East Asian stars, public space, and star studieslower level of the hierarchy would try to exploit the surplus value of strong media by casting
the latter’s valuable talents.
Second, the East Asian media enterprises not only scout talents but also join forces in terms of
finance and production in efforts to share their own national market and conquer larger markets.
East Asia has witnessed many industry-level financed coproductions since the twentieth century.
The media alliances usually demand the mutual and equal participation of cast and crew from con-
tributing partners. The pan-Asian cooperations between Hong Kong and Japan in the 1990s and
between China/Hong Kong and Korea in the 2000s are worthy examples. The mediated geopolit-
ical expression would articulate the regionalizing desire of the East Asian national capitals. In some
extreme situations, the star images in the joint projects could become ideologically pure, set in an
archetypal or highly generic East Asia, since the media capitals are very eager to maximize their
markets by being politically correct. Typical examples include the Promise (2005), a pan-Asian film
set against a fantasy portrayal of East Asia. There are also some occasions when nationalized media
enterprises team up to produce political narratives. For instance, Chinese and Korean film indus-
tries are collaborating on a film project about Korean patriot and political activist An Jung-geun,
who assassinated Itō Hirobumi (the Prime Minister of Imperial Japan) in the Chinese city of
Harbin in 1909 (Yeh and Kim 2014). The media text that offers transnational cross-cultural scenes
would serve as “rehearsal space,” offering spaces for the audience to contemplate the relationship
between their own national identity and that of their foreign neighbors (Hitchcock 2002, 69).
Transnational employment within the East Asian media intersection deserves close exami-
nation; it is more ambivalent in many aspects than the nationalistic alliance of media. The pre-
vious rush of transnational performances can be traced to the debuts of Hong Kong talents in
Japan and that of the Japanese talents in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1990s. Currently, in the
twenty-first century, Korean stars are taking part in the media of Hong Kong, China, Taiwan,
and Japan. Performers and artists in the borderless age are driven to cross over to other countries,
precisely because of the external surplus of their original culture. Their new roles would be
determined by at least four factors of the receiving media system: first, how the media indus-
tries address their target audience, e.g. those who love Korean popular culture, or the pan-Asian
martial art/action film audience; second, the production conventions and strong genres of local
media; third, collective or national attitude toward the culture of the foreign actors; and fourth,
their own identity-making in the age of globalization.
For instance, in the 1990s, Hong Kong filmmakers invited Japanese TV drama stars to act
in their action genres or Wong-Kar-Wai’s stylized visual works alongside a cosmopolitan cast
placed in a cosmopolitan Hong Kong society. Japanese media scouted Hong Kong film stars
to play the role of Chinese students, gangsters or workers in boundary-lade Japanese films and
TV dramas. In the 2000s, Korean TV drama stars have followed in the transnational footsteps of
the Hong Kong and Japanese stars in East Asian media. They currently split their time playing
protagonists in Taiwanese TV dramas and Chinese film and TV. Their Korean identities are usu-
ally erased in the latter two media centers, whose commercialism has articulated Sino-centrism
(Lai 2014). Casting Korean stars, but having them play non-Korean characters, satisfies both of
the commercial considerations. The two media production systems want to attract an audience
with the stars, but they have no strong intentions to produce cross-border stories that might
discourage their audience.
Two questions have puzzled the Asian media enterprises practicing transnational employ-
ment. It has already been noted that coproductions fail, while clones and format trading succeed
more easily, especially when the target audience is mainstream (Zhu 2008, 94). The very begin-
ning of the chapter noted that China–Korea cooperations, which lump together all profitable
talents and elements in one project, usually become artistic and commercial flops and never