The deterritorialization of China pop: a pilot study on the global presence of Chinese streaming services

2.1 Deterritorialization in cultural globalization

Deterritorialization is the weakening of the ties between culture and specific territorial location, the escaping of cultures from the nation-state boundary, and the eventual reconfiguration of cultural experiences. It can be regarded a consequence of cultural globalization, where the connection between everyday lived culture and territorial location is weakened or dissolved (Featherstone 1990; Hannerz 1990; Tomlinson 1999). The far reaching and ever more powerful communication technologies, including the internet, streaming, mobile communication, and social media, have allowed symbolic forms and meanings to travel across national boundaries, therefore opening up “cultural horizons to other practices, values and ways of life” (Tomlinson 1999, p. 170). As a result, “culture is now less confined within territorial boundaries” (Hannerz 1990, p. 239). Pop culture made in one place can be consumed around the world. Streaming services and video websites have played a key role in deterritorializing global pop culture, including China pop.

Tomlinson (1999) discusses deterritorialization mostly in the sense that people’s cultural experiences and cultural identification are increasingly influenced by cultural artifacts, symbolic forms, and cultural meanings not originating from their own location, but from other parts of the world. As such, Tomlinson is mostly concerned with the information receivers. Other scholars touched upon deterritorialization from the sender’s point of view, but didn’t elaborate. This study advances the conceptual framework of deterritorialization by specifying the two stages of its process: foreign cultural content producers sending the content, and local audience consuming it. Cultural artifacts, symbolic forms, and cultural meanings originated from a certain location must be made available around the world in the first place, before the global audience can consume them.

This study argues that streaming services and video websites lift Chinese pop culture products out of their country of origin and make them available around the globe. As a result, the world gets to experience and consume China pop outside China, allowing China pop to be part of the mundane cultural experience of the global population. This is the first stage of deterritorialization, or “the existence of cultures far from their places or origin” (King 1990, p. 399). However, a full examination of cultural deterritorialization should include both the sender and receiver as they are two sides of the same coin. By focusing on the sender, this study only addresses the first stage of the process of cultural deterritorialization rather than assuming the process is complete with just availability of content. To complete the process, audience consumption of this foreign originated content needs to occur, which shall be examined in future studies.

Such a two-stage framework of deterritorialization transcends the classic yet flawed framework of cultural imperialism (Guback 1984; Lee 1979; Schiller 1976, 1989, 1992; Tunstall 1977) and other related models such as the West versus the rest, and the center-periphery framework (Hannerz 1990), which often deny the agency of the peripheries and are not very effective in analysis (Keane 2006; Kraidy and Murphy 2008; Reeves 1993; Straubhaar 1991; Tomlinson 1999; Tracy 1988). The concept of deterritorialization, both in terms of global reach of cultural products (first stage) and lived cultural experience (second stage), pays abundant attention to the capacity and agency of the peripheral players, such as China, which in the old models is more of a receiver of foreign content rather than the sender.

2.2 The “going out” policy

Global outreach of Chinese media is not a new topic. Over the past few decades, scholars have studied the globalization of Chinese movies (Curtin 2007), television (Keane 2010; Zhang 2007; Zhu and Berry 2009), and news (de Burgh 2017). Many of these studies focused on China’s national policy and state-run media, especially China’s “Going Out” strategy.

The motivation behind the “Going Out” initiative is partly nationalism, partly cultural pride, partly ideological control, and partly national strategy. China used to be very weak in cultural exports, with limited global reach and a huge trade deficit in cultural products (Keane 2010; Keane and Wu 2018; Zhang 2007; Zhu 2009). The global success of South Korean hallyu (Jin 2007) and Japanese pop culture (Tsutsui 2010) certainly gave Chinese media a sense of hope as well as urgency. If its East Asian neighbors can export their pop culture to such a great success, why cannot China? China did not want to remain a receiver of cultural products from Japan, Korea and the US, but “aspires to be a sender, an exporter of ideas, images and products” (Keane 2006, p. 851). Meanwhile, with entry into the WTO and the potential of massive influx of foreign cultural content, the Chinese government felt the urgency to strengthen China’s own media and cultural industries, including building their cultural export capacities (Curtin 2012; Keane 2006). Going out also allows China to have some control over global narratives about the country, including support for the Belt and Road initiative, as Western media discourse about China is often biased or stereotypical (de Burgh 2017; Hu and Ji 2012; Thussu et al. 2018).

