Regional soft power/creative industries competitionthe interests of the masses and the nation (Xu 2010). The 2003 Closer Economic Partnership
Agreement has significantly reduced barriers that had limited Hong Kong pop culture from
crossing into China. For example, the agreement permits Hong Kong films to be counted
as domestic Chinese releases, exempting them from the foreign film quota. The collaborative
efforts between China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have to a certain extent resulted in a “reintegra-
tion” of these three major ethnic Chinese locations, which constitute the greater ethnic Chinese
market. Coproduction enables the sharing of resources in developing “profitable dramas that
conform to the taste of the ethnic Chinese market” (Chen 2008, 183), albeit one that is con-
strained by the Chinese state’s ideological intervention and control. Meanwhile, coproduction
reinscribes the centrality of China as the center of all things Chinese (Chow and Ma 2008), an
ideological effect precisely desired by the Chinese government.
The pressure to coproduce intensified for Korean independent television drama producers
in 2006 when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television in China announced
its intention to impose an annual quota on Korean drama imports. In the final analysis, profit
remains the reason for coproduction: “These vast Chinese media markets [Mainland China,
Hong Kong, and Taiwan, but also in Malaysia and Singapore] offer a way for the co- producers
to maximize financial resources and ensure large returns on their investments” (Lee 2008, 196).
Access to the China market has also become more urgent with signs of ebbing interest in
Korean dramas. In 2006, “the four most popular dramas purchased by provincial stations” were
all Hong Kong dramas and “some [Chinese] viewers [are] finding the pace of Korean drama
too slow and the narratives too predictable” (Keane 2008, 151). The content of the dramas that
have thus far been coproduced have been significantly determined by the tastes of the Chinese
audience, a consequence of which is that Korean stations express less interest in broadcasting
coproductions as they have difficulty attracting a sizeable Korean audience (Lee 2008).
In sum, in the regional media market competition serves as a proxy for the regional soft power
competition, and while the Chinese government has been unable to penetrate the Korean and
Japanese markets and thereby influence those audiences, it is nevertheless able to control media
inflows and with its determining ideological effects on coproductions, it has been able to regain
a good measure of ideological influence on its domestic audience and reduce the influence of
imported products.
Obstacles to the efficacy of media culture products
as instruments of soft power
The idea of media culture products as instruments for a nation’s soft power projection is concep-
tually dependent on the likely influence they have on their audience/consumer. Empirical stud-
ies show that the ability to influence transnational audiences is blunted by three factors: (1) the
fragmented nature of audiences, (2) backlash against imported media products, and (3) historical
and contemporary international relations between the exporting and importing nations.
Regardless of the amount of resources an exporting nation spends to promote exports in the
target destinations, it has absolutely no control over how the products will be received and the
reactions they will generate. Empirically, an individual audience member’s real-time reception is
a fragmentary process of intermittent moments of identification with and distancing from what
is onscreen. Furthermore, identification tends to be abstract, with the audience generalizing the
identities of the characters as being “Asian” or “human,” without reference to particular features
of either (MacLachlan and Chua 2004, 166–167) or the audience member may simply express an
aspiration to the consumerism represented onscreen (Thomas 2004; see also Leheny 2006, 230).
In contrast, and more importantly, empirical studies show that cultural particularities, that is,