Squid Game, the South Korean television show in which deeply indebted people compete with one another in a deadly tournament, has become Netflix’s top offering in 90 countries, including the United States, and is already the streaming service’s most popular original program ever. I am one of the millions of viewers who binge-watched all nine episodes as soon as they came out. Not only is the series well plotted, but it also captures deep-seated concerns among many people in prosperous societies about ever-widening income inequality.
The show is only the latest cultural export from South Korea to take the world by storm. From pop music acts such as the boy band BTS to movies such as Parasite (which became the first foreign-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020), Hallyu, or the Korean “wave,” is enjoying unprecedented global success. Historically more worried about fending off Chinese and Japanese cultural domination than spreading its own culture abroad, South Korea has now become a global soft-power juggernaut.
