This commentary first appeared in The Diplomat magazine.

At the 2022 Grammy Awards on April 3, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered a pre-recorded speech, imploring musicians and the global community to speak out on the ongoing war in Ukraine. “Russia,” he said, “brings horrible silence with its bombs.” Zelenskyy urged the Grammy artists to “fill the silence with your music… Tell the truth about this war on your social networks, on TV.”

Many artists in the United States and worldwide have been doing just that, with singers ranging from Billie Eilish to Elton John donating and speaking out in support of the Ukrainian people. But one group has been conspicuously absent from this movement: South Korea’s K-pop singers. Despite their rising global stature, only a handful of K-pop idols have heeded Zelenskyy’s call.

Indeed, while outspokenness on hot-button societal issues has become ubiquitous among American celebrities – who voice their thoughts on causes ranging from the war in Ukraine to Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ rights, and climate change – the social media accounts of Korean idols cultivate squeaky-clean images rather than broach subjects that could prove controversial. Only top stars like BTS have had leeway to speak out on pressing issues – and even then, this is rare. At most, others express their support quietly with subtle fashion items, or advocate on relatively uncontroversial causes, like air pollution or animal rights.

K-pop idols’ silence is particularly conspicuous in comparison to their global fanbase, which has proved to be a formidable source of human rights advocacy around the world. K-pop fans in Myanmar have played a crucial role in organizing anti-authoritarian protests in the country. In 2020, pro-democracy protesters in Thailand marched to the tune of the Girls’ Generation song “Into the New World” – a track that has a rich history of use in South Korea’s own protest movements. In the United States, during the major Black Lives Matter movements in 2020, K-pop fans drowned out racist voices by flooding anti-BLM Twitter hashtags with fancams of their favorite idols.

Sign up for APARC newsletters to receive our experts' commentary and analysis.

Korean celebrities’ avoidance of these contentious issues stems, understandably, from the goal of achieving widespread popularity. In trying to foster an expansive, loyal fanbase, K-pop agencies have instructed singers to avoid topics that could alienate fans instead of attracting them: K-pop stars are not allowed to date, let alone voice opinions on sensitive global causes.

Yet, if K-pop hopes to have global staying power, it is time to break this silence. To ensure that K-pop is taken seriously, the industry’s idols should begin to engage with serious issues that global audiences care about. This is especially true in light of a growing expectation that idols should do so. For example, fans seek accountability from an industry that benefits from the appropriation of Black culture or the support of LGBTQ+ communities, yet whose stars remain silent on the rights issues these groups face. Speaking out on such causes is a sure way for K-pop to garner widespread global respect and cement its place as a genre that is relevant, global-minded, and here to stay.

True, idols may alienate some fans by advancing certain positions, but this has done little to hurt K-pop’s overall march toward global domination. The genre’s popularity is so immense that in 2020, the Chinese Communist Party backed down from an attempt to stir nationalist frenzy against BTS. The mega-boy group emerged unscathed.

Even the Kim Jong Un regime, one of the most oppressive governments in the world, is no match for K-pop: The genre’s popularity among North Koreans persists despite the threat of execution for individuals caught listening. In fact, the issue of human rights in North Korea could be an important cause for K-pop celebrities to take up, especially given K-pop’s penetration into the reclusive nation. Who is better positioned than South Korean idols to speak up on behalf of their brethren to the north?

The problems within the K-pop industry itself may be another good place to start. Idols face notoriously grueling working conditions and immense mental and physical pressure. If idols are to begin voicing their opinions, agencies must better support their artists, rather than abandoning them when controversy arises.

K-pop stars do not need to become as politically hyperactive as their counterparts in the United States. However, now that they have a foothold in global markets, they should use their platform to speak out on human rights movements – not only because they are well-positioned to support these causes, but also because doing so will cement their global staying power. To remain globally relevant, K-pop must be the first mover, not a fast follower – or risk getting left behind.

The Korea Program at Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) will mark its 20-year anniversary with a conference focused on North Korea’s geopolitics and South Korea’s pop culture wave (Hallyu), two aspects of Korea that continue to intrigue the public. Exploring how to translate this public attention into an increased academic interest in Korea, the conference will be headlined by Ban Ki-moon, former United Nations Secretary-General, and Soo-Man Lee, Founder and Chief Producer of SM Entertainment, who will join a lineup of speakers including SUHO, leader of K-pop group EXO. The two-day event will take place on May 19 and May 20, 2022, at Stanford’s Bechtel Conference Center, and is free and open to the public.

