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Transnational Korean Television: Cultural Storytelling and Digital Audience provides previously absent analyses of Korean TV dramas' transnational influences, peculiar production features, distribution, and consumption to enrich the contextual understanding of Korean TV's transcultural mobility. Even as academic discussions about the Korean Wave have heated up, Korean television studies from transnational viewpoints often lack in-depth analysis and overlook the recently extended flow of Korean television beyond Asia. This book illustrates the ecology of Korean television along with the Korean Wave for the past two decades in order to showcase Korean TV dramas' international mobility and its constant expansion with the different Western television and their audiences. Korean TV dramas' mobility in crossing borders has been seen in both transnational and transcultural flows, and the book opens up the potential to observe the constant flow of Korean television content in new places, peoples, manners, and platforms around the world. Scholars of media studies, communication, cultural studies, and Asian studies will find this book especially useful.

Japan in the 1990s differs vastly from what it had been two or three decades earlier. The Japanese state has undergone such a fundamental change that it has been described as a ‘regime shift’ (Pempel 1998). Although the longterm ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has returned to power after its defeat in 1993, it no longer has an absolute majority in the Cabinet. Surrounded by numerous scandals and corruption charges, both the government and bureaucracy have undergone major reforms to increase transparency and reduce bureaucratic influence over the policy-making process. The Japanese Diet has, for example, passed the Information Disclosure Law to increase openness in the administration. Economic policies have also been transformed to cope with the malaise characterised by continuing problems of bad loans in the financial sector, rising unemployment and declining manufacturing productivity.

In the uprising of 16-20 January 2001, which ousted former Philippine President Joseph Estrada from power, two forces stood out as pivotal: television (specifically the coverage of the impeachment trial which was the centre of public attention) and civil society (which was instrumental in the uprising itself). In this chapter I argue that notwithstanding the central importance of television in this most recent national political change, the regulation of the sector and its long-term associations with crony capitalism have established barriers to civil society finding its voice on television.

Singapore has changed dramatically in the last forty years, moving in the 1960s and 1970s from domestic import substitution to low-cost exportoriented goods. Then in the 1980s developing a regional financial and business hub and now increasingly positioning itself as an exporter of capital and expertise (Courtenay 1995: 90). With exceptionally high economic growth rates most years, a GNP per capita of US$6,000 more than Australia and three times Australia’s annual average growth, Singapore has attracted a high percentage of foreign direct investment. Despite exhibiting similar advantages to Australia in terms of a well-educated workforce, competitive pricing, developed transport and telecommunications and citizens from culturally diverse business, family and personal networks throughout the region, Singapore’s media and resultant civil and civic development has not been as progressive and liberal as Australia’s and indeed has not kept pace. So it would appear that state existence, security and prosperity as desired ends for Singapore do not necessarily rely on an equal strengthening of the public sphere, or at least this is not evident to date.

This chapter analyses a profound transformation of Bengali regional-languagecinema since the early 1980s, a transformation that fundamentally changedthe industry and one that can arguably be attributed at least partly to thecreation of a Bengali television-watching public in the same period. Itfocuses on a trend that emerged in mainstream Bengali cinema during the1980s and was sustained thereafter, and brought into prominence a newconfiguration of elements previously marginal to Bengali films. This trans-formation was to do with mainstream Bengali cinema’s increasing adaptation of what are commonly known as the ‘‘masala’’ or ‘‘formula’’ elementsof Bombay cinema such as racy dialogues, stereotypical villainous char-acters, stylized fights and song-and-dance sequences. This new genre, whichhas commonly been discredited as the Bengali film industry’s totally unim-aginative imitation of the popular Hindi-language cinema of Bombay,completely altered what had been the dominant aesthetic of Bengali cinematill about the mid-1970s. Until this point, Bengali cinema was marked by itsclose relationship with Bengali literature and a Bengali middle-class worldview, greater realism than Bombay cinema or other mainstream regionalcinemas, and naturalistic acting styles, and was radically transformed by agrowing adoption of the ‘‘formula’’ elements commonly identified withpopular Hindi cinema. Industry sources, however, indicate that this newtrend was successful in boosting the Bengali film industry, which had beenswamped by a severe economic crisis since the 1970s. The industry’s crisiswas caused by a host of factors: the most important of these was the Ben-gali middle-class audience’s shift to television as a result of an increasingly unsatisfactory film-going experience in this period. The creation of a Ben-gali television public in the early 1980s shifted audiences from the cinematheatres, thereby significantly reducing film revenues in Calcutta, until then the prime market for Bengali films.

