Although there is a long history of exchanges and flows of media products among East Asian
countries, the emergence of a loosely integrated East Asian pop cultural economy is of more
recent vintage. Aided by rapid developments in new communication technologies, which have
radically transformed processes of production, transmission, dissemination, and consumption, the
dense traffic of pop cultural products across the region was, by the early 1990s, a routine pheno-
menon, constituting a regional, East Asian media cultural economy. At the industry level, pro-
ducers of films, television programs, music, and other conventional pop culture products are no
longer satisfied with the domestic market but aim to penetrate the regional and the global mar-
kets. Paren thetically, “pop culture” is used here to denote commercially produced, profit-driven
cultural products to distinguish it from “popular culture,” which embraces cultural practices by
the masses, namely, inherited vernacular cultural practices without identifiable progenitors such as
folk religion and vernacular architecture. The emergence of a regional media cultural economy is
made visible through different modes of cooperation: pop musicians stage concerts in major urban
centers across the region; film and TV directors frequently work abroad; actors and actresses are
featured in “pan-Asian” productions to expand the market for their works; and financial capital
flows across national boundaries in search of coproduction opportunities. Significantly, coproduc-
tion arrangements are not always voluntary but are necessitated by restrictions on the importation
of foreign media products imposed by the local state, pointing us to the politics of pop culture.
The import restrictions placed on media products are undoubtedly economic protectionist
measures designed to shield local producers and industries from foreign competition. However,
given the nature of media products, the concern of the local state obviously involves more than
just economics. The complex ways in which media are able to influence the hearts and minds
of its audience/consumer are of equal if not greater concern to the state. The concerns both
are ideological and political. It was not too long ago when many East Asian countries con-
demned the ubiquitous depiction of sex, drugs, and violence in Hollywood products as “moral
pollution” disruptive to “wholesome” East Asian cultural values and decried the penetration
of imported media products as a form of “cultural imperialism.” The simplistic assumption of
the cultural imperialism thesis—that audiences naïvely absorb the implicit and explicit cultural
values they see or hear in the media—is now much discredited in the media research commu-
nity. In its place, is an “active” audience that reworks what one sees and hears into one’s own
frames and horizons of meanings and relevance. While the models describing the reception and
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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