Regional soft power/creative industries competitionconsumption of media culture have become more nuanced and sophisticated, the simple truism
remains: media have multiple influences on their audience.
If restrictions on media imports are based on the perceived need to limit foreign cultural
influences on citizens, then, conversely, media exports can be conceived as attempts to influence,
across spatial and cultural boundaries, the citizens of the export destinations. It is here that media
cultural products emerge as a potential vehicle for a state to influence, presumably positively, the
beliefs and attitudes of their transnational audience towards itself. It is this that allows media cul-
ture to be folded into the discourse and actual politics of “soft power.” In an age where weapons
of mass destruction are at hand, the use of military power among responsible states as members
of the international community is a receding possibility. The need to seek international influ-
ence by other means is more pressing and “culture” comes to be envisaged as a vehicle, indeed
“weapon,” to achieve such positive influence, hence, the idea of “cultural diplomacy” or in less
polite terms, “soft power.”
Power in whatever mode is the ability to get others to do things that they may not be willing to
do. In contrast to “hard power,” which extracts compliance through degrees of coercion and direct
sanction, the idea of soft power is to induce voluntary action because the target has been influenced
to desire the same outcome as that preferred by the holder of soft power. According to American
political scientist Joseph Nye, the progenitor of the concept, “Soft power rests on the ability to
shape the preferences of others” (Nye 2004, 5). Nye suggests that since the end of the World War II,
the United States has been the single most successful country in exercising its soft power globally
through its ideology, political values, foreign policy, and culture. With regard to political ideology, the
American version of liberal democracy has undoubtedly become globally hegemonic as its privileg-
ing of political individualism is commonly invoked by citizens everywhere against authoritarianism.
On foreign policy, except for the immediate postwar years in Europe, achievements are dubious,
especially in Asia. As for culture, “the set of values and practices common to distinguish between
high culture such as literature, art, and education, which appeals to elites, and popular culture, which
focuses on mass entertainment” (Nye 2004, 11), evidence for the effectiveness of U.S. soft power at
any level of the spectrum of cultural consumption is inconclusive. The United States is the world’s
number one exporter of mass entertainment pop culture in every category—music, films, television
programs and formats. However, Nye well recognized that there is no evidence that this guarantees
the desired influence on the target population as, in any particular location, “attraction and rejection
of American culture among different groups may cancel each other out” (Nye 2004, 13).
Like all modes of power, soft power is a relational concept in which compliance with the
holder of power by the target of power is never guaranteed. Resistance is always possible, regard-
less of the level of coercion or persuasion; power is made visible by resistance. The example of
the United States illustrates that, regardless of the quantum of resources a country expends in
exporting its media culture products, the degree of positive influence it may achieve among the
target audience is effectively beyond its control. This suggests that the efficacy of media culture
products as an instrument of ideological influence on its target audience is highly contextual and
variable, the perimeters of which we have to begin to specify.
With the emergence of the dense media culture traffic in East Asia, it is not surprising that
the competition for regional market share by media organizations from different countries has
caught the attention of their respective governments and that the latter would reconfigure this
market competition into a soft power competition between nations. It is important to remind
ourselves and to emphasize the sequence of this development: the industries penetrated the
regional market and then the nations began capitalizing on the former’s achievement for the
latter’s own interests. Two elements significantly determine the stances taken by China, Japan,
and Korea, the three largest economies in East Asia: first, the unequal flows of the products, with