Below are some key events of the “Going Out” initiative (de Burgh 2017; Hu and Ji 2012; Keane and Wu 2018; Thussu et al. 2018):

1. 2000, China launched its first English news network, CCTV-9.

2. 2009, Cultural Industry Rejuvenation Plan was released, officially initiating the “Going Out” policy. The Chinese government invested about $6 billion for the global expansion of Chinese state media enterprises, including foreign language channels of CCTV, international editions of China Daily, as well as more foreign bureaus and an English television network for Xinhua News Agency.

3. 2012: CCTV launched an African-specific channel, targeting African audiences with content featuring Africa.

4. 2016: China Global Television Network (CGTN) was launched.

The initiative and funding mostly concerned state-run media. The private-sector media outlets, which are the focus of the current study, were not officially part of the “Going Out” policy, but have been going out in reality and served the intent of the government’s initiative to some extent (Keane and Wu 2018; Zhao 2018). This study focuses on the private-sector players rather than state-owned enterprises, filling in several gaps in scholarship on globalization of Chinese media.

Western scholars have traditionally focused their research on censorship and control of media in China (Sparks 2012; Thussu et al. 2018), and not much attention is paid to China’s media overseas. Within the relatively small scholarship that does examine Chinese media’s global presence, so far the attention has been largely on government sponsored media entities, such as CCTV and Xinhua News Agency (de Burgh 2017; Hu and Ji 2012; Keane 2006). Very few scholars have taken a close look at private media companies from China. Too much focus on the state supported “national champions” risks neglecting “China’s abundance of bottom-up productivity” (Keane 2006, p. 849). Given the fast and vast growth of China’s pop culture industry and its global reach, whereby the private sector has been playing an increasingly important role, the global presence of private-sector media outlets is no longer negligible. In addition, most studies on Chinese media’s global reach have been about conventional media (television, radio, newspaper, etc.) and few have looked into a new, fast growing, and increasingly dominant form of media: streaming services. There is an urgent need to take a close look at the latter’s role in transmitting Chinese pop culture globally and its implications for cultural globalization. This study fills in these gaps by examining closely the global reach of three dominant private-sector streaming services, iQIYI, Tencent Video and YouKu.

2.3 Rise of China’s streaming industry

The internet and digital technology have given rise to three tech giants in China, known collectively as the BAT: Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. All three companies are privately-owned and operated and listed on the global stock market. Each of the three tech giants owns or operates a streaming service: iQIYI (owned by Baidu), YouKu (owned by Alibaba), and Tencent Video (owned by Tencent). They are the dominant streaming services in China, claiming more than half of the market share by mid-2016 (Zhao 2018).

To contextualize the development of China’s streaming services, this study identifies three broader socioeconomic conditions that propelled their rise. But first, it needs to be noted that the growth of China’s internet companies have benefited from the Chinese government’s blocking of international tech giants, such as Google, Facebook and Netflix, from operating in China. Such geoblocking (Zhao 2018) largely shield Chinese companies from competitions with global powers, allowing the former to reap most of the benefits of China’s huge market (Leong 2018).

