the sense that Koreans were really working hard.”

She said that a few years later, whenever French people met her, they would all ask about films. That was because auteur directors such as Park Chan-wook, Hong Sang-soo, and Kim Ki-duk had left a strong impression on Europeans. Then, a few years after that, young Europeans began enjoying K-pop through YouTube, and it spread rapidly through social networking services as well. That is roughly how Hallyu spread through Europe.

This is often called the “staircase effect.” Naturally, if a country can sell technology products abroad, it must be a country that has achieved a certain level of economic development. And along with that, it can also be seen as a country that has secured a certain degree of global status and authority. The “economic” admiration and recognition that arise from this psychologically lead people to accept that country’s cultural products as well. In other words, in terms of economic standing, cultural diffusion proceeds in the forward direction “from top to bottom,” descending like a staircase.

So there is one dimension in which economic prosperity improves the quality of various cultural products and gives them international competitiveness, but there is also another dimension in which only economically developed countries secure the “status” needed to sell those products abroad. To become a “cultural powerhouse,” many factors must click into place all at once. And the name of that gear, always, is “wealth.”

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Original title: [문화칼럼] 국가 문화발전은 경제적 풍요와 아무 관련 없다?

Author: Mun-won Lee

Date: 2019-10-31

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=12&idx=22006