"Telling our stories to ourselves" was the fatal mistake

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Programming note: this one took a lot of work and things are busy at the office so we’ll be going fortnightly for the next little while.

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South Korea, in the latter half of the twentieth century, was building its economy almost entirely by exporting manufactured goods, everything from home electronics to ships to automobiles. That changed, as the story goes, when the country’s Presidential Advisory Board on Science and Technology released a report on digital technology in May 1994. It noted that a single Hollywood film, Jurassic Park, with its computer-generated dinosaurs, generated the same amount of foreign sales as 1.5 million Hyundai cars. The darling of Korean industry, Hyundai was exporting 640,000 cars a year in 1994. So one film was worth more than two years of heavy industrial production requiring enormous plant, equipment, capital investment.

The report stunned Koreans—”literally sent shock waves across the country,” writes Doobo Shim, a Seoul-based professor of media and communication. At the time, culture and entertainment were viewed as ephemeral and unlikely to contribute to Korea’s core mission of “improving the material conditions of the people.” The country decided it needed to change its game in order to thrive in the twenty-first century economy.

It wasn’t a straight line from the Presidential Advisory Report to Parasite, Squid Game, BTS, Blackpink, and Han Kang’s Nobel prize, but it’s straighter than you might think. Seoul is now a top-five world cultural center, and arguably top two if we’re talking pop culture and anything that appeals to under-thirties. How it happened tells us a great deal about Canada’s relative failure to develop home-grown cultural and entertainment industries.

The Presidential Advisory Board report alone did not alter Korea’s strategy. The country was starting from way behind. First came democratic reforms and media deregulation. That birthed new commercial TV channels and a variety of independent publications. Now with an independent (from government) domestic media sector, Korea tried to protect it by limiting the amount of foreign cultural product in its market. That didn’t work. In 1993, 90 of the top 100 video rentals in the country were from Hollywood; only five were domestic. Sound familiar, Canada?

Protection wasn’t going to work, anyway. Another factor at play was the Uruguay Round, an international accord negotiated between 1986-1994 that decisively liberalized the global economy, forcing all 123 signatory countries to open their markets for a vast range of goods and services, including communications services and entertainment product. It was clear to Korea that efforts to protect heritage and culture by shutting out the world had no future. It needed to upgrade its efforts in the cultural sphere if it wanted to avoid being swamped by content from multinational companies, and not just American ones. Satellite television services out of Japan and Hong Kong were already making inroads in Korea.

Another thing: Korea had noticed that Japan, its nearest rival in the home electronics sector, was making investments in content. Sony had bought Columbia pictures and CBS records. It was the nineties, the age of synergy, or vertical integration. Companies making devices—video players, portable music players—also wanted to own what played on them. Korean firms such as Samsung and Daewoo, makers of TVs and VCRs, felt a need to be vertically integrated, too.

So the Presidential Advisory Report landed on fertile ground. Korean businesses felt an imperative to pay attention to content. The Korean government felt itself under siege from foreign cultural and entertainment product. “Gone are the days,” said one expert interviewed in the newspaper Dong-A Ilbo, “when the government could appeal to the people to watch only Korean programs out of patriotism.”

All that notwithstanding, the report mostly resonated because it presented culture as an opportunity. It asked Koreans to recognize the potential of arts and entertainment to improve the material conditions of the people. Instead of resisting the emerging global marketplace, the power of multinational corporations and platforms, and the free movement of talent, it needed to master this new system, compete commercially, and take Korean culture to the world.

The Korean government introduced incentives for the corporate sector to invest in film, television, and related fields. It opened a school of film and multimedia at Korean National University of Arts to train a next-generation media workforce. The chaebol—the four family-controlled conglomerates that dominated Korean business (Hyundai, Samsung, LG, Daewoo)—as well as smaller firms and start-ups all piled into media. The whole country was seized with the notion that cultural production was the strategic industry of the twenty-first century. Dong-A Ilbo ran a thirty-four part series to that effect.

Again, not exactly a straight line. Studios, magazines, music companies, and publishers were launched at a furious pace. The better capitalized firms rushed to complete exclusive licensing agreements with the likes of Disney, Warner, Universal, BBC, Discovery, Canal Plus. It was a feeding frenzy, and when Korea suffered an economic meltdown in 1997, a lot of this initial investment proved unwise.

