Soft Power Made in China

This book offers a comparative account of dilemmas for the Chinese state to achieve a goal of its soft power projection to transnational audiences in East Asia. The comparison between Japanese and South Korean audiences carried out in this study illuminates the specific local settings and experiences of these two countries in relation to cross-border cultural flows in the East Asia region. This book thus analyzes two different territories of East Asia: On the one hand, the first geographical focus is South Korea and Japan, two developed East Asian countries of non-Sinophone East Asia, is used for explaining China's soft power dillema via media products. On the other hand, the second geographical focus is Sinophone East Asia, namely, Hong Kong and Taiwan, where shares Chinese language and has predominantly ethnic Han Chinese populations. These two locales are analyzed in this book as unintentionally outsourced Chinese soft power to non-Sinophone East Asia, although these places are also part of China's soft power target. This book will broaden readers' perspectives on contemporary forms of soft power and media flows. This will in particular provide answers, based on empirical studies, about processes and conditions of China's mediatized soft power fails and give further implications for how a country possibly develops its soft power.