Layers of Audience Communities

With the national and cultural boundary-crossing of East Asian Pop Culture becoming part of the regular diet of regional media consumers, national and transnational communities of audience/consumers have emerged, ranging from different types of “occasioned” communities to highly organized transnational fan communities that engage with the national politics of different countries as necessary. While all these beyond-the-text activities of communities of consumers are motivated by their affective labor and are engendered by their love of the pop culture, stars and genres, they still unavoidably get appropriated and transformed by the producers into profit, even the sub-fan organizations cannot ultimately escape this fate.

Placing Singapore in East Asian Pop Culture

Within Pop Culture China, Singapore with its small and multi-ethnic population is essentially a location of consumption of Chinese languages pop culture. Consequently, Mandarin singers from Singapore have to debut their careers in Taiwan, actors have to seek greater exposure and better prospect in Hong Kong and, while local television stations produce a substantial quantum of television dramas annually, only a trickle of this is exported to Southeast Asian neighbours with less developed media industries. However, with its new found national wealth, the local media industry, with the financial and administrative support of the government, have been seeking co-production opportunities regionally. Unfortunately, the state-financed production company, Raintree Productions, operates entirely on commercial basis in search of profit rather than with an ambition of developing local talents and film industry. Methodologically, as predominantly a consumption location, Singapore is an advantageous location to research audience reception practices and formation of transnational pop culture community.

East Asian Pop Culture

Since the 1990s, there has been dense traffic of pop culture routinely crossing the national and cultural boundaries of East Asian countries of Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. The unequal traffic is predominantly from Japan and Korea into ethnic-Chinese dominant locations, which has a historically long and well established production, distribution and exhibition network; Japan and Korea are primarily production-exporting nations, while China and Singapore as primarily importing-consumption ones, with Taiwan emerging as the production centre in Mandarin pop music and Hong Kong remaining as the primary production location of Chinese languages cinemas. Japanese and Korean pop culture are translated, dubbed or subtitled into a Chinese language in one of the ethnic-Chinese importing locations and then re-exported and circulated within the entire Chinese ‘diaspora’. The structures and processes that engender this transnational flow are the foundational to the emergence of an East Asian regional media cultural economy that increasingly see co-production of films and television dramas.

Conclusion

The emergence of an East Asian Pop Culture stands significantly in the way of complete hegemony of US media culture, which undoubtedly continues to dominate the entertainment media globally. Indeed, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, discussions on media in East Asia have displaced concern with the “cultural imperialism” of the West, namely of the US, to focus instead on the celebration of the “arrival” of East Asian pop cultures in the global entertainment market; however, traces of this debate, albeit reconfigured in terms of the hegemony of multinational media corporations rather than nation-states, continue (Shi 2008). Several achievements mark this sense of “arrival.” The earliest East Asian entries into the global pop culture entertainment markets were probably Japanese animation, ...

Pop Culture as Soft Power

Pop culture has emerged has a vehicle of soft power and an arena for competition in cultural diplomacy between China, Japan and Korea. As a middle-power, Korea is the most self-conscious about turning the popularity of its pop culture into an instrument to influence its consumers in Japan and, especially China. Japan’s ability to exercise cultural influence is limited by the potential push-back from memories its colonization of Korea and war time atrocities in China. With a nascent media industry, China is currently at a disadvantage because it is a net importer of pop culture; however, its massive consumption power has begun to force foreign producers to seek co-production opportunities with Chinese companies in order to avoid being kept out by import restrictions imposed by the Chinese government. Co-production gives the Chinese counterparts the right to control the content of the programs, than an ideological advantage. In view of the soft power competition, the idea of pan-East Asian cinema seems to be a project deferred rather than one that is imminent.

Taiwan’s Present/Singapore’s Past Mediated by the Hokkien Language

Hokkien or Minnan is the common language of the majority of ‘local’ ethnic-Chinese in Taiwan and Singapore. However, Hokkien has been elevated to the status of ‘national language’, as ‘Taiwanese’, for Taiwan citizens who desire an independent Taiwan. In contrast, Hokkien has become a language of the marginalized in Singapore who have failed to achieve academic success in its English and Mandarin, bilingual education system. Hokkien is thus used for comedy effects in Singaporean cinema, especially in the works of local filmmaker, Jack Neo. Consequently, when a Taiwanese film with Hokkien dialogue, embracing a nationalist sentiment, crosses over to Singapore, it is misread as signifying the ‘uncouth’, the ‘uneducated’, producing comedic effects, drawing denigrating laughter, as in the case of Singaporean reception of the Taiwanese film, Buddha Bless America. Such instances illustrate the complexities of the use and politics of Chinese languages which is elided in the use of the singular term ‘Chinese’ and ‘Chineseness’ in the English language.

The Structure of Identification and Distancing in Watching East Asian Television Drama

It has been argued that cultural and national boundary crossings of television dramas are facilitated by ‘cultural proximity’ between the production and reception locations. Often dramas are dubbed into local target language; dubbing domesticates the foreign content, thus facilitates reception. In such instances, the pleasure of consuming the ‘foreign’ is preserved in the visual elements of the dramas. Studies of real time audience viewing practices found that they tend to shift intermittently between identifying and distancing themselves from the characters and actions on screen. Furthermore, identification tends to be at the level of abstract identity markers, such as ‘understanding between human beings’ or some vague notion of ‘being all Asians’. In contrast, distancing tends to be from culturally specific elements of the production location, such as ‘it is so typically Korean’, thus unlike the audience him/herself. A transnational audience is therefore a fragmented figure rather than a culturally consistent one. This fragmentation, especially in distancing the foreign, limits the potential of transnational television viewing in generating a pan-regional identity among its audiences.

Pop Culture China

Since the early 19th century, Chinese languages pop cultures have been financed, produced, distributed, circulated and consumed among ethnic Chinese population in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Illustrative of this highly integrated industrial structure is the Shaw Brothers, a pillar in this Chinese languages media industry. Shaw Brothers started business in Shanghai in the 1920s, moved its financial operation to Singapore in the 1950s, produced films in Hong Kong and distributed and exhibited them in its network of cinemas throughout Southeast Asia in the 1960s and now produces and distributes television dramas throughout the same network. This ethnic Chinese population arguing share more knowledge about Chinese languages pop culture than about Confucianism, especially among those below forty years old. The greater cultural China is thus more accurately represented as a Pop Culture China, a decentred, multi-lingual, multi-nodal relatively well integrated cultural economy that operates under the presumed ‘sameness’ of a ‘common’ Chinese cultural heritage, then being unified by some grand philosophical-civilizational tradition. Pop Culture China is made manifest daily through the entertainment pages of the mass media in the constitutive locations.

Introduction

This book is an introduction to an emerging field of study, namely, East Asian Pop Culture. An inherent precondition of such a text is that a substantial amount of research and published material must already be available in the field before the writing can be undertaken. An introductory text is, therefore, fundamentally a parasitic text that draws on the existing material in order to attempt a relatively coherent mapping of the contours of the object of analysis. The indebtedness of such an endeavor to available material is even more pronounced in instances, such as this one, in which the analytic object has to be formulated in/from both comparative and regional perspectives. This is because rare is a single author who is equipped with the linguistic competency and cultural sensitivity required to understand the different regional sites, and is thus able to conduct research in all the significant locations that constitute the region as a unit, spatially and in other ways....