Breaking with the format of a traditional academic conference, the event will bring together scholars and experts to envision new horizons for the field of Korean Studies. It will include panel discussions on issues such as security on the Korean peninsula, North Korean human rights, U.S.-DPRK relations, and the rising global popularity of South Korea’s soft power, with a focus on K-dramas and K-pop. Scholars from Stanford and other prestigious North American universities will join on-stage conversations with leading practitioners including Joohee Cho, Seoul Bureau Chief at ABC News, and Angela Killoren, CEO of CJ ENM America, as well as government officials including Kim Sook, the former South Korean Ambassador to the UN, and Joon-woo Park, the former South Korean Ambassador to the EU, both former visiting fellows at the Korea Program.

Kim Hyong-O, the former speaker of South Korea’s National Assembly as well as a Korea Program alum, and Geun Lee, the president of the Korea Foundation, will deliver remarks at a private dinner event, which will recognize major donors and supporters of the Program.

“We are delighted to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Korea Program with such an outstanding lineup of speakers,” says Gi-Wook Shin, William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea at Stanford and the Program’s founding director. “For the past two decades, the Program has produced exceptional research on pressing issues, fostered connection between scholars and policymakers, and nurtured numerous students,” Shin notes. These accomplishments will be on display in the Korea Program’s new digital archives, which will be unveiled at the conference.

The event will also feature previews of two brand new documentaries, one on K-pop and the other on North Korean human rights, directed by Hark Joon Lee. “It is our hope that these documentaries will deepen global understanding of these issues and be used to help teach the next generation of students about Korea,” says Shin, who provided input on the films along with his research team at the Korea Program.

“We are incredibly grateful to those who have helped the Korea Program thrive over the past two decades,” notes Shin. “This conference will be an opportunity to share our thanks and reflect on our achievements while looking forward to the Program’s future.”

For conference registration, as well as the full agenda and speaker list, please visit the event page. Registration will open on Monday, May 2, 2022, at 9:00 a.m. PDT.

The conference will be live-streamed on APARC's YouTube channel.

About the Korea Program

The Korea Program at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is a West Coast hub of scholarship on contemporary Korea and the issues shaping the future of the Korean Peninsula and U.S.-Korea relations. Our work examines these topics from regional and comparative perspectives through cultural, political, and economic lenses. We train and support emerging Korea scholars and convene experts from academia, government, business, and civil society for dialogue, research, and publishing activities that inform policymakers in the United States and Korea and strengthen the bonds between the two countries. For more information, visit our website.

Media Advisory and Press Contact

Journalists interested in covering the conference should contact Shorenstein APARC’s Associate Director for Communications and External Relations Noa Ronkin at noa.ronkin@stanford.edu by May 17 at 9:00 a.m. PT to register. At the venue, they will be required to present a press credential from an established news organization. Freelance reporters should email a letter from the news organization for which they work to Noa Ronkin by the May 17 deadline. The press area is limited and press seating is not guaranteed.

Why would authoritarian regimes lacking electoral incentives invest in deliberative institutions designed to respond to citizen appeals? There are many reasons, according to APARC Predoctoral Fellow Tongtong Zhang, who argues that providing responses through such channels can incentivize citizens to conform to the regime and appease potential dissidents, while also informing them and the general public that organized opposition is not an effective way to pursue their interests.

Zhang is currently at work on her dissertation, entitled “Whose Voice Matters? Loyalists, Dissidents, and Responsiveness in China,” which examines this very question by looking at deliberative institutions as well as other political communications channels in China. After completing her predoctoral residency at APARC this summer and earning her PhD, she will join the Stanford Internet Observatory at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center as a Postdoctoral Scholar. While at Stanford Internet Observatory, she will collaborate with Dr. Shelby Grossman and other scholars on research projects studying authoritarian regimes’ online political communication.

In the following Q&A, Zhang discusses her research and fellowship experience at Stanford. The interview was slightly edited for length and clarity.

