Popular Culture and the State in East and Southeast Asia

Nissim Otmazgin, Eyal Ben-Ari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136622946
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume examines the relations between popular culture production and export and the state in East and Southeast Asia including the urban centres and middle-classes of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Thailand, and the Philippines. It addresses the shift in official thinking toward the role of popular culture in the political life of states brought about by the massive circulation of cultural commodities and the possibilities for attaining "soft power". In contrast to earlier studies, this volume pays particular attention to the role of states and cross-state cultural interactions in these processes. It is the first major attempt to look at these issues comparatively and to provide an important corrective to the limitations of existing scholarship on popular culture in Asia that have usually neglected its political aspects. As part of this move, the essays in this volume suggest a widening of disciplinary perspectives. Hitherto, the preponderance of relevant studies has been in cultural and media fields, anthropology or history. Here the contributors explicitly draw on other disciplinary perspectives – political science and international relations, political economy, law, and policy studies – to explore the complex interrelationships between the state, politics and economics, and popular culture.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian culture, society and politics, the sociology of culture, political science and media studies.

1 Cultural industries and the state
in East and Southeast Asia

Nissim Otmazgin and Eyal Ben-Ari

This volume examines the relations between cultural industries and the state in East and Southeast Asia (hereafter “East Asia”), comprising mainly the urban centers and middle classes of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. We analyze the emergence of new cultural industries throughout East Asia by looking at the processes by which popular culture is produced, distributed and consumed, with particular attention to the role of states in these processes.

Since the 1980s East Asia has experienced an explosion of popular culture products such as movies, pop music, animation, comics, television programs, and fashion magazines that have expanded and deepened their reach, not only domestically but across national and even regional borders. While much originated in Europe or the United States, a significant proportion of the new popular culture has been produced in and disseminated from places such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and more recently from Shanghai and Beijing. Today, there is no one dominant stream of products originating from any single location, but a variety of commodities, images, and fashions that simultaneously derive from multiple centers.

These multidirectional flows of popular culture have not only intensified during this period to reach consumers in different national and linguistic areas, but have substantially decentralized the region's popular culture market. As a result, now, more than ever, East Asian consumers are exposed to various popular cultures and are characterized by a diversity of consumption habits and lifestyles. They thus concurrently or sequentially consume American, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, European, and other cultural products (Berry et al. 2008; Chua and Iwabuchi 2008; Jin and Lee 2007; Otmazgin 2005). Millions of youths in places like Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, and Jakarta may covet the latest fashions from Tokyo, listen to the same genre of American pop music, watch Chinese dramas on television or DVD, read Japanese manga, and go out with friends to watch the latest Korean movie.

At the same time, however, there is a noticeable unevenness in the production and distribution of these flows. The majority of commodities originate in a small group of wealthy economies in Northeast Asia, while the poorest economies with less developed cultural industries export popular culture on a much smaller scale. A noteworthy recent development is taking place in China, where an unprecedented massive production of popular culture is taking place in the cities, especially in Shanghai and Beijing. This asymmetric, often disjunctive, structure of cultural flows continues despite progress achieved by cultural industries in other parts of East Asia, like Thailand and Indonesia, and despite the relative ease of transferring cultural content through communication technologies such as satellite TV or the internet.

The massive production and consumption of popular culture has had a major impact on the way governments throughout Asia perceive commodified culture. In the past, cultural policies represented ways for governments to emphasize and reinforce nation-building or prevent the infiltration of “foreign” cultures, whether regarded as morally harmful or politically dangerous (Chua 2000: 12–13). South Korea, for example, which experienced 35 years of Japanese colonial rule, long rejected the inflow of Japanese popular culture, fearing it might undermine the country's own traditions and culture, thus subordinating it to Japan yet again. The government defined its role as the custodian and defender of the national public interest and banned the import of Japanese culture, and sometimes also Western culture, during most of the post-World War II period (Howard 2002). Historically, cultural policy was often directed toward nation-building as with “protective” governments claiming to defend the best interests of civil society and deterring encroachment from invidious outside forces that may threaten their nations’ cultural life (Pang, Chapter 8). In this sense, cultural policies often involved regulating, shaping, and managing cultural tastes. The strongest expression of this emphasis is found in censorship (George, Chapter 11; Pang, Chapter 8; Samuels, Chapter 9), but it was also (and still is) implemented in myriad other ways such as building museums and monuments, establishing folklore studies, promoting “national” sports (Sumo in Japan, Taekwondo in South Korea, Kong Fu in China, Muay Thai in Thailand), or designing national school curriculums emphatically reifying the nation.

