The latest annual report of the Korea Foundation, realized in cooperation with the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, attests to the meteoric rise of hallyu outside the borders of the Asian country
Music, cinema, TV series... A cultural wave from South Korea has swept across the globe. Europeans, in particular, have been seduced by these offerings, according to a recent report by the Korea Foundation.
Some 178 million people around the world have been won over by this "soft power" from Seoul in 2022, according to the Korea Times, which cites figures from the South Korean organization. This estimate is 19 times higher than the 9.26 million counted in 2012, when the Korea Foundation began measuring the international impact of hallyu. This term, which literally means "wave," refers to a wide variety of cultural products (K-pop, K-dramas, K-films or Hallyuwood productions, etc.) whose only common point is that they are produced in Chosun, or the Land of the Morning Calm. Vincenzo Cicchelli and Sylvie Octobre outline in their book "K-pop, soft power et culture globale" (PUF, 2022) that hallyu is one of the major cultural phenomena of the early 21st century.