The role of television in democratic politics has been a subject of politicalcommunication studies at least since John F. Kennedy’s performance ontelevised debates supposedly turned around his electoral fortunes and wonhim the 1960 US presidential election. In India too, the potential of themedium in political communication has mostly been analysed in the contextof how television coverage of political leaders and parties, or the lack of it,affects voting behaviour. This chapter differs in its approach. In analysing television’s role in electoral politics in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, it does not look at discourses prevalent on television. Instead, itunderscores how the medium itself has become a part of political discourse,particularly during elections. It points out how television acquired centre-stage as an electoral issue in the 2006 Tamil Nadu assembly elections, evengoing to the extent of dictating poll alliances. Tamil Nadu offers an inter-esting case study to understand the interface between television and Indianpolitics not only because Tamil films and state politics have been inex-tricably intertwined for decades, but also because the two notable political parties in the state have a stake in the private satellite television business.

For any exposition of the television news medium to hold merit itbecomes imperative to glide into the past to recover its earliest antecedent –the newsreel. Newsreel presentation involved an intimate relationshipbetween its producers and events that print reporters had never faced: it wasentirely dependent on pictures that required the camera to be in positionbefore they unfolded (Montague, 1938: 49). Thus, the early producers ofnewsreels discovered that at times when there was a lack of any worthwhileor pictorial news it was possible to create it. It was also possible to ‘experiment’ with news. Newsreels in the United States, therefore, experi-mented with everything: news borrowed from newspapers, studies by collegeprofessors, animated diagrammatical representations of a volatile stockmarket, and so on. Since newsreels were exhibited before drama perfor-mances and film shows in theatres, a great degree of dramatisation andsensationalism was not deemed out of place. They too became part of theentertainment media.

This book explores the political, economic, and cultural forces, locally and globally that have shaped the evolution of Chinese primetime television dramas, and the way that these dramas in turn have actively engaged in the major intellectual and policy debates concerning the path, steps, and speed of China’s economic and political modernization during the post-Deng Xiaoping era. It intertwines the evolution of Chinese television drama particularly with the ascendance of the Chinese New Left that favors a recentralization of state authority and an alternative path towards China’s modernization and China’s current administration’s call for building a "harmonious society." Two types of serial drama are highlighted in this regard, the politically provocative dynasty drama and the culturally ambiguous domestic drama. The book also provides cross-cultural comparisons that parallel the textual and institutional strategies of transnational Chinese language TV dramas with dramas from the three leading centers of transnational television production, the US, Brazil and Mexico in Latin America, and the Korean-led East Asia region. The comparison reveals creative connections while it also explores how the emergence of a Chinese cultural-linguistic market, together with other cultural-linguistic markets, complicates the power dynamics of global cultural flows.

This book examines the phenomenon of prime time soap operas on Indian television. An anthropological insight into social issues and practices of contemporary India through the television, this volume analyzes the production of soaps within India’s cultural fabric. It deconstructs themes and issues surrounding the "everyday" and the "middle class" through the fiction of the "popular". In its second edition, this still remains the only book to examine prime time soap operas on Indian television. Without in any way changing the central arguments of the first edition, it adds an essential introductory chapter tracking the tectonic shifts in the Indian "mediascape" over the past decade – including how the explosion of regional language channels and an era of multiple screens have changed soap viewing forever. Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, the book traces how prime time soaps in India still grab the maximum eyeballs and remain the biggest earners for TV channels. The book will be of interest to students of anthropology and sociology, media and cultural studies, visual culture studies, gender and family studies, and also Asian studies in general. It is also an important resource for media producers, both in content production and television channels, as well as for the general reader.

