Cultural Exchange through Film: Analyzing Chinese Audiences’ Reception of Japanese and South Korean Cinema

This study empirically examines the cultural soft power effectiveness of Japanese and Korean films in China, focusing on the audience attraction mechanism from the perspective of cultural diplomacy. A mixed-method approach was adopted to conduct a cross-sectional survey of 1,942 Chinese film fans, and thematic analysis was used to deconstruct the underlying cultural dynamics. The core findings of this study mainly include three aspects: Japanese films trigger high emotional resonance with their everyday realist narratives, and their effect on enhancing cultural awareness significantly surpasses that of Korean films; emotional proximity is the core mechanism, establishing non-political connections through micro-narrative life symbols to dispel geopolitical hostility; although Korean films enjoy a proximity to Confucian culture, their credibility is undermined by excessive dramatization, and they are counterattacked by Japan’s “hyperrealistic approach†with low cultural proximity. This study verifies the paradox of East Asian cultural acceptance: in the context of historical trauma, high cultural proximity tends to activate political defense, whereas emotional proximity can penetrate this barrier. This study proposes a three-dimensional soft power transformation path, namely, using everyday realism as the emotional foundation, intergenerational tension of values to achieve traditional reinvention, and technological aesthetic immersion to construct sensory conquest.