Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture

Abstract

The emergence of East Asian Pop Culture as an integrated regional media cultural economy is a result of the penetration of Japanese and Korean pop cultures into the historically well established distribution and exhibition networks of Chinese languages pop culture in locations where ethnic-Chinese constitutes the majority population; namely, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China and Singapore. Regionalization has produced transnational and transcultural audience communities of different scale in different reception locations, from those looking merely to be entertained to conventional fan clubs to sub-fan community who translates and subtitles foreign programs for free distribution on the Internet, bypassing state censorship and circuits of profit for the producers. In regional political economy, pop culture has become both a vehicle of transnational collaboration for co-production and market expansion and an instrument of competition in soft power diplomacy, which aims to produce positive sentiments towards the exporting nation among the target audiences. The exporting nation’s achievement in engendering such positive influence is limited by the fragmented nature of the audiences who respond differently to the same products; by backlash from local mobilization against ‘foreign cultural invasion’ in ‘defence’ of the national culture, among the non-consumers in the target location and, finally, by the government of the PRC, the largest consuming country, to control the flow of import, restrict exhibition time and encourage co-production which enables it to shape the content of the co-produced programs.

Determinants of Chinese Tourists’ Loyalty to Korea: A Comparison of Film and Non-film Tourist Perceptions

“…It indicates that Korea may be a more popular destination for the female tourists of younger generation. This may attribute to popularity of Korean wave and therefore people generally perceive the vigorous and energetic image of Korea [3]. Designation managers should cultivate younger generation and meanwhile develop the potential visitors of elder generation.…”

Introduction

“…On the contrary, political as well as technical issues of translation attend every conference held across the network and every issue produced by the InterAsia Cultural Studies journal. In work on film and media, however, the prevalence of dubbing and subtitling practices in the industry complicates and to some extent displaces the notion of a 'source' or 'original' language, becoming an object of study in its own right (Lo 2005, Chua 2012. 10 In the introductory essay to the volume Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, which includes two Australian scholars writing about Australian issues, Chen had stressed that 'colonial conquest has forced Australia and New Zealand to be part of 'Asia', and these two geographical spaces could be seen as part of Inter-Asia, economically and politically'.…”

Inter-Asia referencing and shifting frames of comparison

“…In mainland Southeast Asia, Thai pop culture is well received in Laos and areas bordering Myanmar (Jirattikorn 2008) and Cambodia. In island Southeast Asia, among the Muslim/Malaylanguage communities, Indonesia is marginally dominant; and in East Asia, the regional network is much more complicated, with shifting dominant players according to different popular culture genres (Chua 2012). Such networks might peripherally exceed their respective regional boundaries and appear in other parts of Asia, but they do not reach the global market, despite frequent claims by the producers and other grandiose claims infused with nationalism.…”