Article No. 9

Cultural Proximity, Diasporic Identities, and Popular Symbolic Capital: Taiwan Cultural Worker Qiong Yao’s Cultural Production in the Chinese Media Market

Using Taiwan cultural worker Qiong Yao’s productions as a case study, this paper argues that cultural proximity is not the only critical element in making cultural works popular within regional media markets. The author argues that the whole process of cultural production is an articulation, and all these related elements—such as history, geopolitics, economy, mode of production, and popular symbolic capital--contribute to this articulation. Through the exploration of Qiong Yao’s popular cultural productions in Chinese mediascape, this paper focuses on Qiong Yao’s creative utilization of her complex diasporic identities and popular symbolic capital to support her successful career as a cultural worker. In terms of cultural proximity, this paper contends that it is a combination both of essentialist "being" and constructivist "becoming." This paper grapples with the ambiguous nature of cultural proximity and discusses how to successfully employ it in globalized cultural production.

In 1989, Qiong Yao made critical changes in her career. She not only moved her TV drama production to mainland China but also made a dramatic style change to her cultural productions accordingly. After 1989, Qiong Yao’s creations transformed from contemporary romances to period dramas set in pre-modern China. Does her decision to change the aesthetics and production base merely result from a strategic calculation of how to make popular cultural products to cater to the populous mainland China market? To answer this question, one needs to explore the complicated relationship between media market regionalization and the cultural logic operating beneath it.

In the study of media globalization, many scholars have found that regionalization of media markets serves as an important mediating phase between the "Global/Local" bipolar nexus. This is what Diana Crane (2002) called the "network model of cultural globalization" (p.7), which breaks the myth of America-as-the-center of cultural production. Using Mike Featherstone’s words, this new model shows,

The "regionalization" of media markets, according to Straubhaar (2002), indicates a multicountry media market linked by geography, language and culture. From the empirical studies scholars found that cultural proximity, which includes cultural and linguistic similarities, is the most important factor in forming a regional media market. (Straubhaar, 1991, 1997, 2002; Sinclair, 1999) As delineated by Straubhaar (2003), in addition to language, cultural proximity is composed of such specific things like "humor, gender, images, dress, lifestyle, knowledge about other lifestyles, ethnic types, religion, and values." (pp.77-78) He argues that cultural proximity can be seen as the cultural capital shared by the regional audiences.

However, in these studies there is a strong tendency to see cultural proximity as an essentialist being. When studying why Japanese trendy dramas (or idol dramas) enjoyed immense popularity in Taiwan during the 1990s, Iwabuchi (2002) argues that the "seeming naturalness" of cultural proximity in empirical studies needs to be interrogated. He contends that in the studies of the local consumption of media products:

This is why Iwabuchi argues that Japanese dramas are "becoming cultural proximity" in Taiwan, because cultural proximity, according to him, is not something "out there" or existing a priori but a historical and social articulation a posteriori. (2002, p. 134)

This "becoming" represents an anti-essentialist or constructivist approach to interpreting culture. In a similar vein, Stuart Hall (1999) explores two positions toward "cultural identity" in theory. Cultural proximity is not exactly cultural identity, however, the close relationship between these two cultural positions is indelible. Cultural proximity is initiated by cultural identity, which like proximity is hinged on a rooted identity. If there is no identity, then it will be impossible to acknowledge proximity. According to Hall, the first understanding of cultural identity refers to one shared culture that reflects "a common historical experience and the same cultural codes which are beyond historical vicissitudes." (p. 223) However, Hall identifies himself with the second position, which indicates:

Hall argues that we should think of cultural identity as "a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside,representation." (p.222) Yet in cultural proximity or cultural identity there is something denied to be deconstructed. From a viewpoint of constructivism, even though cultural proximity or cultural identity is a construction, but it should be constructed based on some essences. Just like Hall said, cultural identities come from somewhere. This "somewhere" is composed of language, ethnicity, and collective memories. These essences function like the essentialist being. So, both positions of seeing cultural proximity or identity is either "being" or "becoming" should be rejected. As Hall argues, cultural proximity or identity is "being" as well as "becoming." It is a combination of both and functions like both.

Iwabuchi (2002) correctly points out that what is missing from the study of cultural proximity is audience reception research. No matter which term one uses, cultural proximity, cultural similarity, or cultural identity, an "imagined community"(Anderson, 1983) is always been referred to. Iwabuchi argues that this practice of "imagining" is mainly the product of the agency of the audience. When Straubhaar (2003) starts to emphasize that cultural proximity operates as cultural capital, a concept formulated by Bourdieu (1984), which indicates a series of disposition cultivated by positions in different social and economic classes, his emphasis is focused on the agency of the audience as well.

Yet, I argue that this practice of "imagining" is, at least, initiated by the producer of media texts or cultural industries. As Sinclair and Cunningham (2000) point out, even if we accept the concept of an "active audience" who can subjectively construct the meanings of the media text, the fact cannot be ignored that the media also actively seek and construct their audiences, because "whatever collective audience preferences and desires there might be, they are still shaped commercially and ideologically as markets for certain forms and genres by media corporations" (p. 6). When we reject the presumption that audiences are "cultural dopes" (Fiske, 1987), there is no reason to assume that the cultural industries or media producers are "cultural/commercial dopes" either.

