East Asian Pop Culture

Abstract

The American labour historian Gary Cross argues that ‘consumerism is not an inevitable stage in industrial development. Rather it has been a choice made within complex cultural, political and social contexts’ (1993: vii). Furthermore, ‘increased consumer need would lash workers ever more firmly to their jobs’ (Cross 1993: 39). The consequent ‘work-and-spend’ culture has become an essential part of contemporary everyday life of all wage earners, for whom the constant expansion of consumption remains the primary reason to labour. Historically, American capitalists had invested earlier than anyone else in consumer culture, including mass entertainment, which explains the American domination in the world of mass consumption, from fast food to Hollywood. Since the 1960s, East Asian countries have experienced very rapid and compressed capitalist industrialization leading to the unprecedented expansion of all modes of consumption, from small objects to luxurious automobiles to mass entertainment (Chua 2009). Against the background of the global dominance of the American mass-entertainment pop culture industry, a regional pop culture industry has been developing and consolidating in East Asia, so much so that we can discursively designate this transnational regional cultural industry as the ‘East Asian Pop Culture’ industry.2