Abstract
The authors examine how Chinese film and television companies have collaborated with their counterparts in South Korea during the past decade. The first part of the chapter challenges the concept of cultural and media ‘flows’, arguing that processes and technologies have probably been more instrumental in transforming the Chinese media industries. Whereas the generic term ‘flows’ applies to finished content, an increase in film co-production and formatting activity in the television industry between the two nations leads us to examine other factors including professional relationships and the exchange of creative ideas and technology. The next section looks at the Chinese government’s ‘going out’ strategy through the 2014 film co-production agreement with South Korea, and the post-production collaboration that followed it. We then examine some examples of television collaboration and how this is helping to raise China’s profile in East Asia, where it is inevitably tarred with the negative image of the Chinese Communist Party. The question that arises is: will such East Asian collaboration efforts enable or impede China’s media dream of reaching out to the world stage?
The authors thank Lorraine Lim, Hye-Kyung Lee, Nobuko Kawashima, Dal Yong Jin, Qingsheng Tong and Aegyung Shim, as well as attendees at the Cultural Flows and Cultural Policies in Asia panel at the International Conference of Cultural Policy Research (ICCPR) 2016 in Seoul , for valuable suggestions on an earlier draft. The authors also thanks industry leaders Neil Xie (Base FX, Beijing), Yick Wong (Deluxe Technicolor Digital Cinema, Hong Kong ), Wellington Fung (Hong Kong Film Development Council), Felix Tsang (Golden Scene distributors, Hong Kong) and Kenneth Bi (Hong Kong-born Canadian director of the co-production Control (2013)), as well as Kiju Park (Macrograph, Seoul) and Peter Ahn (Dexter Digital China ) for sharing their insights on this evolving topic. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP170102176), titled Digital China: From Cultural Presence to Innovative Nation.
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Notes
- 1.
The results of these collaborations include the thriller The Mysterious Family (2016); melodrama Passion Heaven (2016); rom-com Meet Miss Anxiety (2014); Korean horror remake Bunshinsaba (2012, aka Bi Xian); and the romantic drama A Good Rain Knows (2009), respectively.
- 2.
These include Feng Xiaogang’s Assembly (2007) and Aftershock (2010); John Woo’s Red Cliff I (2008); Tsui Hark’s Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (2011); the action–crime–comedy Bad Guys Always Die (2015), co-produced by leading Chinese and Korean filmmakers Feng Xiaogang and Kang Je-gyu; and the fantasy-adventure-comedy Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back (2017, dir. Tsui Hark).
- 3.
For further detail on Korean–Chinese film collaborations, see Yecies and Shim (2016).
According to the authors, the range of production and post-production collaboration between the Korean and Chinese film industries had reached a peak, with no end yet in sight.
- 4.
- 5.
At the time of writing, China ’s quota of foreign films included 34 revenue-sharing films per year, while Korea’s screen quota regime required all cinemas to show domestic films for a minimum of 73 days per annum.
- 6.
See: www.koreanfilm.or.kr/jsp/coProduction/productionCaseList.jsp. Accessed 22 November 2017.
- 7.
For The Mermaid, see: www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&id=mermaid2016.htm; for Operation Mekong, see: www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&country=CH&id=operationmekong.htm. Accessed 15 November 2017.
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Yecies, B., Keane, M. (2018). Cultural Exports, Creative Strategies and Collaborations in the Mainland Chinese Market. In: Kawashima, N., Lee, HK. (eds) Asian Cultural Flows. Creative Economy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0147-5_8
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