In the following analysis, this paper focuses on how Taiwan’s cultural worker Qiong Yao created a popular "imagined China" through her cultural production in the Chinese regional media market. Her success exemplified how to employ cultural proximity, which is Chineseness in this case, as a cultural strategy to produce popular cultural products. Yet her success also demonstrated that in addition to cultural proximity there are different factors---such as history, geography, economy, the state’s policies and the mode of production---also contributing to the creation of popular cultural products. Furthermore, I argue that Qiong Yao’s moving her cultural production base to mainland China is not simply a result of strategic calculation aiming for profit maximization but also reflects Qiong Yao’s complex diasporic identities to mainland China.

With larger scale transnational immigration accompanying globalization, diaspora has become a hot issue in media studies (Hall, 1999; Cunningham and Sinclair, 2000; Karim, 2003), as it is in other multidisciplinary fields. But what is diaspora? According to Safran’s (1991) "ideal type" definitions of diaspora, it means the people who form "expatriate minority communities" with the following characteristics:

Putting these cultural policies back to historical contexts, they signified how eagerly the KMT government tried to build an "imagined China" in Taiwan to justify its ruling legitimacy. When exploring Taiwan’s history, one may find the term "Taiwanese" only starting to have a specific definition, meaning namely the people who originally live in Taiwan, after World War II when the KMT government retreated to the island. This reflected how marginal and peripheral Taiwan was in the post war bipolar geopolitics and international politics. It is no wonder why the Taiwanese people, after nearly three hundred years of Qing dynastic rule and Dutch and Japanese colonization, had such a diluted and confused national identity (Williams, 2003) Under this backdrop, the KMT government tried to "sinify" the Taiwanese and renovate their "Chineseness" through cultural policies and this can be seen as a strategy for nation re/building.

Yet, according to Ma (2003), the recent scholarly discussion about diaspora has undergone a remarkable redefinition, which now highlights the positive characteristics of the term:

If we call these people who conform to the classic definition of diaspora as "the old diaspora," then the new immigrant utilizing a flexible identity to do the capital accumulation in the era of globalization can be named "the new diaspora." (Ong, 1997; 1999) The difference between the old and new diaspora lies in the relationship with their homeland. To the former, it is an emotional attachment of cultural identity; but to the latter, homeland is just a place where they can make profits easier with flexible citizenships. However, in many Taiwanese mainlanders one would usually find an overlapping of these two diasporic identities. Taiwan’s popular cultural worker Qiong Yao is exactly the combination of these two different Chinese diasporas.

This first cooperation of publishing Outside the Window started the long-term romantic and career partnership between Qiong Yao and Ping Xing-tao. Since then, Crown has become the exclusive publisher of Qiong Yao’s popular romance novels, and she has become Crown’s brand name writer. When Crown celebrated its 50^th year anniversary, Ping (2004) admitted, "If there were no Qiong Yao, then there would never have been a successful Crown." According to Lin (1994), this kind of complementary cooperative relationship between Qiong Yao and Ping Xin-tao is "the entrepreneurial mode" of cultural production. This mode of partnership indicates that collaborations between the creator and a person who specializes in commercialization and administration, and this combination provides an advantageous position with the flexibility in the cultural production to create a successful authorship. On one hand, this partnership can cater to the market’s demands; on the other hand, it sustains understanding between the creator and his/her administrative partner while proffering the creative freedom to the creator. (p. 185) This partnership extended to Qiong Yao’s later filmmaking and TV drama production as well, which makes the biggest contribution to the establishment of the peculiar "Qiong Yao franchise" in contemporary Chinese popular culture.

For such a prolific cultural worker like Qiong Yao who occupies plural positions in popular cultural production, the best way to analyze her oeuvre seems to be through periodization. According to the historical contexuality, Lin (2002) divides two critical epochs in Qiong Yao’s writing. From 1963 to 1985, Qiong Yao wrote 42 novels, while some of them grapple with the protagonist’s memories of mainland China, 39 are set in contemporary Taiwan. These latter 39 novels reflect the rapid social change and economic development taking place in Taiwan during that period. However, after she published the novel Xue Ke in 1990, all 21 new novels and 15 TV dramas are set in distant China—both in temporal and spatial terms. This interesting cultural atavism is triggered not only by her cultural identity but also by the mode of her later cultural production.

Ever since Qiong Yao had started to adapt her own novels into movies in 1976, her literary creations became the by-products of her filmmaking (Lin, 1994). This means that her cultural production has become a formulaic process: first, her novels would be serialized by Crown magazine, then published as books, and then the records of the theme songs from the movies written by her (the lyrics) would hit the market, and finally her fictions were transformed into movies shown in theaters. The same production mode continues in her recent TV drama productions. And now TV dramas have become the final products of her cultural production process. According to Qiong Yao, currently she even sees herself as a TV drama scriptwriter instead of a novelist:

This kind of fixed formula of cultural production not only helps Qiong Yao to extract the marginal interests from her production, but it also guarantees that she would be the only one who can employ the creations of "Qiong Yao" as raw materials for other cultural production. In the end, the whole production process has become a "branding" tool. Because Qiong Yao has become the most authoritative and only interpreter of her cultural products, consumers can easily recognize what is a "Qiong Yao novel," "Qiong Yao pop music," "Qiong Yao movie" and "Qiong Yao TV drama" in the market of popular cultural products.