The first condition that allowed private-sector streaming services to develop is the growth of China’s cultural industry as a whole. China did not pay a lot of attention to the cultural industry until the 1990s, when the Chinese government officially declared cultural industries to be part of national development. The Ministry of Culture formally instituted a Cultural Industries Department, aiming to “transform and regulate China’s burgeoning but largely inefficient cultural economy in the lead up to the WTO accession” (Keane and Fung 2018, p. 4). Taking cues from the success of Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea, China also aspired to grow a robust and internationally influential cultural industry (Kean 2004; Su 2019).

According to Chinese Ministry of Culture (later Ministry of Culture and Tourism), the value of the cultural sector increased from RMB1.21 billion (US$146 million) in 1990 to RMB8.37 billion (US$1.01 billion) in 1998 (Kean 2004). From 2015 to 2019, China’s cultural and related industries increased its value from RMB2.7 trillion (US$409 billion) to RMB4.4 trillion (US$667 billion), with an annual increase rate of nearly 13 %. Cultural industry output accounted for 3.95 % of China’s GDP in 2015 and 4.5 % in 2019 (Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism 2021). By comparison, the cultural economy of the U.S. contributes about 7 % to its GDP (Kean 2004). Nonetheless, the 20th congress of the Communist Party of China declared in its report that cultural industry has become a main force and a new growth engine for China’s economy (China Economic Times 2022). By 2022, China aims to push cultural consumption to past 6 % of all consumption in some cities (State Council of China 2019).

The second condition is the fast growth of China’s information technology, including the internet and mobile technology. The huge number of Chinese people online has afforded the BAT a grand-scale market and consumer base. By December 2023, nearly 98 % of China’s 1.09 billion internet users consume online videos, including on video streaming sites and short video platforms; that amounts to 1.07 billion users (CNNIC 2024). China’s media and creative industries are increasingly intertwined with the internet industry (Su 2019; Zhao 2018). Digital platforms such as mobile apps and streaming services are changing the way that cultural content is produced, distributed, consumed and shared. As a result, “the digital economy is taking Chinese culture further than ever before” (Keane and Wu 2018, p. 52).

The third condition is China’s emphasis on innovation in recent decades. To overcome China’s innovation deficit and heavy reliance on foreign technologies, in the early 2000s, China initiated the “Indigenous Innovation” campaign. This campaign mostly focuses on advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, bioengineering, advanced chips, and national defense. The Chinese government poured huge amounts of funding into this initiative, but most of the funding goes to state owned enterprises (SOEs) rather than private-sector tech companies (McGregor 2010). Although the BAT are not among the “national champion” SOEs, they nonetheless jumped on the bandwagon of innovation. Their leaders, Robin Li (Baidu), Jack Ma (Alibaba) and Ma Huateng (Tencent) have been established as exemplary innovators as well as evangelicals for innovation, bringing fervor and zeal for innovation at the grassroots level (Leong 2018).

One of their innovations was streaming service, which changed the way of watching content compared with legacy TV, transforming traditional linear programming to digital non-linear programming, allowing content consumption at anytime, anywhere (Su 2019). “With innovation being the basis for Chinese media, online video platforms have transformed into producers, distributors, advertisers and even ecommerce providers” (Su 2019, p. 2).

With a fast-growing cultural industry establishing the macro environment, a huge internet network providing the infrastructure, and a zeal for innovation supplying the motivation, streaming services have grown substantially in China.

The “going out” policy fits squarely with the first stage of cultural deterritorialization: sending Chinese media content overseas to reach audiences beyond the Chinese national boarder. The rise of streaming services further extended this process by allowing more players (private companies) to provide Chinese media content to the rest of the world on multiple streaming platforms, which will be discussed in detail below.

4.1 Business overview

Baidu is iQIYI’s controlling shareholder. YouKu is a subsidiary of Alibaba Group Holding Limited. Tencent Video is a subsidiary of Tencent Holdings Limited. Alibaba and Tencent, the two holding companies, are listed on the global stock exchanges, including Nasdaq, Hong Kong and Europe, not YouKu or Tencent Video. Only iQIYI is listed on the stock market under its own name. All of these companies are privately owned global conglomerates rather than State-owned Enterprises (SOEs).