Since the late 1990s, there has been a crucial and substantial transformation in China’s television system involving institutional, structural and regulatory changes. Unravelling the implications of these changes is vital for understanding the politics of Chinese media policy-making and regulation, and thus a comprehensive study of this history has never been more essential. This book studies the transformation of the policy and regulation of the Chinese television sector within a national political and economic context from 1996 to the present day. Taking a historical and sociological approach, it engages in the theoretical debates over the nature of the transformation of media in the authoritarian Chinese state; the implications of the ruling party’s political legitimacy and China’s central-local conflicts upon television policy-making and market structure; and the nature of the media modernisation process in a developing country. Its case studies include broadcasting systems in Shanghai and Guangdong, which demonstrate that varied polices and development strategies have been adopted by television stations, reflecting different local circumstances and needs. Arguing that rather than being a homogenous entity, China has demonstrated substantial local diversity and complex interactions between local, national and global media, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese media, politics and policy, and international communications.

Korea was the fifteenth country in the world to start television broadcasting when it first launched in Seoul in 1956. Since then, the structure, content and policies concerning Korean television have continuously transformed, due largely to changing contextual circumstances such as wide-ranging socio-political democratization and the rise of the neoliberal global economic system and digital technologies. Up until the 1980s, the oligopolistic structure of the two public broadcasting networks  – Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) and Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC)  – dominated the broadcasting market. However the landscape has dramatically changed since the early 1990s, with 11 newly launched commercial terrestrial broadcasting channels (including Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS) in December 1991) and 153 cable channels when the multichannel television era began (Jin 2005 : 1). A digital satellite television system called Skylife was launched in March 2002, and airs 176 channels at the time of writing. Such changes stem from the shift in the domestic political climate where liberalization and privatization were promoted in assertively practiced neoliberal reform movement in the early 1980s, as well as changes in the global cultural industry environments based largely on globalization and the development of digital technologies. This chapter explores democratization, transnationalization and digitalization, three active factors within Korean television broadcasting by analysing changes and shifts in popular music programmes.

The construction of a problem, be it a crisis or a moral panic, is an attempt of policing and control, for the maintenance of hegemony and authority (Hall et al. 1978 ). A problem emerges as a problem only when it is out of its proper place, just like dirt becomes dirt only when it is not properly placed in the earth. The elimination of dirt is necessary in maintaining the cleanliness of the social order (Douglas 2002 ). In other words, it is the need for a particular social arrangement that constitutes the existence of a problem. Taiyu, the lingua franca of the Taiwanese, became a problem of dialect (called Minnanyu) to be eliminated when the KMT colonial regime moved to Taiwan, building it as a Chinese nation and instituting Mandarin as the national language. Television is central to the building of the Chinese nation. Taiyu serial dramas were broadcast soon after the fi rst network was established in 1962, but have been constructed as the most problematic and debased genre since the early 1970s when the second TV station, CTV (1969), and the third, CTS (1971), were established and used serial drama to compete for profi t. Accusations directed at the poverty of its quality and the vulgarity of the audiences have characterized mainstream criticisms and constructions of Taiyu serial dramas as problems from the 1970s to the present. This chapter investigates not only the how and what but also the why of this problem-construction, as an attempt to understand the power mechanisms at work in struggling for hegemonic control. It charts two historical moments – the 1970s and from the 1990s to the present – when language has played a signifi cant role in the articulations of serial dramas as problems and explores the changing political, economic and cultural forces that situate them as problems worthy of discussion. I argue that the history of this problem-making demonstrates the centrality of Chinese culture in political domination through cultural means, with ethnic/class politics playing a central role in the maintenance of a hierarchical social order. In the 1970s, Chinese culture was used to create ethnic/class divisions within Taiwan while simultaneously creating the illusion of a symbolic whole under the name of the Republic of China. However, since the 1990s, and intensifying after the 2000s, with the entanglement of democratization and neoliberalization in Taiwan and the rise of China, the ethnic/class tension is not just complicated by confl icted national identifi cations and Chinese culturepromoted by both the KMT Party’s Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, but also for unifi cation purposes. While democratization, which involved the search for Taiwanese identity, led to the rise of Taiyu-based Hsiangtu drama, the neoliberal defi nition of culture as economic resource, which consecrates Chinese culture through capital investment, facilitates this unifi cation process while creating further ethnic/class/national identity divisions within Taiwan. The result is a disparaging of Taiyu-based culture in general and, in particular, Taiyu serial drama as a problem to be reformed.