The reason that Qiong Yao’s novels in the 1990s were all set in pre-modern China has a close connection to the mode of her cultural production. Constrained by moving her TV production to mainland China in 1989, Qiong Yao cannot create any stories about contemporary Taiwan. At the same time, as a Chinese diaspora who lives in Taiwan, she also cannot create stories that take place in contemporary China. Why did she set herself in such a confined cultural production context? In the following analysis, we find that the decision to move her TV production base to the mainland reveals her complicated identity embodied in both the old and new Chinese diaspora.

As a matter of fact, "visiting relatives in hometown" was not the main purpose of her homecoming journey. As mentioned earlier, Qiong Yao came to Taiwan as a child with her nuclear family members. According to Li (2002), the reason for most of the younger generation mainlanders’ homecoming was to accompany their parents to hold family reunions in their mainland hometowns. But Qiong Yao did not return to the mainland with her parents. In the schedule of her 1988 40-day homecoming trip, Qiong Yao and Ping Xin-tao did not even go back to their hometowns, Hunan and Shanghai, "because of the complicated and agonizing feelings toward our homelands." (Qiong, 1989b, p. xxx) Instead, they went to the Great Wall, the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River and the Stone Forest in Quilin. These scenic resorts might be the most "Chinese" and the most popular sightseeing sites for any foreign tourist. In a sense, Qiong Yao’s homecoming was a pilgrimage to an imagined homeland, "China." When she walked on the Great Wall, Qiong Yao wrote about her muse:

The Great Wall is the totem of China all the time, and now, when I am walking on this totem, I feel all the blood flowing in my vessels is Chinese blood. Thirty-nine year’s nostalgia has been on my mind, heavily and agonizingly. Now, every step I walk, I tread a small part of my threadlike nostalgia into Great Wall. But how much nostalgia can be accumulated during the thirty-nine years? How can this nostalgia be deleted by my footsteps on Great Wall? (Qiong, 1989b, p. 44)

Qiong Yao emphasized in the postscript of The Unsevered Nostalgia that this book is not a "travelogue" but "a personal passage." (Qiong, 1989b:286) However, in addition to many colored pictures of the author herself located within those spectacular but highly familiar and symbolic Chinese landscapes, this book read just like a travelogue combining exoticism and scattered emotional muse of her "nostalgia" toward China. In The Unsevered Nostalgia, Qiong Yao concluded in this way:

Chinese people are like this, no matter how they are separated by space and time, Chinese people always do the same things in the traditional festivals….Chinese love their own ancestors, love their own earth, love their own homelands, love their own families and homes….Chinese people are like this, no matter how they are separated by mountains, by the sea, or by the time, there are always the Yellow River and the Yangtze River flowing in their blood. (Qiong, 1989b, p. 286)

In her first homecoming, Qiong Yao was surprised to find how popular she was in mainland China. There are many places in The Unsevered Nostalgia describing how Qiong Yao was surrounded by passionate readers and local media. From Qiong Yao’s landing in the Beijing airport, wherever she was: no matter in Shichung, Wuhan, Guilin, Yunnan, or even on the sightseeing ship on the Yangtze River, from the north to the south, there always were numerous fans asking for autographs, taking pictures with her, and numerous media hoping to interview her. This made Qiong Yao personally feel how hot the "Qiong Yao fever" was in mainland China. However, Qiong Yao’s books that circulated in mainland China were all illegal pirate copies. Worse than that, there were many books embezzling her name for marketing. This made her understand how important "copyright" is—both to a writer’s economic profits and popular symbolic capital.

As Qiong Yao wrote,

This complaint is a result of what Raymond Williams calls the bourgeois individualist concept of authorship. (Williams, 1977) That is, the individual is thought to be the origin of the creation, the owner and protector of his/her own work within a capitalist market. However, Qiong Yao’s complaint reflected her anxiety beyond the material profits. Here what annoyed her most was that her popular symbolic capital might be eroded by these copyright infringements.

According to Pierre Bourdieu (1993), cultural production is nothing but a field of positions and position-takings. In other words, this is a field of power struggle. For an established writer such as Qiong Yao, who is already the position taker in the field of cultural production, still has to struggle against the fear that her position might be threatened by some vicious embezzlements. In this sense, her homecoming made her understand that mainland China is more than a mythic homeland to her, it is a market as well. She is not only a person with imagined nostalgia but also an author, and a writer from Taiwan whose interests have been ruthlessly exploited by mainland Chinese cultural industries.

Qiong Yao’s romance novels and movies might be the earliest and the most influential Taiwanese popular culture known and consumed by mainland China’s audiences since the 1978 economic reform. In a 1992 survey of 1,500 people in Beijing, Qiong Yao ranked first among eight authors with a name recognition rate of 85.8%. In the same survey, Qiong Yao also ranked in first place with works actually read by those respondents and ranked second place by preference. (Gold, 1995, p. 262-3 f) In 1999, a Taiwan official report about the cross-strait literature flows conducted by the Cultural Affairs Committee showed, the second most popular Taiwan and Hong Kong literature genre in mainland China was romance fiction, after the martial arts novels, and an estimated 18 million copies were published. Among them, Qiong Yao’s works ranked first place. This report also pointed out, in the heyday of Taiwan and Hong Kong literature in Mainland China, the one printing of a Qiong Yao novel could reach 700,000 copies. (Chen, 1999)

In addition to her romance novels read by millions of Chinese audiences, the TV dramas and movies based on Qiong Yao novels were also produced by mainland China’s television station and film studio in the late 80s. In the meantime, with the mushrooming of video booths in the streets around mainland China, the romance movies produced by Qiong Yao were also watched by the whole generation of Chinese young people. Also, the repeated broadcast of pop songs from Qiong Yao’s movies by radio stations and the rampant sales of pirated tapes also contribute to the formation of "Qiong Yao fever."

