I’ve been thinking about this question for most of the last decade.

Not from a national pride angle — I find that framing mostly useless. But from a practitioner’s angle: I’ve spent fifteen years building Chinese cultural experiences for international audiences, and I’ve watched Korean culture systematically occupy space in Western markets at a scale and depth that Chinese culture hasn’t matched.

The honest answer involves some things that are uncomfortable to say. I’m going to say them anyway.

The Starting Point: Two Different Orientations

Korea’s cultural industry wasn’t always globally dominant. The inflection point was the 1998 Asian financial crisis.

In the aftermath, the South Korean government made an explicit strategic decision: natural resources are finite, but culture is infinitely reproducible. They began building cultural output as a national export industry — systematically, with government capital, institutional infrastructure, and a long-term commercial orientation.

The key phrase is export industry.

From the beginning, Korean cultural content was designed with the question “who buys this, and in what market?” baked into the brief. Not: “how do we express ourselves authentically?” — though that mattered too — but: “how do we build something that works in Tokyo, London, and Los Angeles at the same time?”

The government created the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) with a budget running into billions of won. They funded the full value chain: creation, distribution, intellectual property protection, international marketing, and market entry support. The infrastructure for cultural export was treated as infrastructure — the same way a country builds roads to enable trade.

Chinese cultural projects, at the same level of generalisation, have predominantly been oriented around cultural transmission — the goal of helping international audiences understand and appreciate Chinese culture. This is not the same goal as selling something to a global market. And the difference shows.

The Productisation Gap

Let’s go more specific, because the abstract comparison is too easy to argue with.

K-Pop is the most obvious case study. Look at how a K-Pop act is constructed:

– Trainees are recruited young and developed through years of standardised training programmes

– Music production is modular and market-researched — the question is always whether a song will land in Seoul, Tokyo, and LA simultaneously, not whether it has artistic merit

– Visual packaging is designed with almost forensic attention to consumer psychology

– International market entry is planned, sequenced, and resourced

This is a manufacturing mindset applied to cultural content. The industry doesn’t ask “is this artistically valid?” It asks “will this resonate with this specific demographic in this specific market?”

That’s a product orientation. And it produces product results: repeatable, scalable, exportable.

Chinese cultural production tends to work the other way around — create something excellent, then figure out how to sell it. The quality can be extraordinary. But “figure out how to sell it” is often where the journey ends, because the commercial infrastructure isn’t there.

The Ecosystem Problem

I want to be careful here, because this isn’t just about individual projects or even government policy.

The Korean cultural wave works because it’s a system, not a collection of individual successes. The elements are:

– Agencies that take on financial risk, develop artists, and scale distribution

– Platforms — domestic and international — that carry the content

– IP law that protects creator revenue

– Fan ecosystems that drive organic global spread

– A consumption chain: someone watches a drama, starts listening to K-Pop, buys Korean beauty products, plans a trip to Seoul

That last point is important. Korean cultural consumption compounds. One touchpoint leads to the next. The category is internally reinforcing.

Chinese cultural export, in most cases, doesn’t compound in the same way. Lightopia had hundreds of thousands of visitors in the UK who left with a genuine experience of something new and remarkable. But where did they go next? There was no next step. No broader ecosystem of Chinese cultural experiences for them to enter. They admired the lanterns, left, and had nowhere else to go.

Individual excellence is real. Systemic infrastructure is largely absent.

What I Saw in the UK

Here’s the thing I noticed most, working in Britain for fifteen years.

After a Lightopia event, I’d regularly hear: “How did you make these? Chinese craftsmanship is incredible.”

I almost never heard: “Where can I find more Chinese cultural experiences like this?”

Because the answer was: you can’t, really. Not in the UK in any systematic way.

Contrast that with Korean culture. The consumption path is clear and navigated by millions of people: a drama on Netflix, then a playlist on Spotify, then a skincare routine, then a restaurant, then a flight to Seoul. Each step is designed to lead to the next.

That’s an ecosystem. Chinese cultural export, for all its genuine quality, hasn’t built that yet.

Is There a Path Forward?

Yes. A large one.

China’s cultural depth is, by any honest measure, far greater than Korea’s. The traditions, the craft forms, the visual languages, the storytelling traditions — the raw material for cultural export is extraordinary.

The gap isn’t in the content. The gap is in the capability to turn that content into products, and to build the infrastructure that compounds individual products into an ecosystem.

That capability is learnable. It’s buildable. And it’s what I’ve spent the last decade working on through the CAAP™ system.

The Korean model isn’t magic. It’s method. And method can be studied, adapted, and applied.

What China needs isn’t to copy Korea. It needs to develop its own systematic approach to cultural productisation — one that’s grounded in the specific depth and character of Chinese cultural traditions, and designed for the markets it’s actually trying to reach.

I think that’s the work of the next twenty years. And I think the practitioners who do it will build something extraordinary.

Ian Xia is the founder of Xiangvision (英伦大像), Lightopia Festival, and the CAAP™ Culture As A Product system. He has spent over a decade commercialising Chinese cultural projects internationally from a base in the UK.