In return for emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund, the Korean government agreed to structural reforms which, among other measures, reduced the power of the chaebol and forced economic diversification in a manner favourable to the cultural sector.

Post crash, the government continued to focus on success in global cultural markets, providing direct support at every stage of cultural production: training of artists and producers; expansion of libraries and programs to promote reading; public investment in performance spaces and studios; grants and low-interest financing for film, TV, music, and publishing; coordination among mediums and agencies to ensure intellectual property stayed in the country and was exploited by Koreans; screen quotas for Korean films; fixed pricing to protect publishers and bookstores; and aggressive export promotion including relatively enormous subsidies for translation of Korean books. All of it was aimed at putting Korea on the global cultural map.

Most of Korea’s early successes were regional, with Korean films, television programs, and novels finding audiences in China, Japan, and other parts of Asia. In 2012 Psy’s “Gangnam Style” became the first video to hit a billion views on YouTube, and far more sophisticated versions of K-pop followed. Oldboy put Korean cinema on the map in 2003, and sixteen years later Parasite won the best picture Oscar. Han Kang won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian—one of at least five Korean books to make the prize list in the last decade—and won her Nobel in 2024. Korea emerged as a world leader in the video-game industry and Esports, winning three consecutive Overwatch World Cups. Webtoons, the mobile digital comic service, was invented in Korea and found a massive global readership. Seoul is a major outsourcing hub for video effects and animation (including The Simpsons). Korean talent is now everywhere: visual arts, architecture, classical music. It’s extraordinarily impressive.

Canada has a slightly smaller population and slightly higher GDP than South Korea. It faced many of the same pressures to liberalize its trade and adapt to new technologies in the 1980s and 1990s. On the cultural file, its response, in important ways, was the inverse of Korea’s. Rather than building aggressive export industries, Canada retreated to its domestic cultural space. Instead of taking its culture to the world, Canada adopted as its fundamental objective the notion of “telling our stories to ourselves.” We conceded global marketplace dominance to the US and de-prioritized commercial success.

Like Korea, we insisted on certain amounts of Canadian content on our airwaves. We subsidized cultural production at most stages of development, although our levels of public support were relatively scant, calibrated to serve the domestic market, not to compete internationally. We devised ownership rules that were supposed to ensure Canadians remained in control of their cultural production, but these proved difficult to enforce and ineffective in a world of large platforms and global distribution. We were only loosely coordinated, so that even where Canada had success—say, building major film/TV production hubs in Vancouver and Toronto—these were mostly producing foreign intellectual property.

We have produced an extraordinary amount of talent. We can match any K-pop line-up with the likes of Drake, The Weeknd and Justin Bieber. We have at least our share of internationally recognized authors. We’ve launched world-class filmmakers, including James Cameron and Denis Villeneuve. American television and American comedy are rife with Canadian talent. Yet the vast majority of these great artists and performers, even if some choose to reside in Canada, do most of their business outside Canada. They are produced outside Canada. Their intellectual property is owned outside Canada. Their economic benefits are captured outside Canada. Often the world doesn’t even know that our talent is Canadian, and much of its work is not recognizably Canadian, or only incidentally Canadian.

Meanwhile, Canadian consumption of Canadian content is shrinking by the year. We have Canadian media, Canadian-produced books and films and television shows, but they command pathetically small fractions of the domestic audience, like Korean film in the early 1990s. We are also marginal in global markets. There are exceptions, of course. Our children’s lit and TV shows travel well (in part because they’re often scrubbed of overt Canadianism). Once a decade, we create a TV show like Schitt’s Creek or Heated Rivalry. Exceptions that prove the rule.

We are one of the world’s best originators of cultural talent, and one of the world’s worst owners of cultural production and intellectual property. That matters because anyone wanting a big-time publishing contract or film deal or comedy career is going outside the country to realize their dreams. It matters because Canada’s economy is ridiculously dependent on basic extractive industries like mining, forestry, and oil & gas. We could use the diversification.