There is no exaggeration when we call Qiong Yao a star. Stephen Hinerman (2001) argues that stardom of popular culture is formed by the interaction between production and consumption: "Stardom functions as part of the production process—it is vital to representation, narrative, and marketing. Once produced, stardom is then consumed by audiences, located in particular, but mobile, sites of time and space." (p. 205). In a similar vein, David Hesmondhalgh (2002:21) points out how important a role stardom played in formatting. Formatting is a popular way for cultural production to minimize the danger of commercial failure. The three main means of formatting are the star system, genre and the format of serial. The star could be a writer, a producer, a director or an actor. Once the star is associated with the media text, he or she could proffer an aura for the media text. Furthermore, the star has a close connection with the genre as well. Usually a star will link with a specific genre, such as a romance writer or a comedy actor. After this connection is established, the star and the genre will serve each other with mutual recognition. In other words, formatting is making a brand name for an authorship in cultural production. The establishment and operation of "Qiong Yao industry" is a successful formatting. In contemporary Chinese popular culture, the equation of "Qiong Yao" and "romance" has been strengthened by the production, circulation and consumption of Qiong Yao’s works, no matter if it is a novel, a movie, a TV drama or even a pop song.

The recognition of "Qiong Yao" as "the romance author" has been transformed into Qiong Yao’s "popular symbolic capital." According to Bourdieu (1984; 1993), symbolic capital indicates the degree of accumulated prestige, celebrity, and honour an artist accepts from the critical community in the field of cultural production, and the symbolic capital finally will transform into material interests. However, Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic capital is limited to the elite and artistic-restricted cultural production, such as serious literature or classical music. The large-scale cultural production is another sub-field of cultural production, which refers to "mass" or "popular" culture, such as TV programming or popular romance literature. Bourdieu seems to only employ the maximization of economic capital as the criterion to analyze its operation. (Bourdieu, 1993)

Compared with Bourdieu’s sophisticated analysis of how the symbolic capital in "high art" cultural production transforms into economic capital, his analytical framework for the operation of popular cultural production is obviously too simple. I argue that even in the field of popular cultural production there is still an intermediary symbolic mechanism to articulate cultural production and economic profits. This mechanism can be called "popular symbolic capital."

John Fiske (1987) has revised Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital into popular cultural capital, which is a kind of secularized cultural capital that "consists of the meanings and pleasures available to the subordinate to express and promote their interests." (p. 314) To Fiske, the popular cultural capital serves as a kind of vehicle for the subordinate class to resist the bourgeoisie’s domination through culture. However, in my usage of "popular symbolic capital," it is a kind of intermediate mechanism to translate the mass cultural producer’s popularity into economic interests, like what symbolic capital serves the serious artists in the field of high culture production to change nonmaterial reputation into economic profits. Popular symbolic capital can make cultural products both satisfy the popular taste and economic consideration of cultural industries at the same time. The importance of popular symbolic capital in cultural production lies in the fact that it can provide the cultural producers with more resources, room for creativity and the power to control the process of cultural production. Popular symbolic capital is similar to David Harvey’s emphasis of image in the era of flexible accumulation. David Harvey (1989) contends that

The production and marketing of such images of permanence and power require considerable sophistication, because the continuity and stability of the image have to be retained while stressing the adaptability, flexibility,and dynamism of whoever or whatever is being imaged. Moreover, image becomes all-important in competition, not only through name-brand recognition but also because of various associations of ‘responsibility’, ‘quality’, ‘prestige’, ‘reliability’, and ‘innovation.’ (p. 288)

The "formatting" or "branding" in popular cultural production is a good example to illustrate how popular symbolic capital can help cultural production to attract mass audiences, that is, commercial success. As mentioned earlier, this popular symbolic capital serves as an important advantage for Qiong Yao’s cultural production making inroads to mainland China. Seen in this way, one explanation for Qiong Yao’s huge popularity in global Chinese communities is because of her successful employment of her popular symbolic capital. Popular symbolic capital can also make Qiong Yao ignorant of the literary community’s ridicule and contempt for her commercial popularity. Qiong Yao once said that she cares most about her audience’s reactions toward her works; on the other hand, what she cares the least about is the criticisms from the "experts." (Ho, 2004)

However, sometimes the popular cultural capital is not always an advantage for the cultural worker, on the contrary, it might be burdensome against the cultural worker’s creation. In Qiong Yao’s case, it is understandable about her reluctance yet having no choice to develop her hit Huanzhu Gege into a trilogy. When defending herself from the accusation of being an opportunistic writer for big money, Qiong Yao explained why she finally decided to write Huanzhu Gege:

Cultural production is the representative practice of flexible accumulation, especially the transnational cultural production. The success of such practice depends on the knowledge of different cultural tastes, cultural policies and market operations. So the quan xi is critical to any of Taiwan’s cultural workers’ business in the mainland. In Qiong Yao’s case, this go-between is Ouyang Chang-lin. Ouyang, then a reporter at the Hunan TV station, appeared repeatedly in Qiong Yao’s The Unsevered Nostalgia. However, this reporter later became Qiong Yao’s TV drama co-production partner in mainland China for 15 years.

