It’s Time for a New Conversation about the Pop Culture/Soft Power Nexus

• U.S. pop culture is now bipolar: legacy Hollywood liberalism (e.g., Marvel Cinematic Universe) versus Muskified online right-wing culture.
• The African youth market, fueled by platforms like Boomplay preloaded on Transsion phones, will dominate global pop culture in coming decades.
• U.S. debates ignore how China–Global South tech ties are reshaping soft power, exposing limits of conventional American frameworks.

When Donald Trump returned to the U.S. presidency in 2025, he kicked off a new era in U.S. international influence. While many of the core foreign policy focus areas remained in place, the optics and style of how the U.S. interacts with the rest of the world, and especially the Global South, have changed.

This has coincided with a shift in U.S. pop culture, outlined in a recent New York Times discussion about shifts in U.S. global influence and the concept of soft power that I found both interesting and frustrating.

The conversation, with the authors W. David Marx and Euny Hong (who both focus on the overlap of popular culture and geopolitics from different perspectives), pointed out that as liberal U.S. values increasingly overlapped with establishment values, the transgressive power of pop culture became entangled with right-wing politics.

The result has been a curious separation in U.S. global cultural influence. We’re simultaneously seeing the ongoing influence of broad-based Hollywood liberalism, as mythologized through such legacy franchises as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as the Muskification of U.S. online culture, drawing the influences from right-wing spaces like 4chan into the mainstream.

The result has been to turn the U.S.’ global influence increasingly bipolar.

When the conversation turned to China, things became a bit more frustrating and revealing. The authors dutifully noted Chinese pop culture trends like the Labubu and the recent Chinamaxxing boom in the Global North.

However, as usual in these kinds of discussions, the Global South, and Africa in particular, were not at the table. This allowed the participants to leapfrog over several inconvenient realities to land, reassuringly, back at square one: even though the rise of various culture industries created a “kind of multipolar world of cool […] America’s still the dominant cultural power.”

Sure, Grandma. But let’s back up, because I fear that this framing of Chinese cultural influence misses some details. First, how is it possible to talk about global pop culture and not mention actual youth?

In addition to the U.S., the conversation mostly focuses on the influence of Japan and South Korea (two of the oldest populations in the world), while talk of pop culture markets mostly focuses on the rapidly aging markets of Europe and the U.S.

In Africa, where the median age is actual teenagers, the real power of Chinese influence can be seen. This power doesn’t lie in the consumption of Chinese content, but in the centrality of Chinese-built tech backbones and distribution platforms.

A key example is Boomplay, a music streaming service linked to the mobile phone giant Transsion, which occupies about half of the African mobile phone market. It comes preloaded on Transsion phones, and Boomplay worked with African studios to secure the world’s largest catalog of streaming rights for African music.

The stars boosted through this network aren’t Chinese. This is because Africa doesn’t need Chinese pop stars any more than it needs Beyoncé. It is royally endowed with some of the most interesting – and young! – pop stars in the world.

In this sense, Boomplay plays a similar role to Western outlets like Netflix and Spotify, which have elevated African pop culture internationally. The difference is scale. While Spotify’s African users hover around 15 million, Boomplay currently boasts 90 million active users on the continent.

This is just the beginning. The African youth market is hundreds of millions of teenagers strong and remains largely untapped. It will fully come to dominate global pop culture over the next decades. Spotify has already noted a 500% increase in global streams of Afrobeat songs over the last few years.

As with post-WWII Japanese pop culture, much of its uniqueness will be driven by domestic consumption, without having to foreground global markets. Unlike Japan, African domestic markets are stackable and rapidly integrating. And – of course – much of that integration is happening

This is what makes many U.S. discussions of pop culture-driven U.S. soft power so limiting. Beyond not really grappling with how quickly the relationship between the U.S. and the world is curdling, they also refuse to see how the uniqueness of China-Global South relations is reshaping the very concept of soft power itself.

But sure – let’s keep talking about the global popularity of hip hop.

• Culture
• Media
• Soft Power