This chapter presents a critical analysis of media and change in postcolonial Malaysia, a South-East Asian nation of 29  million multicultural people, with a focus on the role of television in the nation’s transformation following independence from British rule in 1957. Despite having inherited the basic democratic institutions of the British political tradition, Malaysia continues to debate the transition from soft authoritarianism to democracy (Means 1996 :  103). Since 1957, Malaysia has been led by a single political party, the Barisan Nasional (BN). While the BN is a coalition of three major ethnic-based political groups, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), it is, in effect, a symbol of Malay-Muslim supremacy (Ketuanan Melayu). UMNO, the dominant group within the party, has, since its formation, aspired to uphold Malay culture as national culture and Islam as the offi cial religion for the country. From the fi rst general elections in 1959 until the 2008 general elections, the BN held two-thirds of the 222 seats in the Dewan Rakyat (House of Representatives). Malaysian media scholar Karthigesu ( 1987 , 1994 ) contends this was largely due to the role of public television, which was launched and promoted by government itself, broadcasting in its colonial service model. In fact, the arrival of state television in 1963 coincided with the formation of the Federation of Malaysia (Moten and Mokhtar 2013 ). In this chapter I argue that television has been pivotal in shaping and transforming the political and cultural landscape of Malaysia as the medium evolved from a strictly national to a loosely global and then fluidly trans-local orientation. While television fi rst enabled the BN to hold its two-thirds majority and build the nation premised on Malay supremacy policies, it subsequently played a part in weakening the BN’s grip over the multiethnic electorate as the UMNO Ketuanan Melayu ideology, layered deep beneath the powdered face of television, surfaced in the digital media era.

Since their development in their current format in the early 1990s as a means to attract female viewers in their twenties, Japanese prime-time television dramas-known commonly as ‘ dorama ’ 1 —have featured working women. Even police procedurals, medical dramas, and serials based on ‘ shojo manga ’ (graphic novels for girls) depict women working outside the home. The dorama most watched by Japanese audiences older than age 25, and those that continue to attract global fans, present the daily lives of independent women working in Tokyo. The protagonists enact fantasies about female professionals while depicting real issues facing the larger generations they represent. Viewers may not want to be these characters, but they can see aspects of themselves in them.

Television dramas, both serials and series, have been a long-term recruiter of large-scale national audiences for television broadcasters as they are potentially able to speak to their audience in affective and imaginative ways (Chan 2011 ; Sun and Gorfi nkel 2014). Usually it is the locally produced drama that resonates most with a national audience, the familiarity of the setting and context often carrying signifi cant implications for social and sometimes political life (Blandford et al. 2011 , Chan 2011 ). These television texts can pick up on popular strands of discourses in the public sphere and succeed in establishing a form of dialogue with audiences; in the instances examined in this chapter, this dialogue is about the formation of national identities or citizenships. There is good reason, then, for broadcasters and governments to attempt to use television drama to educate and persuade, although Sugg and Power ( 2011 : 26-7), long-term drama producers at the BBC World Service Trust, warn that for dramas to succeed in this manner, they first have to be entertaining, otherwise they are unlikely to generate an audience in the fi rst place. Audiences are not easily fooled and can sniff out the difference between being entertained and being preached at in a didactic way. This chapter deals with a period in the history of Singapore where television historical drama played a signifi cant role in creating a national past upon which the promotion of a distinctive national identity might be based. In addition to a consideration of a selection of drama series themselves, the chapter draws upon interviews where viewers are encouraged to share their memories of these dramas, and the part they played in the construction of a Singaporean identity.