The first time Qiong Yao met Ouyang was when she was going to start her journey to the Three Gorges. Ouyang tried to interview her but was turned down (as a matter of fact, Qiong Yao turned down all interviews during her first homecoming). Being a Hunanese, Ouyang felt that he had the privilege to interview his fellow countryman Qiong Yao, "the glory of Hunan" as he put it. When Qiong Yao told him she did not plan to go back to her hometown because she was "not ready," Ouyang sighed out his bewilderment: "[B]ut you still should return to your hometown, you know, Hunan is proud of you! If you love the scenery of the Yangtze River, you should love Hunan’s landscape more! "(Qiong, 1989b, p.118)

Ouyang then followed Qiong Yao four thousand miles for an interview. Finally, Qiong Yao confessed to him that she decided not to return to Hunan because she was afraid of seeing her run-down old house and her grandfather’s deserted graveyard. Ouyang not only immediately set a cameraman to shoot footage of her old house and her grandfather’s graveyard but also sent the tape overnight to Qiong Yao. Touched by his indomitable "mule spirit," Qiong Yao gave him an exclusive interview on the last night of her first trip to mainland China. (Qiong, 1989b) The repeated appearance of Ouyang in The Unsevered Nostalgia is understandable. Coming from her hometown, this man was, in a sense, the incarnation of the imaginary nostalgia which stalks Qiong Yao the entire way.

Qiong Yao’s cultural products are not only popular in Taiwan and mainland China but also in overseas Chinese, particularly Southeast Asia, communities. In Taiwan, Qong Yao’s popularity was mainly interpreted by the institutionalization of mass cultural consumption (Lin, 1994). Yet, how can one explain Qiong Yao’s popularity among both mainland Chinese and overseas Chinese?

In other words, Gangtai popular culture such as Qiong Yao’s fiction provides the Chinese an imagined world with economic prosperity, individual freedom and without ideological surveillance, that is, a world of modernity.

In Qiong Yao’s case, the identity of Taiwanese and the spatiality of Taiwan are equally important to support that imagination. According to the official ideology of the CCP government, that Taiwan is a renegade province of China, and in this sense, the Taiwanese are still compatriot Chinese to China proper. This consanguineous connection and cultural similarity between mainland Chinese and Taiwanese provide mainland Chinese a plausible hope that someday they can emulate Taiwan’s modernity. The spatial separateness between Taiwan and the mainland provides the physical foundation to support that kind of imagination: Taiwan is the other place outside the mainland. This unique position occupied by Taiwan in such an imagining process is quite similar to Hong Kong’s "marginal centrality" towards mainland China. According to Michael Curtin (2003), the "marginal centrality" of Hong Kong means

However, Curtin (2003) also contends that this advantageous position is fluid and can be either won or lost. Understandably, with mainland China’s economy gaining rapid growth and the whole society steadily moving toward modernity, the "marginal centrality" enjoyed before by Taiwan and Hong Kong has been gradually eroded. Yet in the early 1990s, the in-betweenness entertained by Taiwan and Hong Kong had been fully utilized by their popular cultural workers. Seen in this way, this cultural and spatial ambiguity of Taiwan and Hong Kong provides a good chance for Taiwan and Hong Kong cultural workers to manipulate the vantage point of both being the Chinese old diaspora and new diaspora. While the new diaspora identity provides them the flexible citizenship to sell or co-produce the cultural products in mainland China, the old diaspora owns the cultural proximity and emotional sameness to produce cultural products mainland Chinese can identify with.

Qiong Yao’s popularity is a very cultural-specific phenomenon. One main reason that kept Qiong Yao from being known to non-Chinese audiences is the Chineseness of her cultural works. Lin (1992; 1994) delineates three different kinds of "structures of feeling" (Williams, 1977) in Qiong Yao’s fiction. The first is melodramatic imagination; secondly, romantic fantasy; thirdly, and most importantly one, affective familialism. Without an exception, all Qiong Yao’s fiction is focused on the tensions and conflicts between parents and children which are triggered by the latter’s love affairs. Lin argues this motif is a representation of the Chineseness in Qiong Yao’s fiction:

In addition to its subject matter entertaining the universal concern of traditional Chinese culture, the linkage between Qiong Yao’s narrative and Chinese traditional literature cannot be ignored either. Qiong Yao often cites bountiful Chinese classical poetry in her writing as central images and symbols or employed by her heroes/heroines as a way to express their feelings. According to Gu Xiao-ming (1992), a professor of history at Shanghai Fudan University, besides Qiong Yao’s dexterously employing traditional Chinese narrative skills in her story-telling, the main attraction of Qiong Yao’s fiction to Chinese audiences is that:

In other words, Qiong Yao’s fiction is full of "Chineseness," and this makes every Chinese easily identify with her stories, even though most of them are set in contemporary Taiwan, a periphery to China proper. Here, employing "Chineseness" becomes a handy cultural strategy to attract Chinese audiences by the popular media text.