It also matters because a thriving cultural sector lifts the whole of a country. The main benefit to Korea of massive success in the global cultural marketplace hasn’t come from the export of films, music, TV shows, books, etc. Total K-culture exports amount to $38 billion annually. That’s more than half the value of exports of Korean automobiles—a meaningful contribution to the material conditions of the people, and it’s growing by 5 percent a year. But the real gains come from the halo of cultural success. Korean cosmetics are taking the world by storm. Korean cars and electronics brands are looked at differently these days. Korean tourism has exploded. Cultural success makes everything else in a country shine. The total impact of Korea’s cultural industries has been estimated as high as 5 to 6 percent of GDP.

And that’s in three decades from a standing start, with modest public investment compared to what the Korean government had been throwing at heavy industry. It’s also modest compared to the $40 to $50 billion Canada unwisely invested, at the top of the hype cycle, in subsidizing electric vehicle battery production—a business in which we have no real competitive advantage and no history of success.

This critique of Canada’s approach to culture isn’t original. In 2016, Melanie Joly, as minister of Canadian heritage, said we were doing it all wrong. It was a brave stance given that her party had the biggest hand in building our federal cultural programs.

Protectionism, she said, was futile in an age of global platforms. Confining ourselves to our domestic market was a retreat and a recipe for failure given that Canadian consumers are plugged into those global markets. Too much effort was being directed at subsidizing creation across a fragmented landscape of small producers, leaving us without scale.

The message was that while Canada has abundant talent and can produce strong content, we suck at taking it to the world and capturing value from it. The priority, Joly argued, should be to retain ownership of intellectual property, produce commercially viable content at scale, and build the marketing systems required to export aggressively.

She was especially right that the clear objective has to be commercial success. Without it, we won’t keep talent and intellectual property at home. We won’t create enough jobs to train future generations of talent. We won’t have sufficient resources and opportunities to sustain creators, whether they wish to pursue commercial success or their own artistic visions. There is a real tension in Canadian cultural politics between pursuing art and pursuing commerce. Our leading funding body, the Canada Council, has come down entirely on the side of pursuing art. That’s a mistake. Commercial success supports artistic vitality. It shouldn’t be the sole measure of success, but the healthier the economic environment, the more freedom artists have to do what they want, experiment, take risks.

Unfortunately, Joly didn’t have the political skill to implement her vision. She blew herself up and her successors reversed course and doubled down on the failed policies she’d critiqued.

We need the federal government to start over, or we need a single province to break out and pursue its own cultural agenda. We don’t necessarily want to adopt the Korean model—it has it’s challenges, from factory-style production to political agendas—but it’s a starting point. We just can’t keep doing what we’re doing, shipping our talent and our intellectual property south so America can benefit and shine. We’ll continue to be weak and irrelevant, both to ourselves and the rest of the world.

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Coming soon from Sutherland Quarterly

Sutherland Quarterly is pleased to announce its next edition, coming April 28, will be Tyler Dawson’s exceptionally timely The Republic of Alberta: An Idea that Won’t Go Away:

What could the consequences be if Alberta turned its back on Canada?

In The Republic of Alberta, Globe and Mail journalist Tyler Dawson delivers the definitive history and analysis of Alberta’s long-simmering separatist movement. From its colonial roots and early resentment toward Ottawa, through the oil-fuelled grievances of the NEP era, to the rise of modern populism and convoy protests, Dawson charts a clear trajectory of Western alienation. Blending historical insight with contemporary reporting, he examines the thinkers, politicians, and cultural flashpoints that have shaped the separatist impulse. As Alberta Premier Danielle Smith courts separatist sentiment more openly than her predecessors, Dawson explores the uncertain future of a province increasingly questioning its place in Canada.

Buy your copy now or take advantage of this special offer for SHuSH subscribers: buy a subscription to Sutherland Quarterly (or treat a friend) and we’ll send you the Sutherland House book of your choice at no charge.

Launched in 2022, Sutherland Quarterly is an exciting new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s finest writers, published individually as books and also available by annual subscription—four great books a year, mailed to your door, for just $67.99. Subscribe now at sutherlandquarterly.com and we’ll immediately be in touch to send you the free book of your choice.

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