Playing to the World's Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (review)

In Playing to the World's Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV, Michael Curtin recounts how film producers and directors gathered for the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum in 2000 and lamented the waning commercial success of Hong Kong movies in the previous decade.¹ How could they revive Hong Kong's status as the center of Chinese entertainment and popular culture in Asia and beyond? What direction did Hong Kong's film industry need to take in order to survive, or even to regain its preeminence in the Asian film world? Hong Kong film critic and historian Law Kar conveyed the uncertainty well, between the two questions, "To go global, are we going to the West or going north to China? Which way is global?"² At the core of these concerns lies the tensions between the globalizing forces at play in media cultures such as financing, distribution, and expansion on the one hand, and the sociocultural variations and uniqueness of local film productions and talent migrations on the other. It is precisely the delicate balance between globalization and localization that structures Curtin's inquiry into the commercial Chinese film and television screen industries.

According to Curtin, as Chinese-identified audiences around the world are growing and increasingly becoming more affluent and sophisticated, neither Western nor Asian media conglomerates can deny the enthusiasm and passion of the global Chinese audience— or as Curtin terms it, "the world's biggest audience."³ Indeed, in this century of global interdependency and connectivity, where growing Chinese audiences around the world can access information and entertainment through myriad media platforms— such as satellite TV, cable, and broadband Internet—Curtin suggests the possibility of envisioning the power dynamics and relations in the cultural geographies of commercial film and television industries as gradually shifting from the West to the East. Curtin's innovative conception of "media capitals" not only complicates our understanding of the developments of media globalization in the 1990s and early 2000s, but also debunks the myth that Hollywood's cultural hegemony will last forever.⁴

Through twelve case studies of media corporations, Curtin contends that Chinese media are becoming an alternative globalizing force alongside the seemingly preeminent juggernaut of Western media industries. Curtin's study is primarily based on his interviews with upper-level executives of both domestic and foreign media conglomerates in Hong Kong, Taipei, and the People's Republic of China (PRC); he explores the aspirations of entrepreneurs such as Rupert Murdoch of StarTV and Richard Li of PCCW (Hong Kong's pan-Asian broadband Internet service) to capitalize on the allegiance of audiences in the global China market.

Curtin suggests that, just as the status of Hollywood as the center of Western global media can be overtaken by other media capitals in the world, Hong Kong's status as media capital and center of production of Chinese popular culture has been in constant flux. In order to elevate and subsequently sustain their status as "media capitals," cities such as Hong Kong and Taipei, in particular, must manipulate to their advantage both the centripetal forces of production and creative activities, as well as the centrifugal forces of distribution and expansion. For instance, while catering to the consumption tastes and habits of Hong Kong's families in box-office favorites such as the Aces Go Places series (Eric Tsang et al., 1982-1997), Cinema City also reached out to overseas markets through worldwide video distribution, which in turn catapulted Hong Kong to the status of second largest exporter of films in the world in the 1990s, surpassed only by Hollywood.

As an example of how foreign corporations must heed the sociocultural variations of the global China market in order to succeed, Curtin examines the rise of Hollywood films in Taiwan. For instance, he argues that foreign media ventures in Taiwan and the PRC must strategize by balancing...