BTS as government conspiracy

Here's a somewhat amusing column by a writer who inadvertently started a conspiracy idea about K-pop, and has regretted it ever since:

I hope the fact that the South Korean government basically forced the band [BTS] to retire will put to rest the persistent rumor that K-pop in general, and BTS in particular, is funded by the Korean state as part of a cunning plan. A rumor that I am constantly asked to address. A rumor that I may have started.

Here’s the back story: In 2014, I wrote a book on the origins of Korean popular culture. BTS was barely a thing then. At the time, the only Korean performer the Western world knew was Psy, the guy who did “Gangnam Style” and whose video was the first to get a billion views on YouTube. Many people considered his success a fluke. I wanted to alert the world of the Korean pop cultural tsunami that was on the way.

One — just one — of my theses was that starting in the 1990s, Korean government officials mobilized to increase the soft power of their country by becoming a global pop culture exporter. South Korea was a pioneer in wiring a whole nation for broadband, with the aim of making Korean entertainment shareable with the world. A new subdivision within the Ministry of Culture was devoted to K-pop and other aspects of the Korean wave. In the early days, the ministry subsidized projects like paying for Korean dramas to be dubbed in other languages.

Immediately upon the book’s release, that idea — just one of many in the book — started to grow fangs. People heard what they wanted to hear, which was that the Korean wave was nothing more than a Potemkin wave: Korean deep state propaganda and a flimflam.

A website headline for a radio chat show misleadingly said that I — or rather “Euny Kong,” per the host — would be discussing how South Korea “manufactured cool en masse.” Another article claimed that according to Euny Hong, the popularity of all things Korean was government-fabricated.

Why did people latch onto this narrative? The answer is best encapsulated by something an editor told me when he rejected my book in 2013: The “Gangnam Style” video, he said, didn’t really get a billion views. The Korean government had hired 10,000 people to click on the video 100,000 times, he insisted. Like many other people I have encountered, he recoiled at the idea that a tiny, formerly destitute Asian country could have pulled off a global cultural coup without some kind of shenanigans.

And for every person who used me to gleefully take K-pop down a peg, there was at least one K-pop stan who wanted my head on a spike.