![jewel mania level 528 jewel mania level 528](https://i.imgur.com/01FDGyS.png)
The growing popularity of Korean pop culture in the world was at least partly driven by the South Korean government supporting its creative industries through subsidies and funding for start-ups, as a form of soft power with the goal of becoming a leading global exporter of culture in line with Japanese and British culture, a niche that the United States has dominated for nearly a century.
![jewel mania level 528 jewel mania level 528](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/44ykqYflDig/mqdefault.jpg)
![jewel mania level 528 jewel mania level 528](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7cdgKEZNCjk/maxresdefault.jpg)
Since the turn of the 21st century, South Korea has emerged as a major exporter of popular culture and tourism, aspects which have become a significant part of its burgeoning economy. These two words, hallyu and Korean wave, were officially included in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2021. The term was reintroduced in Japan as hanryu or kanryu by the Asahi Shimbun in 2001. The term was adopted by Chinese media to refer to the success of South Korean popular culture in China. While some sources attribute the term Hallyu, a variation of a Japanese expression using Ryu (流) as a postfix to refer ‘~way’, ‘~style’, ‘~group’, to being first used by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in South Korea in 1999, when the ministry produced a music CD titled in Chinese 韓流-Song from Korea other scholarly sources attribute the term's ascendance from Korean television dramas first airing on Chinese television in 1997, naming the phenomenon hanliu ( simplified Chinese: 韩流 traditional Chinese: 韓流 pinyin: Hánliú), meaning "Korean wave". First driven by the spread of K-dramas and K-pop across East, Southeast and South Asia during its initial stages, the Korean Wave evolved from a regional development into a global phenomenon, carried by the Internet and social media and the proliferation of K-pop music videos on YouTube. info), a neologism, literally meaning "wave/flow of Korea") is the increase in global popularity of South Korean culture since the 1990s.The Korean wave or K wave ( Korean: 한류 Hanja: 韓流 RR: Hallyu MR: Hallyu, listen ( help Increase in global popularity of South Korean culture since the 1990s