Cultural soft power

Soft power describes the pursuit of influence and prestige through attraction rather than military or economic coercion. In this account, it is not an abstract national strategy operating above popular culture: it is built through songs, performances, recognizable bodies, fan activity, brand partnerships, tourism, and public appearances. K-pop becomes the medium through which South Korea presents itself abroad, and BTS becomes one of the clearest human faces of that transformation.

From cultural industry to national strategy

South Korea strengthened its investment in popular culture after the 1997 financial crisis. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism received funds to promote K-pop, and a consultative committee established in 2012 supported the expanding global popularity of Korean culture with hundreds of millions of dollars. This policy helped convert idol music from what had often been treated domestically as inferior, disposable entertainment into a powerful export and a source of national prestige.

The shift altered the status of the artists themselves. BTS came to represent South Korea abroad alongside internationally acclaimed figures such as the Olympic skater Yuna Kim and the footballer Son Heung-min. Their public image was therefore expected to do more than entertain: it was also expected to create favorable perceptions of the country wherever the group traveled. The pressure of serving as national representatives complicated the older idol role, since BTS had to satisfy audiences seeking both performers and highly managed idols while operating across different cultural expectations.

BTS and the conversion of popularity into value

BTS’s rise demonstrates how soft power moves between cultural, commercial, and economic forms. At the group’s debut, the K-pop industry was dominated by SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment, companies founded in the mid-1990s with accumulated financial resources, extensive talent pools, and established relationships with brands, sponsors, media outlets, and broadcasters. Big Hit Entertainment, founded by Bang Si-hyuk in 2005 after his success as a composer at JYP Entertainment, entered this elite environment at a disadvantage. BTS had to fight for recognition among Seoul’s entrenched cultural and business networks.

The eventual reversal was economically measurable. Over a decade, BTS was estimated by the Hyundai Research Institute to have contributed $32.6 billion to the South Korean economy, a figure reportedly comparable to the contribution of Korean Air. The group secured contracts with Samsung, Louis Vuitton, and the NBA, while approximately 800,000 foreign tourists visited South Korea each year because of BTS, spending an estimated 5 trillion won, or more than $3 billion. In 2023, the Korea Post issued commemorative stamps for the group’s tenth anniversary and sold about 1.5 million units. Popularity had become tourism, consumption, visibility, and institutional recognition.

Jungkook’s solo career extends this same conversion process beyond the group. His 2022 FIFA World Cup performance in Qatar reached an audience connected to an event watched by approximately five billion people worldwide. His song “Seven (feat. Latto)” debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and Global 200, accumulated nearly 16 million Spotify streams, became the first K-pop work to top Spotify’s United States charts, and became the first release by a Korean solo artist to debut at number one on the global ranking. It also reached number three on the UK Singles Chart, became the fastest song in Spotify history to reach one billion streams, and ranked as the platform’s fourth most-streamed song of 2023. These achievements made an individual Korean singer a participant in the central institutions of global pop measurement.

Performance, image, and international recognition

Soft power depends on attraction that can be recognized immediately, and Jungkook’s public image supplies one of its most visible forms. In 2023, seven months before the release of Golden, he became a global ambassador for Calvin Klein at the age of twenty-five. The following year, Calvin Klein displayed his image on a 23-meter billboard on Houston Street in Manhattan, described by GQ as the most famous billboard in the world for more than fifteen years. His campaign combined a polished yet rough-edged appearance, tattoos, piercings, silver earrings, and a beauty presented as both distinctly individual and broadly legible across cultural boundaries.

The commercial results made that image an asset rather than merely an aesthetic impression. Launchmetrics estimated that Jungkook’s fall 2023 Calvin Klein Jeans campaign generated $13.4 million in media impact value in forty-eight hours, making him the company’s best-performing ambassador. The book’s account places this achievement within a wider history in which Asian men were rarely presented by major brands as the default standard of beauty. His visibility therefore carries a representational consequence: it places an East Asian male pop star at the center of an advertising language once associated with a narrower Western ideal.

His World Cup appearance shows the same process through performance. After receiving the choreography video the night before a full rehearsal, Jungkook stayed awake until six in the morning learning the steps. He rehearsed whenever he could, revised formations, offered detailed notes to the dancers, added a dance break, and practiced the changed choreography alone in his hotel room until dawn. Before 67,000 people and millions more watching on television, he danced with natural ease while keeping his vocals strong and stable, then met the Qatari singer Fahad Al Kubaisi on the central platform in a moment framed as unity. The performance made him legible not only as a K-pop idol but as a pop artist capable of occupying the same international stage and expressive register as Western stars.