All three streaming services adopt a mixed-funded business model that combines subscription and advertisement (Tang and Wei 2023). Paid subscribers, named VIP members by the platforms, enjoy early access of new episodes, better image qualities (high definition of 1,080 pixels vertically, or 4,000 pixels horizontally), and ad-free viewing. Non-subscribers can watch shows for free with commercials, fewer new episodes, and lower image quality (standard definition of 480 pixels vertically). In addition, these streaming platforms generate revenue from in-app sales (merchandize related to shows) and content distribution, where the platforms license their shows to third party platforms overseas, such as Rakuten Viki and Netflix. For example, in the fiscal year of 2023, iQIYI generated content distribution revenue of RMB2.5 billion (US$346.3 million), and online advertising revenue of RMB6.2 billion (US$876.6 million) (iQIYI 2024).

Tencent Video is China’s largest streaming service provider, with 116 million subscribers by the end of March 2024 (Tencent Holdings 2024). It is one of the Value Added Services (VAS) provided by Tencent Holdings Limited, first founded in 1998 and first listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2004. Tencent did not report revenue from video streaming subscription in its latest financial report. In terms of global expansion, Tencent is counting more on its international gaming business. In the first quarter of 2024, international games revenues increased by about 3 % year-on-year to RMB13.6 billion (US$1.9 billion) (Tencent Holdings 2024). In comparison, Tencent Video is a relatively small part of its overall business.

Founded in 2009 and first listed on the stock exchanges in 2018, iQIYI is China’s second largest streaming service with 101.1 million subscribers at the end of 2023, down from 119.7 million a year ago. Membership services revenue for 2023 was RMB20.3 billion (US$2.9 billion), increasing 15 % from 2022, mostly driven by increase of subscription rates (iQIYI 2024).

IQIYI began to expand its overseas business in late 2019 through launching the multilingual mobile app outside China. By 2021, international operation was still a small portion of the company’s overall business, accounting for about 7 % of its total revenue. But its 2021 annual report specifically notes, “We expand our business overseas through our multilingual iQIYI app, which offer a curated selection of popular imported and local video content titles” (iQIYI 2022, p. 62). The same report indicates that the company will continue to invest in high quality content and overseas expansion, “in order to achieve long-term success” (p. 15). The company also included international business as a new growth area in its Next Generation Business plan (Li 2022).

YouKu, incorporated in 2005, is part of the Digital Media and Entertainment Group of Alibaba Group Holding Limited, serving as the company’s “key distribution platforms for digital media and entertainment content” (Alibaba Group 2022, p. 25). With estimated around 90 million subscribers, YouKu is the third largest streaming service in China (Wallach 2021). Alibaba Group doesn’t disclose YouKu subscriber numbers in its recent financial reports. In fiscal year 2024 (ending on March 31, 2024), revenue from the Digital Media and Entertainment Group was about RMB21 billion (US$2.9 billion). That accounts for 2.2 % of Alibaba’s total revenue for fiscal year 2024 (Alibaba Group 2024). In the 2023 fiscal year, total viewing time on YouKu mobile app increased by 13 % year over year. YouKu’s total subscription revenue grew over 15 % from the prior fiscal year, primarily due to increase of subscription rate (Alibaba Group 2023). But there is a “modest decline” of revenue from YouKu in the quarter ended on March 1, 2024 (Alibaba Group 2024, p. 4). The reports have no mention of YouKu’s global operation.

The limited discussion of global business in their financial reports indicates that all three streaming services are still in the early stage of global expansion. Among the three, iQIYI has expressed clearer global ambition. In the year of 2023, iQIYI provided more than 500 titles and more than 6,000 h of entrainment content to audience in about 200 regions around the world (iQIYI Press 2023a, 2023b). In December 2023, iQIYI hosted an “International iJOY conference: 2024 Grand Reveal” at the Asia TV Forum in Singapore. At the conference, Wang Xiaohui, chief content officer of iQIYI, emphasized the platform’s “unwavering commitment to providing premium Chinese and Asian content worldwide” (iQIYI Press 2023a, para. 1).

