Transnational media production from the margins of “Cultural China”: the case of Singapore’s media producers

The rise of the PRC marks a reconfiguration of regional media industries in Asia. Apart from media producers actively seeking opportunities to venture into the Mainland Chinese market, Chinese media companies and platforms are increasingly entering into the rest of Asia in a bid to expand on their regional presence. In particular, Chinese platform giant iQiyi has set up headquarters in Southeast Asia alongside various Chinese production houses establishing branches all over Asia, utilizing local media production services and labour in the process. While the main frameworks commonly used to analyze these production services tend to focus on economic perspectives, these miss out on the plethora of activities, forces and sentiments unleashed by such transnational collaborations that may exceed the depoliticized logics of profit maximization.

Often deemed by their Mainland Chinese counterparts as lacking in sociocultural capital and production niches, Singaporean media producers have remained marginal as a producer for the wider Chinese-speaking regional markets and have been slow to venture into the Mainland Chinese media industries. However, Singapore is emerging as a popular hub for Chinese SVODs and production companies looking to set up shop in Southeast Asia. Drawing on interviews with key Singaporean producers situated in Singapore and Malaysia working with the Mainland Chinese market, this paper teases out how Singapore’s producers navigate issues of capital, power and identity when providing production services for Mainland China, and interrogates relations between global, national and regional forces as manifested in producers’ subjectivities in the era of the “rise of China.”