ABSTRACT
An intra-Asian market for creative and cultural goods and services can be said to have emerged in the East Asian region in the mid- to late 1990s. Twenty years later, the East Asian craze for Japanese popular culture has broadened into an intra-Asian market for all sorts of creative cultural products from Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China as well as Japan and Hong Kong. All forms of cultural production take place within what people call a market economy. The market economy is a social system in which goods and services are bought and sold. Trade takes place when buyer and seller agree on a price. There is a ‘double discourse’ of value/values at work: the former is concerned with money, commerce, technology, industry, production, and consumption, together with the people engaged therein; the latter take into account culture, art, status, and other forms of non-monetary appreciation.