Yang Xianghua, iQIYI’s president of movie and overseas business group, told the conference: “We’ve verified the popularity and influence of iQIYI original productions outside of China, as well as how China’s business model can be adopted for international markets. We also anticipate an annual income growth and profit for our overseas business in 2023” (iQIYI Press 2023b, para. 2). The company accounted the roll out of more than 280 Chinese language movies, drama series, variety shows and kids programs on its international platforms for the next two years (iQIYI Press 2023b). In an interview with Variety.com, the American entertainment news site, Mr. Yang said that iQIYI aimed at entering the market in Southeast Asia and East Asia first, and then expand in North America. “North America is already a big market for us in revenue terms,” he said (Frater 2023, para. 11).

In fact, global expansion has become a necessary business strategy for these companies, as they are facing market saturation within China (Tang and Wei 2023). Tencent Video and iQIYI both saw decrease in subscription in 2023 from the year before. YouKu and iQIYI are increasing subscription rate to keep revenue growth. They need to expand business internationally to generate more revenue and follow Netflix’s example of growth: gain more international users (Hu et al. 2022; Jinyu 2022; Yueshang 2022). Cultural deterritorialization, in the case of streaming platforms, has a strong business motivation and follows market logic. “[Chinese] Fast-moving commercial digital companies are ‘going out,’ seeking virtual treasures, mostly for their shareholders” (Keane and Wu 2018, p. 61).

4.2 Platforms

Each streaming service offers multiple platforms, tailored for Chinese and overseas markets, as well as for different devices: computers, mobile phones, tablets, etc. IQIYI started offering multilingual international platforms in 2019. Tencent launched its international video streaming platform WeTV in 2019 (Tang and Wei 2023). YouKu launched its international version in 2022. Tencent, iQIYI and YouKu’s Chinese websites are accessible in the United States, but some shows are only viewable with a Chinese IP address. IQIYI only offers its international version in the App store in the US; YouKu and Tencent offer both their Chinese and international versions. On their YouTube channels, the companies encourage visitors to download their international apps.

The three companies built platforms specifically for the international market, with overseas IP addresses, apps, subscription rates, payment options, as well as multi-language options (see Table 1). The content offered is also different, which will be discussed in the next section. The login and payment options clearly show the differences between Chinese and overseas technology and payment systems. Login options such as QQ, Taobao and WeChat are only available to users in China, who use a Chinese mobile phone number to receive a verification code. International users need to use email or other login option (see Table 1). Overseas users can make payments with foreign credit cards and Apple ID, while users in China primarily use Zhifubao (Alipay) or Weixin Pay. Such different options are indications of market segmentation, domestic versus overseas. In the future, the companies could further differentiate their offerings in different regions (North America, Europe, Asia, etc.), as has been practiced by Netflix.

4.3 Content

This section examines the availability of Chinese pop culture content on platforms owned by the three streaming services, as well as on third-party platforms.

4.4 Challenges and risks

As shown in the preceding discussion, Chinese streaming services have become a contender in global media markets (see Figure 6). However, their global excursion still faces many challenges and risks. The “going out” of China’s culture “remains a work-in-progress” (Keane 2019, p. 253).

For starter, all three streaming services are still a long way to upend the global dominance of English-language platforms such as Netflix and Disney+ (Tang and Wei 2023). So far, people watching or subscribing to overseas platforms of Chinese streaming services are primarily the Chinese diaspora, and many of them reside in the Asia-Pacific region (Keane and Wu 2018; Keane 2019). Korean productions, in contrast, has been much more successful in engaging a global audience.