Sign up for APARC newsletters to receive research and commentary updates from our scholars

Your research centers on how authoritarian regimes (particularly the Chinese government) perpetuate their rule over societal actors and how preferences and behaviors of these societal actors are shaped as a result. How did you come to develop an interest in this topic?

I think it’s a combination of my life experience in China and the literature I read in the seminars on comparative politics in my first year of PhD. Those readings introduced me to differences in the logic of governance between democratic and authoritarian governments. In democracies, the behavior of officials is mainly shaped by the incentive to win elections. In non-democracies, the governance behavior of officials is largely shaped by the desire to secure citizen compliance and, by extension, to maintain social stability. Existing literature on how autocracies obtain citizen conformity has largely focused on two strategies — co-optation and repression. However, while growing up in China, I observed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has more tools at its disposal to control the public. 

Among these tools, I am particularly interested in the fast-growing channels for public deliberation under authoritarian rule because, without free popular elections, authoritarian rulers should have little incentive to invest in these institutions designed for citizens to express grievances and make appeals to the government. So I am curious about what role these quasi-democratic, participatory institutions play in authoritarian control and how societal actors (e.g. citizens, firms) feel about and react to the regime thanks to these institutions.  

You are working on your first book project; can you tell us a bit about what to expect from it? 

The book is based on my dissertation and asks why dictators lacking electoral incentives invest in deliberative institutions that are designed to respond to citizen appeals. An overarching question is whether the government actually responds. If it does, do all citizen appeals receive equal consideration? Previous research on authoritarian responsiveness largely contends that autocrats prioritize the appeals of potential dissidents. However, my research leads me to argue that autocrats may respond to all appeals but with qualitatively different types of responses.

More specifically, I hypothesize that for autocrats, providing substantive responses — responses that resolve the appealed problems — to regime loyalists can incentivize more citizens to conform to the regime. On the other hand, providing symbolic responses — responses that are rhetorical without solving the problems — to potential participants of collective action can appease these potential dissidents while also informing them and the general public that organized opposition is not an effective way to pursue their interests. Taken together, I theorize that authoritarian officials would selectively provide substantive responses to citizens who show higher compliance with the regime’s control and that officials would selectively provide symbolic responses to citizen appeals that are more likely to elicit collective action. I support this argument using primary government documents, interviews with local officials, and original, large-scale datasets of online appeals and government responses in China.

You have mentioned your interest in political communication in non-democracies. What are some aspects of political communication that you find especially interesting? 

My research primarily focuses on deliberation and responsiveness in non-democracies. I am curious as to why dictators invest in deliberative institutions designed to answer citizen grievances, under what circumstances these institutions would help citizens resolve their problems, and perhaps more importantly, how these deliberative institutions shape citizen attitude towards the regime and their political behaviors.

Beyond deliberation and responsiveness, I’m also interested in other communication strategies (e.g. education, media) that authoritarian regimes use to secure citizen compliance. For example, I’m currently working on a paper studying the political behavior of teachers at Confucius Institutes (CI), the Chinese government’s overseas program for cultural and language promotion. The prevailing view in media and policy writings is that the Chinese regime prescribes specific actions that CI teachers must take (e.g. censorship) when encountering politically sensitive questions. However,  using interviews, a global survey, and experimental methods among CI teachers in over 70 countries, we find that the Chinese regime only prescribes broad goals to CI teachers, such as “defending China’s national interests,” without specifying how to pursue these goals behaviorally. We also find that under these ambiguous instructions, men and women CI teachers choose divergent behaviors to advance the regime's goals.​​

What do you see as some of the biggest challenges to development in non-democracies? 

Development is a huge topic. I’m only able to provide some observations based on my research about authoritarian responsiveness. In this area, the biggest challenge I observe is still the lack of institutional channels for citizens to hold the government accountable. It is a sign of development that authoritarian governments are investing increasingly in deliberation channels, online and offline, for citizens to express grievances and demand public service. While less than 10% of appeals in my sample receive a substantive response from the government, it also shows that some citizens do get their problems resolved through these participation channels. 