Institutions, diplomacy, and the limits of representation

The state’s use of K-pop as soft power became explicit through BTS’s relationship with international institutions. In 2018, the group was invited to the United Nations to help UNICEF promote a campaign for global education and development, after launching the Love Myself campaign with UNICEF the previous year and partnering with the organization’s program to end violence against children. During the COVID-19 pandemic, President Moon Jae-in brought BTS to the United Nations General Assembly, gave the members red diplomatic passports and certificates, and appointed them special presidential envoys for future generations and culture. Wearing suits, they performed “Permission to Dance” in the Assembly Hall, encouraged vaccination, and addressed young people facing the difficulties of the pandemic.

Jungkook’s contribution to the recorded address was deliberately restrained. Seated in black with silver earrings shining, he spoke calmly and firmly about uncertainty, the possibility that their voices could give people strength, and the group’s determination to continue doing so. The scene joins personal modesty to national representation: the speaker is an individual artist, but the setting and appointment make his voice part of a state-sponsored account of South Korea’s future and cultural identity.

This representational role also produces political and social pressure. The debate over military service exposed how closely BTS’s global prestige had become tied to ideas of national fairness. Some athletes and artists have received exemptions for achievements said to raise South Korea’s international prestige, including Son Heung-min after winning gold at the 2018 Asian Games and League of Legends player Faker and his teammates after winning gold at the 2023 Asian Games. Yet exemptions for idols remained controversial because their contribution was harder to reduce to a medal or a clearly bounded institutional achievement. The question was not simply whether BTS had increased the country’s visibility, but whether that visibility justified unequal treatment.

Fans as transnational agents

Soft power is not produced by governments and artists alone. The BTS fandom, known as ARMY, was named in July 2013 after Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth and became nearly as recognizable as the group it supports. Its highly international composition made it distinctive for the period in which it emerged. International ARMY organized across Twitter, Discord, Reddit, Tumblr, YouTube, and TikTok, using each new platform to circulate BTS’s work and build a global audience for a group initially oriented toward East Asian listeners.

The fandom also acted politically. In 2020, international ARMY joined other K-pop fandoms to oppose white supremacy and anti-Black racism online, overwhelming the harmful hashtag #WhiteLivesMatter with K-pop fancams and reaction GIFs. BTS’s $1 million donation to the Black Lives Matter movement helped give this collective action a public focus, and ARMY matched the donation within twenty-five hours. In this instance, the attraction surrounding Korean popular culture became a vehicle for transnational coordination rather than simple consumption.

Jungkook’s own relationship with fans reveals the reciprocal nature of this system. At his final solo showcase for Golden, he became emotional while thanking ARMY and acknowledged that neither the idol nor the pop star Jung Kook would exist without the fans. When a fan suggested that he would have succeeded at anything, he rejected the compliment and attributed his growth into a better person to meeting them. The statement does not erase the labor of training, production, promotion, and performance, but it identifies attachment as a central mechanism through which soft power becomes durable: fans do not merely receive an image of Korea; they help carry, interpret, defend, and expand it.

Achievement and contradiction

The book presents soft power as a genuine transformation, but not as a frictionless triumph. K-pop’s international success depends on cultural exchange, including the deep connection between Korean popular music and hip hop shaped by African American culture and the presence of the United States military in South Korea. BTS’s path from the rebellious hip-hop-oriented “No More Dream” to the entirely English “Dynamite” shows how a Korean group could adapt its sound for global circulation without erasing the history of the industry from which it emerged.

The contrast between the group’s marginalized beginnings and its later prestige supplies the concept’s emotional force. BTS first confronted Seoul’s competitive hierarchy and the advantages held by established entertainment companies; later, the group generated billions in economic activity, attracted tourists, filled international media, and received diplomatic status. Jungkook’s solo achievements repeat that movement on an individual scale, from a Korean trainee and member of a disadvantaged company to a performer at the World Cup, a chart-leading solo artist, and a global fashion ambassador.

Yet national pride can become another form of discipline. South Korea’s unequal society, including its large gender wage gap and rapidly increasing income inequality, makes public demands for fairness especially intense. The same country that celebrates BTS as a source of international prestige must also ask whether cultural fame should confer privileges unavailable to others. Soft power therefore operates as both opportunity and obligation: it expands what Korean artists can accomplish abroad while placing their bodies, choices, and public conduct under closer national scrutiny. Its most persuasive form remains not official prestige alone, but the combination of institutional reach, artistic competence, commercial recognition, and the voluntary devotion of audiences who transform cultural admiration into a shared international presence.