Overview
- Offers empirical findings based on extensive fieldwork along with a novel theoretical framework to rethink soft power studies from an interactive and comparative standpoint
- Contributes to current research on China’s soft power via media products by analyzing its manifestation in two interconnected processes of strategic generation and embedded reception in neighboring East Asian developed countries
- Utilizes a multidisciplinary approach grounded in audience research, sociological studies, science and technology studies, and institutional approaches
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About this book
This book analyzes the ways in which China’s soft power growth faces dilemmas in East Asia through both online and offline platforms. One dilemma for China’s transnational soft power-field expansion lies in the intersection of its source and receiving countries. The author discusses how transnational audiences’ consumption and reception of Chinese television series are shaped by domestic factors, with interpretations of and desires for different forms of capital, further inhibiting the foreign export of these series. Another dilemma is the “outsourced soft power.” While Hong Kong and Taiwan play significant roles as outsourced soft power mediators, their under-established emerging digital media platforms have yet to meet the expectations of transnational audiences in a virtual transnational soft power field.
Grounded in the author’s multi-site field research focused on television spheres, Soft Power Made in China argues that China’s soft power paradox in South Korea and Japan—two quasi-Sinophone countries—is not due to a lack of state-level strategy, but linked to soft power pathways that rely on production in one source country, and both distribution and reception in a receiving country.
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Keywords
Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Dilemmas of (Outsourced) Soft Power and Futures with Digital Media
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Conclusions and Postscript
Reviews
“Claire Seungeun Lee in her new book provides a thoroughly-researched critical analysis of China’s Soft Power strategy in East Asia. Her book will surely stimulate further debates not only on the controversial concept of soft power itself, but also on a range of interdisciplinary issues concerning the future of the region in the context of China’s rise.”(Xin Xin, Reader in International Communications, University of Westminster, UK)
“Soft Power Made in China has provided us a uniquely comparative and empirically rich study and fills the existing gap in the literature on China’s soft power. This book uniquely vested efforts to engage with the audiences of East Asia—Sinophone and quasi-Sinophone communities—of transnational Chinese soft power projection via media and unveils the Chinese soft power dilemma in the region. Claire Seungeun Lee’s book offers insights to soft power competition in global South in the Chinese century.” (Jia Gao, author of Social Mobilisation in Post-Industrial China, 2018)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Claire Seungeun Lee is an assistant professor at Inha University, South Korea. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, her research primarily focuses on China’s social and technical transformations, global media, im/migration, the intersection between technology, deviance, policies in cyberspace, and digital sociology.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Soft Power Made in China
Book Subtitle: The Dilemmas of Online and Offline Media and Transnational Audiences
Authors: Claire Seungeun Lee
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93115-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-93114-2Published: 09 October 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-06593-5Published: 03 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-93115-9Published: 25 September 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXI, 236
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations, 16 illustrations in colour
Topics: Asian Culture, Asian Politics, Cultural Policy and Politics, Media and Communication, Asian Cinema and TV