Yet, when authoritarian officials fail to provide substantive responses, citizens have no legal, formal channels to punish officials. In democracies, unsatisfied petitioners can vote for the opposing party in the next election, expose government unresponsiveness to media outlets, and even sue the government in court. However, in autocracies, these methods of punishment are weak or absent. Some citizens may use non-institutional methods to punish the government, such as protesting or exposing official misconduct on social media. But these behaviors, which aim to attract a lot of public attention, are often cracked down on if they achieve this goal. Without credible punishment from the bottom-up, authoritarian officials treat these deliberative institutions as a tool for their social control rather than a channel to serve the public.

My research also finds that the Chinese central government does conduct regular audits on government responsiveness at the local level. But this top-down monitoring is largely symbolic and focuses on the quantity rather than the quality of officials’ responses to citizens. Therefore, I think that to improve government responsiveness in non-democracies, it is still crucial that the customers of these deliberation channels, that is, citizens, have some formal, legal channels to punish officials when officials fail to resolve the appealed problems. 

Your robust research methodology includes qualitative interviews, archival research, computational methods with large-scale datasets, and survey and field experiments. How did you develop this approach?

My PhD department (Political Science) provides us with many training opportunities for both quantitative and qualitative methods since our first year in the program. Our course sequences in quantitative methods and formal theory introduced me to a variety of powerful analysis tools and causal inference designs. I’ve also received quantitative training from the departments of Statistics, Communication, and Computer Science. In particular, the methods courses taught by Prof. Jennifer Pan and Prof. Dan Jurafsky helped me lay a good foundation for skills in web-scraping and natural language processing. 

My qualitative training started from the Chinese politics course sequence taught by Prof. Jean Oi. Later on, I continuously learned from Prof. Oi every time I talked with her about doing fieldwork in China. She guided me to extract and focus on the “big question” from lots of seemingly unstructured details I collected in the field, and she also gave me many helpful suggestions on what homework I should do before going to the field, how to approach people in the field, and how to design my questions and learn to improvise during the interviews. 

This combination of quantitative and qualitative training has made me a strong believer in mixed-methods research. I think that quantitative methods are powerful in showing systematic patterns and qualitative methods are powerful in uncovering the mechanism underlying these patterns. Moreover, qualitative fieldwork has helped me a lot in understanding how things actually get done at the micro level (e.g. the step-by-step workflow of a specific bureau within a municipal government when handling a citizen appeal), which I think is useful for identifying important research questions and developing hypotheses before collecting data systematically. 

Beyond your book project, what are you working on while at APARC? How has your time here aided your research?

I very much appreciate APARC’s support in the 2021-22 academic year. I was applying for postdoctoral fellowships in the past fall, and the Center’s generous funding and supportive staff have greatly helped me concentrate on market preparation. I also enjoyed the office space provided by APARC. Due to the pandemic, we were not in the office all the time but while I was there, I had very interesting conversations with several other fellows at the Center. Chatting with them broadened my horizon about the Asia-Pacific region. They also offered me some fresh perspectives on my research, which I find helpful while revising my dissertation. 

Thanks to these valuable resources provided by APARC, I was able to make progress on my dissertation and several related projects. In one paper, I show that citizen petitioners can increase government responsiveness by using certain rhetoric to communicate with local officials in China. I find that compared to appeals using a “legal script”, which invokes citizens’ legal rights to obtain public service, appeals using a script of “performance legitimacy,” which invokes the CCP’s moral commitment to deliver socio-economic welfare to the public, have a significantly higher likelihood to obtain substantive responses from local governments. Another paper I’m working on investigates how the characteristics of petitioners, appeals, and government responses change over time in China by comparing the appeals under Hu Jintao’s rule vs. appeals under Xi Jinping’s rule.

Has the global pandemic affected your ability to travel and do research? How have you adapted?

I was planning to conduct field interviews in the Sichuan province of China in 2020 and had to cancel because of the pandemic. However, on the positive side, the travel restrictions provided me with a relatively long period of time to concentrate on the quantitative parts of my dissertation and enabled me to make substantial progress on some time-consuming work such as scraping Weibo and reading and coding the posts. 

What is on the horizon for you? What's next? 

I plan to graduate this summer and will join the Stanford Internet Observatory at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center as a Postdoctoral Scholar. While at Stanford Internet Observatory, I will collaborate with Dr. Shelby Grossman and other scholars on research projects studying authoritarian regimes’ online political communication. I will also go onto the tenure-track academic market and hopefully get a faculty position in a university.