Chua Beng Huatforeign cultural elements, tend to cause viewers to distance themselves from what is onscreen.
For example, a Hong Kong woman comments, “[Korean TV drama’s] kind of life and death love
story will never happen to me. ... Those things are too tiring to me, I may not do that!” (Lin
and Tong 2008, 113). What are “attractive” onscreen are those things that the audience members
already claim as features of his or her own life, and what causes distancing or rejection are the
specificities of the cultures of the exporting countries. The individual audience member is thus a
fragmented figure who could simultaneously be attracted and repulsed by the representations of
the foreign cultures onscreen, affirming that there is no guarantee that the popularity of the pop
culture product will create a positive disposition towards the exporting nation. This fragmented
figure renders dubious the efficacy of media products as instruments of soft power.
No one willingly accepts being the target of others’ power, hard or soft. One nation’s pro-
jection of power into another’s territory unavoidably engenders resentment and backlash from
the latter. Resentment can come from multiple sources, singularly or in coalition, in the tar-
get nation: non-consumers of the imported media products, workers in the media industry,
nationalists, and the government. Occasionally, a segment of the “non-audience” may coalesce
into a “community” to confront the audience of imported pop culture. In such confrontations,
this non-audience often claims to be the majority population, anointing themselves as “the
people”—an abstract symbolic unity—and then turning the contest into one of “defending
the national culture” against “foreign cultural invasion.” For obvious reasons, the non-audience
would have the complicit support of both local media industry professionals and the govern-
ment. In East Asia, such confrontations are fueled by historical animosities between Japan, China,
and Korea, the ongoing “cross-strait” stalemate between Taiwan and China, and more recently,
the antagonism between Hong Kong residents and Chinese visitors.
Here are three instances illustrative of backlash. First is the case of some Chinese students
who proclaimed themselves to be “patriots” and protested against Taiwanese aboriginal singer
Chang Hui-mei’s decision to perform at the 2000 Taiwan presidential inauguration ceremony,
which supposedly marked her as an “enemy” of a unified Chinese nation. In 2004, local police
cancelled her sold-out concert in Hangzhou for fear of violence (Tsai 2008, 221). This was
an instance of non-consumers acting with the complicity of the state. The second instance
of backlash took place in 2005, when some Taiwanese pop musicians protested against the
Korean Wave. Playing on a homophone for Korean Wave in Mandarin (hanliu can mean both
Korean Wave [韩流] and “cold current” [寒流]), Taiwanese rap artist MC HotDog (MC 熱狗)
penned an obscenity-laced song, The Invasion of the Korean/Cold Wave, excoriating Korean
culture. The lyrics also insult the overwhelmingly female audience for their supposed naïveté,
gullibility, and even stupidity in their desiring of the “love” and “romance” depicted in Korean
dramas (Yang 2008). The third example comes from the publication of the Manga Kenkanryū
(Anti–Korean Wave Manga) in 2005, which was the height of the Korean Wave boom in Japan.
The manga claims to provide the “truth” about Korea, a “thoroughly depraved nation” and
asserted that “When you [Japanese readers] know Korea, it’s only natural that you become
Anti-Korean!” (Liscutin 2009) Impressive as the sales of the manga might have been, Nicola
Liscutin observed “The breathtaking impact of Manga Kenkanryū is demonstrated less, how-
ever, by its sales figures than by the extensive pro-Kenkanryū movements that rapidly spread
on various Japanese and global Internet sites” (2009, 173). In every one of these cases, the
non-audience protestors discursively and ideologically invoked the sign of the “nation,” and
with it the imagined national public space and national culture, the better to label, marginalize,
and silence the local audience of imported media products as “cultural traitors,” thus politi-
cally and morally excluding them from the “nation.” Proclaiming themselves as patriots and
protectors of the national culture, they preempted potential negative sanctions from the state