"Chineseness" is used by Tu Wei-ming (1994) as a central criterion to define the "cultural China." According to Tu, "cultural China" is a symbolic universe "that both encompasses and transcends the ethnic, territorial, linguistic, and religious boundaries that normally define Chinesesness." (1994, p.v) In the project of "cultural China," which serves as an antithesis to "political China," Tu tries to deconstruct the cultural authority of geopolitical China. Contrasting with the monolithic and hegemonic essentialist national China discourse in "political China," Tu emphasizes that the periphery--the Chinese diaspora--can form a new cultural center of Chineseness. Simply put, the "cultural China" tries to deconstruct the cultural authority entertained by the political center, mainland China, and to proffer the ability to the political periphery, the Chinese diaspora, to enrich the Chinese culture. Tu uses "the living tree" as a metaphor to indicate the meaning of "cultural China": the Chinese diaspora is sprouting the most vigorous new cultural branches and leaves from the root China.

From a more radical stance, Ien Ang argues that the "cultural China" project is "an overwhelming desire…to somehow maintain, redeem, and revitalize the notion of Chineseness as a marker of common culture and identity in a rapidly postmodernizing world." (2001:43) Ang criticizes that the organic metaphor, "the living tree," exactly illuminates the illusion of decentering an essentialist China implied by the "cultural China" project. She contends,

But even in a rapidly postmodernizing and globalizing world, Chineseness still represents such ambiguous and deep-rooted feelings toward the imagined homeland among Chinese, which indicates an "obsession with China." (Chow, 1991) Rey Chow (1993, p. 24) calls it the "myth of consanguinity," which has very real effects on the self-conception of diasporic subjects, as it provides them with a magical solution to the sense of dislocation and rootlessness. Chineseness, like Aihwa Ong said, is "[a]n essentializing notion….because the Chinese past, nation, singular history, or some "cultural core" is taken to be the main and unchanging determinant of Chinese identity." (1999, p.134-135)

Following these arguments, one can see the close and intertwining connection between Chineseness and Chinese national identity or Chinese subjectivity. In China proper, mainland China, the Chineseness is much more functioned as an essentialist being. However, from the constructivist view, no matter how complicated or even mythicized, Chineseness is still a historical construction. The different narrative forms of mass media have become one of the most prominent vehicles to construct one’s national identity. As Stuart Hall (1999) states, the narratives of mass media are those "representations" through which the cultural identity is being constructed. It is not surprising that historical dramas have become such a popular genre in recent mainland China’s TV programming because these dramas represent all kinds of national narratives that recount Chineseness and create China as an imagined community in the torrent of globalization. With the historical period costumes, mannerisms, subject matters and setting in past China, the Chineseness makes these dramas easily recognizable to be "Chinese."

Seeing it this way, Qiong Yao’s period costume drama produced in the mainland and set in ancient China is creating a specific national narrative. Through this national narrative, Qiong Yao uses the most distinguished "Chineseness" to interpellate individual audiences as the Chinese subjects and to build an "imagined China." Contrary to the "cultural China" project, the periphery not only does not deconstruct the cultural authority entertained by the center but also uses the mythic Chineseness as a cultural strategy to attract the audiences.

There is a peculiar new force to the imagination in social life today….One important source of this change is the mass media, which present a rich, ever-changing store of possible lives, some of which enter the lived imaginations of ordinary people more successfully than others.

---- Arjun Appadurai (1996, p. 53)

Qiong Yao once said, "From my childhood, I am a person who survives through ‘imagination’" (2003, p. 1096). For a writer, imagining is not a special talent. On the contrary, imagining is a common ability for every individual and the consumption of cultural production is basically a practice of imagination. Appadurai (1996) has pointed out how important imagination is in the formation of global cultural order because through imagination one can live the vicarious experiences from different societies. But imagination is a two-way practice. From the cultural production perspective, it can afford progressively to develop what Appadurai specified as global culture. At the same time, it can also conservatively appeal to some most primitive feelings to seek the maximization of audiences.

Qiong Yao’s period costume dramas produced in China in the 1990s can serve as a good example for the latter cultural strategy. These dramas exploit the Chineseness to invoke every one of Chinese descent, no matter if he or she is Chinese proper or overseas Chinese, to identify with the Chinese subjectivity temporarily. This identification would be harmless. Because through consumption and imagination, what these audiences with Chinese descent only identify with a distant interpellation, Chineseness. These dramas set in ancient China decrease the possibility of conflicting with contemporary politics, and therefore these imaginations will not interfere with the loyalty of the Chinese diasporas to their host societies. However, they do not exclude the critiques toward the contemporary Chinese political development either.

As mentioned earlier, Qiong Yao is a Chinese diaspora cultural worker. Diaspora has usually been connected with a passive cultural position. However, in Qiong Yao’s case one can see how a cultural worker transforms diasporic identities into cultural strategies to attract audiences. Being a Chinese old diaspora, Qiong Yao utilizes the cultural capital or cultural proximity to produce popular cultural products among the Chinese communities. But being a Chinese new diaspora, it allows Qiong Yao to make inroads into the biggest media market in the world, find her cultural franchise more audience, and accumulate more material capital and popular symbolic capital.

