ABSTRACT

East Asian film and television productions in Mandarin have been shown

on Indonesian television since the early 1990s. This is despite the well-

documented history of tension between the nation’s Chinese ethnic minor-

ity and the so-called indigenous population in the central and western

parts of the country, especially in the island of Java (see Chapter 4). At the

time of writing, almost all national private television channels continue to

run the so-called Asia Mandarin and Asia non-Mandarin1 TV serials,

series, and single movies in their every day programming pattern. After the initial success of Hong Kong’s TV productions, the Indonesian private

television stations searched for other sources of East Asian TV produc-

tions, such as Korea, Japan, and Taiwan in the last decade of the twentieth

century.