ARI Working Paper Series

There is a very dense traffic of popular culture products criss-crossing national and cultural boundaries of locations with predominantly ethnic Chinese population in Asia. The economics, the producer and consumer populations contained within the spaces delineated – the PRC, particularly its major cities, Taipei, Hong Kong and Singapore – by this traffic can be designated discursively as Pop Culture China. This paper analyses the ways in which the entertainment pages of the Chinese language newspaper partakes in the constitution and help to make visible the presence of the ‘imagined community’ that is Pop Culture China, and how its readers make real the community of Pop Culture consumers, as ‘occasional’ and ephemeral community.