Kung fu, pandas or Peking Opera are what one would commonly associate with China - but they are also vital cogs in a massive "soft power" exercise that China hopes will give it more global voice and an image makeover. It is also proving to be a tough challenge for policymakers, as the growth of the country's "soft power" has not been in tandem with that of its "hard power".

This has been the study tour of follow up questions, so why not writing a follow up post? After hypothesizing about the role that governmental action might have played in the Korean creative brand, why not comment on what we learnt about their future plans?

South Korea has successfully individualized itself in Asia by forming a mainstream culture that has increasingly isomorphic qualities in the Eastern Hemisphere. This also coincides with the government’s public diplomacy strategy of successfully promoting Korea as a brand.

“Many production companies in Korea are recruiting competent talents from foreign countries to enrich the contents of K-pop (Korean music genre) and Zimbabwe’s artists are also candidates for such co-operations,” said Korean Embassy Counsellor, Choi Young-joon.

K-pop is part of a broader trend known as the Korean Wave and called “hallyu” in Korean. The Taiwanese were among the first to notice the invasion of Korean soap operas in their television programming in the late 1990s and gave the phenomenon its name. Until then, the term had referred to the cold winds blowing down from the Korean Peninsula.

Arirang TV, an English-language network based in Seoul, is revamping its news and entertainment programs, in hopes of promoting Korea and its culture to a wider international audience. “In Korea, K-culture, which goes beyond K-pop, accounts for a huge part of its nation branding. Our program revamp this time is focusing on those two trends, K-culture and nation branding.”

Seoul has certainly been successful in its soft power efforts globally over the past decade, and has consequentially accrued political capital and financial contracts not only in the Americas but also in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East.