Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

China’s television market greatly expanded since the early nineties. Korean television programs, among other sources, made impressive inroads into the China’s growing television market since early nineties and formed visible and significant presence toward the end of that decade. Despite the Chinese government’s worries on the increasing popularity of the Korean programs among the Chinese audience, the consumption of Korean television programs in China keeps increasing. The reasons for the popularity of the Korean programs came from various sources including cultural proximity, new and fresh stories, mixing fun with moral factors, etc. With the introduction and expansion of the web-based platforms for moving images in 2000, the room for Korean programs quickly swelled. The types of popular programs also diversified from dramas to shows and entertainment programs. In this circumstance, Chinese stations saw better opportunities for raising rates and making profits in the format imports rather than the imports of the ready-made programs only. Selling formats came along with one or more Korean producers participating in production or planning Chinese production. To raise the quality of production, a large number of production crews from Korea went to sites and transfered technologies and skills. A good success of format export-import was well evidenced in the case of “Run, Brothers!”. Successful implementation of formats brought giga-amount profits to the Chinese company. However, they brought no increase of marginal profit to their Korean partners. Plus, format implementation did not always fit well with the Chinese situation, especially when the Chinese government restricted the import of the Korean format to “one format for each station.” Co-production rose as an alternative to this question. It shares not only the production manual (the so-called bible) and staff but also license and profits between the partners. It could also escape the government restriction imposed on the imports of programs and formats. Moving from simple imports of ready-made programs to format imports, and further to co-production, the business collaboration of Chinese and Korean television productions has evolved toward more sophisticated ways. The export of programs and formats from Korea to China is challenging one of the principles of the media economics too. The size of home markets and reachable external markets determine content budgets. Media products in (financially) larger markets have larger production budgets and this is a source of advantage in the international competition for audiences. So content tends to flow from larger to smaller national markets. But in the case of the Chinese import of Korean television, this doesn’t apply. Not only the size of the market (which is financial capital), but also the amount of cultural capital decides the quality of television. The paper will explore this and other related issues developing from the cross-border television flow in East Asia.