Chua Beng Huatprovided mass entertainment. The proliferation and diversification of mass entertainment pro-
grams has been fed in part by imported programs, primarily from Hong Kong, South Korea,
Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. Meanwhile, the domestic industries stepped up the pace
of production to fill the demand generated by the constantly expanding number of cable and
satellite timeslots. However, while Chinese stations have been increasingly able to gain market
share at home with some highly rated domestic programs, its exports to the region, especially
Japan and Korea, remain miniscule.
China has always had some success in exporting historical dramas and dramas based on
Chinese literary classics to Hong Kong and Taiwan and other overseas Chinese communities.
In 1998, the Hunan Satellite TV production Huanzhu gege (Princess Huanzhu) “was the first
Mainland Chinese drama to achieve success in Korea, although broadcast after 11 p.m. on SBS
due to [the] Korean Broadcasting Commission’s foreign content restrictions” (Keane 2008,
151–152). Intriguingly, Chinese military dramas seem to have a market in Korea and Japan
(Xu 2010). Judging from the record of regional sales, Keane rightly concludes that “Mainland
Chinese producers have established a foothold [in the East Asian regional market] and in some
way broken down stereotypes of Chinese dramas being boring and ideological” (2008, 152).
Despite continuing measures to revitalize the culture industries through commercialization,
including “lowering the threshold for private and foreign investment in state-owned media com-
panies, tax breaks and setting up a cultural industries investment fund,” as well as “nurturing
cultural talents, improving intellectual property rights protection laws and cracking down on
piracy,” Singapore’s Straits Times correspondent notes, “the missing ingredient in this grand plan,
however, is the expansion of space for creativity through looser government control” (Goh 2009).
However, it should be noted that Chinese media products face significant structural obsta-
cles in Korea and Japan that reduce the possibility of China becoming a major player in the
regional media market. The dissemination of both Korean and Japanese television dramas were
initiated by media entrepreneurs in Taiwan and Hong Kong who acquired the dramas, includ-
ing through illegal means, for broadcast on local cable stations. In addition, the Taiwanese and
Hong Kong stations were willing to invest in the subtitling and dubbing of the Korean and
Japanese programs to facilitate local reception. This investment was also justified by the fact that
subtitled and dubbed programs can be re-exported to the large ethnic Chinese communities
in Southeast Asia and smaller ones elsewhere in the world. In a recent empirical study of the
penetration of Chinese media products in Korea and Japan, Lee (2014) found that these kinds of
intermediaries, and the subtitling and dubbing services they provide, are largely absent in both
countries. In interviews with the very small audience of Chinese TV programs in Korea and
Japan, the consumers were predominantly individuals who had past experience living in China
or learning Mandarin.
In the contest for the regional media market, however, China has a trump card. To gain access
to a potential 1.3 billion viewers, regional production companies from Hong Kong (Chow
and Ma 2008), Taiwan (Chen 2008), and increasingly Japan and Korea (Lee 2008) have been
entering into coproduction arrangements with Chinese state-owned media companies so as to
bypass official obstacles, including state political and ideological control, access to distribution
channels, and annual import quotas. In the case of Taiwan, even coproduction is fraught with
difficulties; a less cumbersome alternative for Taiwanese production companies is to relocate
to China (Chen 2008, 183). Coproductions have benefited both Hong Kong and China. They
have injected new financial resources into Hong Kong’s weakening film industry, which is
parti cularly needed to produce costly blockbuster films. For China, coproductions have intro-
duced new aesthetics and commercial entertainment elements into its media culture products,
which had previously been laden with staid and unrealistic themes of socialist selflessness in