Jocelyn Yi-Hsuan Laibecome regional sensations. Some of them are even the best examples of failure (such as The
Promise mentioned previously and My Combat Butler and Absolute Boyfriend, two Taiwanese
manga remakes, casting a Korean actress). These phenomena have frequently taken place in
Chinese-language films and television, especially in Chinese and Taiwanese mainstream media.
Their failures are related to the gap between the artistic commitment of the appropriating
productions and the tastes of the target audience. Take the participation of Korean stars in
Chinese media and Japanese stars in Taiwanese media for instance. The popularity of the foreign
cultures in the two countries is precisely the reason why audiences cross over to other media
systems to demand and seek what the domestic media productions do not possess. The lack of
a competitive edge in the Chinese and Taiwanese media among the runaway audience is due
in large part to two factors, First, the loss of appeal of domestic values (usually connected to
governmental media control), and second, the production quality (usually connected to the
accumulation of media capital and talents). For instance, the Chinese media system is tightly
controlled by the state and its more traditional official value system that in return offers policy
protection. In Taiwan, many Taiwanese audiences have run away from the “poor quality” of
the domestic media since the early 1990s. They shy away from the embedded value system in
the narratives (Iwabuchi 2002, 150), and industrial underdevelopment and formulaic standard-
ization of the content (Hu 2002 and 2008, 122). When foreign stars work with local projects,
their performances are aesthetically subjected to the local ecology. If the projects do not have
commitments to improve production all round, especially addressing the targeted yet reluctant
audience, the multinational casting would not satisfy the targeted audience that opts for the
foreign culture.
The expense of casting a much more established star usually means incurring greater expense
for the projects at the lower levels of the East Asian media hierarchy. The project must take
advantage of the star-capital to cover the extra expense of hiring an established star-worker.
Here there is a difference between the Chinese/Japanese and Taiwanese/Hong Kong media.
Chinese or Japanese projects can easily recoup the expense in their growing home markets.
Alternatively, many transnational casting projects from Taiwan and Hong Kong are export-
oriented. As regards Taiwanese and Hong Kong media, which lack a growing home market,
multinational casting projects usually expand their market plan to regional markets: either
Japanese, Chinese, or the South East Asian market. In recent years, the Chinese state’s censorship
and control of the media have had an undesirable effect on the creativity of not only Chinese
but also Taiwanese and Hong Kong productions. Particularly affected are those projects involv-
ing mediation of geo political facts and political dissidences. The pan-Asian media projects that
hold Japanese financial investment are subjected to Japanese media rules and interest.
Starscape: Differences between East asian discursive locations
The second question is why these transnational works are not well received outside the pro-
ducing country, even if they are well made or have well-known East Asian stars. Their overall
underperformance is mainly related to the national difference in East Asia. Arjun Appadurai
(1990, 6–7) provides an effective framework for us to understand these national differences.
He considers the global cultural economy a landscape of five fluid and open-ended dimen-
sions: ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, financescape, and ideoscape. The five landscapes are
“deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness
of different sorts of actors,” especially nation-states, multinationals, etc. The landscapes form
the building blocks of what Appadurai (1990, 7) calls multiple “imagined worlds” that are con-
structed by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups in the world. Individuals