Regional soft power/creative industries competitionand in fact elicited the latter’s complicity. The confluence of interests between the anti-foreign
non-audience activists and the state makes the importing nation an inhospitable location for
exporting nations to exercise soft power.
One country’s presence in another has many fronts, and it is impossible for any nation to
coordinate the ongoing practices on all the various fronts to project a consistent and coherent
positive image of itself; contradictory or conflicting practices across the different fronts mean
that its “attractiveness” is always in flux among the people of the host country. The United States
has possibly been the most successful projector of soft power, but its constantly changing for-
tunes in different parts of the world attest to this. In East Asia, the continuing contestations over
the “truths” of Japanese military violence during its long colonization of Korea and its invasion
of China in the 1930s constantly arouse rhetorical animosities. Korean and Chinese histories
feature prominent accounts of the sexual violence directed against “comfort women”—Korean
and Chinese women made sex slaves of the Japanese military. To the historical animosities must
now be added the contemporary competition between a rising China and a declining Japan
for territories in the South China Sea, a conflict that threatens to disrupt regional peace. These
emotionally charged issues, wrapped up with nationalisms on all sides, unavoidably detract from
any positive attitudes that may have developed out of the consumption of one another’s respec-
tive media culture products.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, media culture has a consequential impact on its audience. For one who does not
have the opportunity to travel, “knowledge” of a foreign land is often derived wholly from its
representations on big and small screens. This ability to influence undergirds the proposition
that pop culture can be transformed into resources and instruments of soft power, allowing
the exporting nation to positively influence their target audience. However, substantively and
analytically, how and in what ways this influence can be achieved is always an empirical issue.
In the East Asian context, Japan, Korea, and China are vying to increase their regional soft power
through the export of media products. Existing empirical studies of audience receptions of tele-
vision dramas have shown that audience members are fragmented figures who intermittently
identify with and distance themselves from what is onscreen, suggesting an absence of a singular,
sustained positive or negative influence. The exporting nation’s hope for positive influence on
the audience in the target nation is neither linear nor guaranteed. Furthermore, the numerically
superior non-audience of imported media products can be readily mobilized against importa-
tion in the name of “protecting the national culture,” with the tacit or explicit support of local
culture producers and the state. The potential for such backlash requires the exporting nation to
tread softly with regard to its soft power ambitions. Also, antagonistic historical and contempo-
rary international relations among China, Japan, and Korea consistently undermine any possible
goodwill that may be derived from the consumption of one another’s media products, especially
the consumption of Japanese products in China and Korea. Finally, the structure of the loosely
organized East Asian media cultural economy is itself an obstacle to the possible engendering
of soft power by any of the three regional players. Despite China’s recent efforts to export its
media products to Japan and Korea, Chinese products have made very marginal market inroads
into those two countries. Conversely, after having experienced a massive influx of Japanese and
Korean media products, the Chinese government, through various strategies of market regula-
tion, including increasing the number of coproductions and managing them on its own terms,
has been able to reduce the inflow of foreign media and increase the domestic market share of its
homegrown products. Ultimately, the massive market of 1.3 billion potential consumers might