An unexpected consequence of Qiong Yao’s cultural strategy is globalization. Although her works were not broadcasted by transnational media conglomerates, Qiong Yao’s cultural works reached numerous overseas Chinese through selling the overseas copyright, narrowcasting on ethnic TV channels, and selling or renting of videotapes, VCD and DVD in local video parlors. Here I want to borrow the couplet concept, "globalization from above" and "globalization from below," from Brecher et al. (Clifford, 1994, p. 327) If globalization from above indicates that globalized media texts flow through transnational media conglomerates or the state’s export policy, then globalization from below represents how media products flow through different channels and are actively sought and consumed by specific audiences. Qiong Yao’s popularity in global Chinese communities represents exactly a successful operation of globalization from below.

Finally, coming back to the problematic "cultural proximity." As seen in the case of Chineseness, one has to admit that in media production and consumption "cultural proximity" or "cultural identity" functions like an essentialist being. Can we deconstruct cultural proximity or cultural identity and disenchant ourselves of these mythic feelings? Probably not. However, we can take a position of "strategic essentialism." (Ang, 2001, p.36) In the context of cultural production and consumption, "strategic" means a way to intentionally utilize something for our own good. To cultural producers, this indicates the employment of cultural proximity to attract the audience; to the consumer of cultural products, "strategic" represents a fluid and flexible identification with some specific cultural identity for one’s own pleasure and emotional fulfillment.

After examining Qiong Yao’s success in contemporary Chinese popular culture, one can find that cultural proximity cannot provide a satisfactory explanation. As a matter of fact, any successful cultural production is an articulation of different elements, such as history, geopolitics, geography, economy and the mode of production. The way of how these elements are being articulated into a cultural product can be seen as a process of imagining. This imagination is initiated by the creations of cultural workers and completed by the consumptions of the audiences. As Appadurai said, some imaginations enter our lives more successfully and among them the popular cultural production is the representative one. Even through some careful exploration, some parts of the popularity of a successful cultural product still remain unexplained. However, one thing we can make sure, that is, in the complicated process of imagining, the cultural proximity is one important but definitely not the only critical element.

Key words: cultural proximity, diaspora, popular symbolic capital, Qiong Yao.

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the orgin and rise of nationalism. London: Verso.

Ang, I. (2001). On not speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. London: Routledge.

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bhabha, H. (Ed.). (1990). Narrating the nation. London: Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: Social critique of the judgment of taste, trans. by R. Nice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University of Press.

-------------. (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. New York: Columbia University.

Chow, R. (1991). Woman and Chinese modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

------------. (1993).Writing diaspora: Tactics of intervention in contemporary cultural studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Clifford, J. (1994). Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology, 9 (3): 302-338.

Crane, D. (2002). Culture and globalization: Theoretical models and emerging trends. In D. Crane, N. Kawashima and K. Kawaski (Eds.). Global Culture: Media, arts, policy, and globalization. pp.1-25. London: Routledge.

Cunningham, S. & Sinclair, J. (2000) (Eds.). Floating lives: The media and Asian Diasporas. Queensland: University of Queensland Press.

Curtin, M. (2003). Media capital: Towards the study of spatial flows. International journal of cultural studies, 6(2), 202-228.

Donald, S. H., Keane, M. & Yin, H. (2002) (Eds.). Media in China: Consumption, content and crisis. London: RoutledgeCurzon.

Featherstone, M. (1995). Undoing culture: Globalization, postmodernism and identity. London: sage.

Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press.

Gold, T. (1995). Go with your feelings: Hong Kong and Taiwan popular culture in greater China. In D. Shambaugh (Ed.). Greater China: The next superpower? Oxford, N Y. : Oxford University Press.

Hall, S. (1999). Cultural identity and diaspora. In S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (Eds.). Migration, diasporas and transnationalism. pp. 299-314. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar.

Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An inquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Hesmondhalgh, D. (2002). The cultural industries. London: Sage.

Hinerman, S. (2001). Star culture. In J. Lull (Ed.). Culture in the communication age. pp. 193-211. London: Routledge.

Hsing, Y. T. (1997). Building Guanxi across the straits: Taiwanese capital and local Chinese Bureaucrats. In A. Ong and D. Nonimi (Eds.). Ungrounded empires: The cultural politics of modern Chinese transnationalism. pp. 143-164. London: Routledge.

Iwabuchi, K. (2002). Recentering globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism. London: Duke University Press.

Karim, K. H. (2003) (Ed.). The media of diaspora. London: Routledge.

Keane, M. (2002). Television drama in China: Engineering souls for the market. In T. J. Craig and R. King (Eds.). Global goes local: Popular culture in Asia. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Lang, M. (2003). San Mao and Qiong Yao, a "popular" pair. Modern Chinese literature and culture, Vol. 15, no. 2, pp.76-120.

Li, K. C. (2002). Mirrors and masks: An interpretive study of mainlanders’ identity dilemma. In S. Corcuff (Ed.) Memories of the future: National identity issues and the search for a new Taiwan. pp. 102-122. New York: M.E. Sharpe.

Lin, F. M. (1992). The social change and romantic ideology: The impact of the publishing industry, family organization, and gender roles on the reception and interpretation of romance fiction in taiwan, 1960-1990. Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation of Sociology at University Pennsylvania.

