ABSTRACT
No one would ever suggest conceptualizing Asia as a culturally homogeneous space. The adjective ‘Asian’ is complicated by a multitude of possible cultural references, from relatively culturally homogeneous countries in East Asian, such as Japan and Korea 2 to multiethnic/multiracial/multicultural/multireligious/multilingual postcolonial nations in Southeast and South Asia. For this occasion, I would risk this complexity and talk about East Asia plus one, namely Singapore, because of its overwhelming majority population of ethnic Chinese. The imaginary coherence of this grouping lies in the relatively imaginable possibility of constructing an ‘East Asian’ identity. Such a project of constructing a coherent and stable East Asian identity is a project that has a rather long standing. Most recently, in the early 1990s, in the triumphant days of the rise of capital in these countries, this group of countries was designated as a relatively coherent ‘cultural’ unit under the label of the ‘dragon’ economies. The symbol of the ‘dragon’, the sign of imperial China, obviously refers to their allegedly common Confucian heritage, which points beyond the Chinese population and enabled the inclusion of Japanese and Korean populations. This alleged presence of Confucianism in the ways of life of the huge, aggregated population of these countries provided for both the reason and its ‘discovery’ of Confucianism as an explanation for the rise of capitalism in East Asia, parallel to the affinity of Protestantism in the emergence of capitalism in the West (Tu 1991a). After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, this Confucian project has been displaced. Against this displacement, I am attempting to delineate an object of analysis, calling it ‘East Asia Popular Culture’, to designate the development, production, exchange, flow and consumption of popular cultural products between the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