However, the success of the cultural industries generated a major shift in official thinking that centered both on the potential for enhancing countries’ so-called “soft power” and the possibility of cultivating lucrative export enterprises. From official, state-mandated points of view, the first element involves perceived links between cultural products originating in a certain country and that country's international influence; the second entails relatively new thinking about the connection between industrial and cultural policies. As Lee (Chapter 7) shows, culture is linked to both the developmental idea of amassing national wealth and to enhancing the national image by promoting the export of national cultural products. As a result, government-led discourses of cultural policy, culture and cultural products are now valorized throughout the region for both their economic and political value. Culture thus becomes an object of policy that is seen as manageable (like other national assets) through technological and political channels in the service of national economic and political goals although it may, at the same time, be seen as difficult to control. Governments thus no longer view “culture” primarily in domestic terms, but also see its potential in international affairs, as both a potentially profitable activity for export and a vehicle for political persuasion. This, in turn, rebounds to domestic political advantage through both realms by boosting the national image abroad and enriching it.

By studying the state, political power and industrial and economic policy as they shape and are shaped by popular culture, this volume opens up multiple important and intertwined issues. Although popular culture production and dissemination has become regionalized and globalized, with various confluences routinely crossing national borders as a part of a transnational-urban culture of consumption, cultural policy remains predominantly national – there are very few policy initiatives on a country-to-country or region-wide basis. In fact, it is only recently that issues related to popular culture have been added to bilateral and multilateral negotiations between East Asian countries, with a special emphasis placed on intellectual property violations. This situation differs from the American case, where the national government frequently raises issues of intellectual property and the taxation of its cultural products (such as Hollywood movies and animations) in trade negotiations with other countries (Zemans 1999). Moreover, the great majority of previous studies of popular culture in general, and East Asia in particular, have focused on cultural products as texts and their interpretation. The issues that have been studied include ideas about modernity and life-style and modes of consuming such texts (Lee, Chapter 7). Where political analysis has come in it has usually entailed issues of national identity (Lee 2008). Where economics has been invoked, it has been issues such as ownership and control in the media industries, the emergence of production chains, and market maturity that have been addressed (Keane 2006; Jones 2006; Yúdice 2004).

However, for all the dramatic changes in East Asia's popular culture markets in recent decades, very little attention has been given to the economic and industrial aspects of cultural diversity. Although a number of such works deal with Western-based cultural industries (for example, Beck 2003; Bilton and Cummings 2010; Hartley 2005; Hesmondhalgh 2002), there are very few which illuminate the production mechanisms, marketing routes, and capabilities of the cultural industries in East Asia and their political implications. To date, no single work has provided comprehensive empirical studies of East Asia's cultural industries or examined their activities in the context of policy-making. Our volume speaks directly to issues of the state as it impacts economics and politics. It is the first major attempt to look at these issues comparatively and interactively, and to provide an important corrective to the limitations of existing scholarship on popular culture in East Asia.

As part of this move, the essays in this volume also suggest a widening of disciplinary perspectives. Hitherto, the preponderance of relevant studies has been in cultural and media fields, anthropology or literature (Otmazgin 2008b). Here we explicitly draw on other disciplinary perspectives – political science and international relations, economics and business administration, law and policy studies – to explore the complex interrelationships between the state, politics and economics and popular culture. The recent internationalization of popular culture industries underlines the need to develop new frameworks of analysis. We believe that only such a wide span of disciplines can encompass the issues involved in this emerging field of scholarship.

After briefly explaining what we mean by popular culture, in the rest of the Introduction we address the following issues. First, we analyze the distinctive character of the cultural industries and outline the non-economic value the cultural industries generate. Second, we examine the reasons for increasing interest in the cultural industries and discuss the recent governmental and academic interest this sector is creating. Third, we address the major theoretical and analytical foci in the study of popular culture in East Asia by introducing the discourse over “soft power” and its recent special preoccupation with popular culture. Fourth and finally, we discuss the tensions and contradictions between the state and cultural industries in the context of policy-making.

Popular culture and high culture

The scholarly literature on contemporary culture typically distinguishes between popular cultur e and high culture. Popular culture refers to a variety of products and activities that are held and practiced by large numbers of ordinary people. At the root of the popular is the idea of attracting large numbers of people to a certain practice, event, or phenomenon that resonates with their everyday lives. High culture, on the other hand, is a term used to make two sorts of distinctions: in class terms, between the culture of the elite and in contemporary societies that of the middle class on the one hand, and the lower strata on the other hand; and in aesthetic terms, between serious, autonomously produced (usually exclusive), “true” art, and commercially produced mass art (Crothers and Lockhart 2000: 129; Payne 2003: 415).