Ma, L. J. C. (2003). Space, place, and transnationalism in the Chinese diaspora. In L. J. C. Ma and C. Cartier (Eds). The Chinese diaspora: Space, place, mobility, and identity. pp.1-49. New York: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Ong, A. (1997). Chinese modernities: Narratives of nation and of capitalism. In A. Ong and D. Nonimi (Eds.). Ungrounded empires: The cultural politics of modern Chinese transnationalism. pp. 171-202. London: Routledge.

Ong, A. (1999). Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality. London: Duke University Press.

Safran, W. (1991). Diaspora in modern societies: Myths of homeland and return. Diaspora 1(1), 83-99.

Sinclair, J. (1999). Latin American television: A global view. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Straubhaar, J. D. (1991). Beyond media imperialism: Assymetrical interdependence and cultural proximity. Critical studies in mass communication 8, 39-59.

-----------. (1997). Distinguishing the global, regional and national level of world television. In A. Sreberny-Mohammandi, D. Winseck, J. McKenna and O. Boyd-Barrett (Eds.). Media in global context: A reader. pp. 284-298. London: Arnold Press.

------------. (2000).Culture, language and social class in the globalization of television. In G. Wang, J. Servas and A. Goonasekera (Eds.). The new communications landscape: Demystifying media globalization. pp. 199-224. London: Routledge.

------------. (2003). Choosing national TV: Cultural capital, language, and cultural proximity in Brazil. In M. G. Elasmar (Ed.). The impact of international television: A paradigm shift. London: LEA.

Tu, W. M. (1994a). Cultural China: The periphery as the center. In W. M. Tu (Ed.). The living tree: The changing meaning of being Chinese today. pp. 1-34. Stanford, C. A.: Stanford University Press.

------------. (1994b). Preface to the Stanford Edition. In W. M. Tu (Ed.). The living tree: The changing meaning of being Chinese today. pp. V-X. Stanford, C. A.: Stanford University Press.

Williams, J. F. (2003). We are the Taiwanese? Taiwan in the Chinese diaspora. In L. J. C. Ma and C. Cartier (Eds.). The Chinese diaspora: Space, place, mobility, and identity, pp. 163-189. New Yrok: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

Yang, M. M. (1994). Gifts, favors, and banquets: The art of social relationships in China. Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press.

Yin, H. (2002). Meaning, production, consumption: The history and reality of television drama in China. In S. H. Donald, M. Keane and H. Ying (Eds.). Media in China: Consumption, content and crisis. pp.28-39. London: RoutledgeCurzon.

Cao, H. L. (2003). The Hunan TV phenomenon. In J. T. Sun (Ed.). Chinese media: the interviews with 30 contemporary most influential media managers, pp. 63-80.. Taipei: WeiDe.

Chen, S. J. (1999). The development of Hong Kong audiovisual and telecommunication industries. In T. D. Lee and S. C. Liu (Eds.). The Asian Pacific media landscape: The formation of terrestrial, cable and satellite television. Taipei: YaTai.

Du, S. J. (2001). The smoke, the rain , and the melancholy: A biography of Qiong Yao. Nanjing: Jangsu literature and Art Publishing House.

Gu, X. M. (1992). The social meanings of Qiong Yao fiction. In Y. T. Lin and M. Fan (Eds). Essays on contemporary Taiwanese pop-literature. Taipei: China Times Press.

Lin, F. M. (1994). Interpreting the romance kingdom of Qiong Yao. Taipei: China Times Press.

Lin, X. Y. (2002). The Study of post-war Taiwanese popular romance fiction: A case study of Qiong Yao, 1960-1990. Unpublished Mater thesis of Chinese Literature at Taiwan National ChungXin University.

Qiong, Y. (1963). Beyond the Window. Taipei: Crown.

------------. (1964). Romance in the rain. Taipei: Crown.

------------. (1969). In the garden. Taipei: Crown.

------------. (1976). I am a cloud. Taipei: Crown.

------------. (1977). Hazy birds, hazy moon. Taipei: Crown.

------------. (1980). Between togetherness and separation. Taipei: Crown.

------------. (1989a). My story. Taipei: Crown.

------------.(1989b). The unsevered nostalgia : My homecoming to the mainland. Taipei: Crown.

------------. (1990). Xue Ke. Taipei: Crown.

-----------. (1997). Postscript. In Huanzhu Gege I: The truth comes out, pp. 736-738. Taipei: Crown.

-----------. (1999). Foreword. In Huanzhu Gege II: The disaster comes back, pp.3-5. Taipei: Crown.

-----------. (2003). Postscript. In Huanzhu Gege III: Heaven and earth, pp. 1096-1101. Taipei: Crown.

Ping, X. T. (2004). Moving against the steam. Taipei: Crown.

Xiao, Z. M. (1992). The cross-strait exchange of entertainment business. In The anthology of cross-strait cultural and educational exchanges, pp.129-162 Taipei: Mainland Affair Committee, Taiwan.

ShaoChun Cheng, a Ph. D. candidate in School of Telecommunications at Ohio University. He received his M.A. of Sociology at National Taiwan University. Before joined the Ph. D. Program at Ohio University, he has worked for eight years in print journalism and TV reporting in Taiwan. His is now working on his dissertation project "The Asymmetrical Interdependence within the regional media market—Taiwanese Television Drama in the Chinese Mediascape." His interests include: Media globalization/Regionalization; cultural production; cultural studies/ critical theory of mass communication.

His e-mail addresses are shaochun54@yahoo.com and shaochun54@gmail.com