Abstract
Globalization of Asian markets has focused attention on the flow of
western cultural products into Asian countries as they attempt to
manage global economics at a local level. Countries such as Singapore,
Malaysia and China have responded to what is deemed western cultural
hegemony by initiating protectionist media policies to limit perceived
negative influences of foreign cultural imperialism on their societies
and maintain appropriate levels of cultural autonomy. China, in particular,
introduced a raft of media and cultural policy changes throughout
the mid- and late 1990s in preparation for its entry into the World
Trade Organization (WTO) in November 2001, as a way of balancing
modernization and tradition under the banner of `spiritual civilization'.
The key to these strategies is the limiting inappropriate western
cultural products, while simultaneously strengthening its domestic
television industry through a range of strategies, including the
selective importation of products from culturally sensitive overseas
Chinese and favoured western television programme suppliers. This
article examines the strategies employed from 1995-2002 by four television
operators (CETV, AOL Time Warner, News Corporation and MTV) to access
China's highly regulated mediascape. These strategies are defined
by the common element of localization, which links into the main
tenets of the Chinese government's spiritual civilization programme.
However, these localizing strategies manifested in many and varied
ways, as organizations attempted to adhere to the government's discursive
construction of `common cultural tradition' and `common economic
philosophy'. The success in forging the local (values) with the global
(economics) relies on the government's ability to create, mediate
and sustain social perceptions of Chinese modernity through the
discursive construction of what Appadurai refers to as `imagined
worlds'. Today, the concept of an `imagined China' is reflected in
the flexible frameworks found in China's current cultural and economic
management models, evoked through the formalization and implementation
of spiritual civilization and which manifest within government
media policy and regulations.
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