In the West, the division between the supposedly “high” and “low”, or “elite” and “popular” culture, has been vigorously debated. Advocates of high culture conceive of it as a medium of intellectual and spiritual reflection. They argue that when artistic work is repackaged for mass consumption it subsequently loses its privileged character, spirituality and supposed moral standing. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the founders of the Frankfurt School of Thought and harsh critics of consumer capitalism, argued that the commercialization of culture destroys individual artisanship and supports the fragmentation of society. Defenders of popular culture, on the other hand, argue that the mass circulation of commodified art brings about an aestheticisation of simple practices and renders consumerism a facilitator of spirituality (Adorno 1991; Adorno and Horkheimer 1973; Hartley 2005: 6–9; see also Chua 2000: 5–7). The practice of “pop art”, for example, vividly drew attention to the aesthetic value of American mass produced goods – cars, clothes, domestic appliances, and magazines – and managed to turn attention to the aesthetic qualities of everyday culture and fandom – previously considered as trivial and “popular” (Payne 2003: 414).

While the debate over high and low culture continues in the Euro-American West, in East Asia the distinction between popular culture and high culture is less evident in everyday life, and many practices that might be labeled as elite have become the domain of a huge middle class. In Japanese, there is no proper word that corresponds to “popular” in English in the context of “popular culture”, and practices that ostensibly represent “high” culture, such as waka, haiku, ikebana and tea ceremony are being practiced and consumed by a large number of people, and in this sense have become “popular” (Ivy 1993; Martinez 1998: 1–18; Slaymaker 2000: 3). Hence, despite official discourse in places like Japan and China that encourages elitist cultural practices (Chua 2000: 28–9), the Western-based distinction between high and popular cultures is less relevant to the way massively produced cultural commodities are perceived and consumed. Moreover, in the context of contemporary East Asia this distinction is frequently irrelevant, since practices and innovations extracted from both “high” and “traditional” sources have become commodified and commercialized, eventually becoming the domain of a large group of consumers. Indeed, it is worth remembering that many practices that were once deemed “popular” – kabuki or Shakespearean plays – are now considered as elite products reflecting high aesthetic ideals, yet both are sometimes transformed back into popular products, e.g. via movies and TV programs.

In this volume, we refer to popular cultural products and cultural commodities as commercially and consciously produced goods, largely for entertainment. More specifically, popular culture relates to artifacts, practices, and institutions that relate to music, animation, comics, television programs, movies, computer games, and fashion (magazines, clothes, design). A wider definition might include other fields and products, such as sport, amusement parks, food, culinary utensils, toys, architecture and design, accessories, stationery, and idol culture. The means by which popular culture is consumed cover various CDs, DVDs, cassettes, books, magazines, clothes, accessories, posters, picture, internet, broadband and cellular phones.

Popular culture and East Asia – why now?

Popular culture is, of course, not a new phenomenon but a set of behaviors and sentiments rooted in particular social processes and practiced by a wide number of people (Payne 2003: 415). However, in East Asia popular culture has only recently become the focus of wide research and debate among politicians, journalists, and bureaucrats – and not only in academia. What lies at the bottom of these developments?

First, it is only during the last few decades that East Asia has experienced massive circulation and consumption of popular culture in the form of commodities. The US–China opening in the early 1970s made possible first economic exchange and then social and cultural exchange across many borders and boundaries: notably, Japan–China, South Korea– China, but also China–Southeast Asia.¹ However, it has only been since the 1990s that the production and export of popular culture products, such as movies, pop music, animation, comics, television programs, and fashion magazines, has reached a massive scale, gradually gaining the attention of governments and the mass media (Berry et al. 2008; Jin and Lee 2007; Otmazgin 2005).

This “cultural renaissance” is rooted in a number of developments related to the region's booming economies and consumer demand. To begin with, during the last two decades most countries have attained a sufficient level of development to be active participants in the regional and global economy (with North Korea and Myanmar being obvious exceptions) (Lincoln 2004). Next, a flourishing consumer culture has evolved based on a sizeable pool of middle-class consumers with disposable incomes and leisure time (Shiraishi 2006; Robinson and Goodman 1996: 11; Samuels Chapter 9, this volume). The movement of people in and out of cities, in the form of emigrants, tourists, and students, also fills some of the gaps between rival and urban areas and keeps the rural population informed about the latest popular cultures coming from the city by using new ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Popular culture and soft power
• Part II The processes of policy making
• Part III Cultural policy and the dynamics of censorship
• Index