The kingdom of Bhutan drew the international spotlight in 1999 when it became the last nation on earth to introduce broadcast television. It was a deliberate and strategic move by a country that for centuries had chosen to isolate itself from the rest of the world, turning inward to nurture its own culture. The small Himalayan country, whose population in 2013 was estimated at just 733,000, 1 sits uneasily between two feisty behemoths  – China and India – each with over a billion people and an ongoing history of border disputes. Bhutan has long been wary of being swamped, either politically or culturally, by these larger neighbours, as well as the world beyond (Penjore  2004 ).

Writing a history of Indian television immediately begs the question, how do we want it read? Exhaustive chronological treatments anchor the field (Kumar 2000 ), ideological examinations reveal a Hindu-centric nation with serious consequences for religious and gender minorities (Rajagopal 1996 ; Mitra 1993 ; Van der Veer 1997 ), development analyses demonstrate the failures of a socialist state (F ü risch and Shrikhande 2007 ), and audience studies reveal complex negotiations among multiple identity positions (Mankekar 1999 ). These critical approaches to the study of television in India rightly expose power differentials that facilitate, through the centuries, the inequities of interwoven structures of imperialism, colonialism, casteism, and capitalist patriarchy. Most importantly, they highlight the chronic condition of distrust in postcolonial societies, making it highly challenging to legitimize profi table connections to global circuits as they modernize under the very conditions that once constrained them.

One may argue that Chinese television has already received more than its fair share of attention in the study of Chinese media. As compared with radio and cinema, which developed in the socialist era (1949-78), television has been seen as the dominant medium in the decades of marketization and economic reforms since the late 1970s (Zhu and Berry 2008 ). Television has been studied as a metonym for the ongoing tension and complicity between the Chinese state and the market (e.g., Zhao 1998 ; 2008a) and as a metaphor for the contradictions between a legacy of socialist rhetoric and ethos and a neoliberal market agenda. It is precisely these contradictions that make up what is often referred to as the ‘Chinese characteristics’ (Zhao 2008a; Sun and Zhao 2009 ) of China’s television culture.

Tamil television lends itself to some interesting initiatives in gender empowerment through its programming in 3 categories – fiction, reality, and talent shows. This chapter provides a glimpse into television programmes on leading Tamil channels over the last decade (2000–10) from a gender perspective. Focusing particularly on women and transgender characters/hosts, emotional and psychological quotients of the shows and their audiences, moments of dramatic intensity, the chapter demonstrates how the vernacular televisual representations were quite different from the stereotypical portrayals of the mainstream ‘national’ television, even though the programmes were produced, televised, and received within the broader patriarchal framework of Tamil cultural and political contexts. The chapter, as a whole, intends to look at the production, representation and identification of Tamil television soaps and reality shows as vehicle for spotlighting gender issues and alternative sexualities in the public domain.

With special reference to the current scenario in West Bengal, this chapter argues that the rise and popularity of Bangla news channels like Star Ananda, 24 Ghanta, Kolkata TV, and Tara News have resulted in the emergence of a vernacular style of news broadcasting which is quite distinct from that of global or national news media. One major point in this chapter is how the vernacular news channels encourage particular forms of address — the emotional, the intimate and the melodramatic — and how close-ups and sound bites create particular kinds of telegenic political leaders who can use these formal characteristics to their advantage. This chapter explores the ways in which a distinctive kind of vernacular is reconfiguring the nature of political participation itself and hence the notion of citizenship and perhaps even the nature and functioning of the nation-state in India.