Netflix released its viewing data for the first six months of 2023. In the top 10 most watched shows, the Korean drama “The Glory” is ranked no. 3 with more than 622 million hours viewed. There are 15 Korean productions made it to the top 100 of this list, and zero Chinese titles. The most watched Chinese show on Netflix is “Meteor Garden,” ranked 856th on the list with more than 24 million hours viewed (Netflix 2023). Netflix made many of its Korean productions globally available while the Chinese titles are only available in certain regional markets, such as North America. That has to do with the fact that Netflix is the main investor and distributor of most of its Korean catalogue.

In 2023, Netflix announced it would invest US$2.5 billion in the next five years to produce K-dramas, movies and reality shows. The company invested about US$500 million in 2021 on Korean content, on top of the US$700 million spent since 2016 (Bae and Toh 2023). Such deals are unheard of for Chinese productions. The collaboration between Netflix and Chinese streaming services, such as iQIYI, mostly focuses on content licensing rather than direct investment, let alone in such huge amounts (Keane 2019; Keane and Wu 2018). Chinese cultural industry, and perhaps the Chinese state, may never entertain such foreign investment in content production, as this model yields control to an American company like Netflix and perpetuates Western dominance of global cultural production and distribution, which could be seen as another form of cultural imperialism (Jin 2007).

These streaming services face other risks in their global expansion, as mentioned in their annual reports (Alibaba Group 2022; iQIYI 2022; Tencent Holdings 2022):

1. Changing Chinese and international laws and regulations, including laws regarding investment and operations by foreign companies [considering the looming ban on TikTok].

2. Tightening control of the Chinese government on internet operations and content offering. Lack of creative freedom and the ability to take creative risks pose a major hurdle for Chinese content to engage international audience (Keane 2019).

3. Difficulty in catering to a wide range of tastes, preferences and expectations of a global audience, including providing content that is culturally and socially appropriate in certain regions.

4. Uncertainty in geopolitical situations, including possible conflicts.

The proceeding discussion demonstrates that for these companies to continue to grow their business outside China, they have to navigate the tension between state power, market forces, and users both in China and globally (Dai 2012; Keane and Fung 2018). They are perpetually solving the puzzle of generating content that satisfies the party state’s governance needs while also being attractive to a global audience (Keane 2010).

4.5 Analysis of findings

Based on the findings presented above, this study makes the following three analytical and theoretical arguments about the global reach of China’s pop culture content within the conceptual framework of deterritorialization.

First, the first stage of deterritorialization of Chinese pop culture content, i.e., the offering of Chinese content globally, is now carried out with scale, synergy and strings attached. The findings about the platforms and content offering have shown that the global reach of Chinese pop content is carried out at a scale, with multiple multilingual international platforms, more than 80 YouTube channels, thousands of shows, and hundreds of thousands of videos. Such a scale is enabled by global conglomerates that are many things in one: tech companies, internet companies, e-commerce providers, logistic network operators, as well as content producers, distributors and exhibitors. Different parts of their complex businesses influence and support each other, forming synergy. “Digital media and entertainment is a natural extension of our strategy to capture consumption beyond our commerce businesses,” states Alibaba’s 2022 annual report. “This synergy delivers a superior entertainment experience, increases customer loyalty and improves monetization for content providers across the ecosystem” (Alibaba Group 2022, p. 25). Tencent has a vast international gaming business and Tencent Video helps promote and strengthen that business by offering shows featuring attractive professional gamers, such as Ye Xiu in “The King’s Avatar.” Tencent games, such as Cross Fire and Honor of Kings, are also featured in popular shows, “Cross Fire” and “You Are My Glory,” respectively. IQIYI’s business is rather concentrated on video streaming, but uses its YouTube channel to tease out their latest and hottest shows, luring viewers to their paid platforms. This can be seen as cross-platform synergy.

The various challenges and risks facing these companies indicate that they have many strings attached. “China offers unique challenges such as strict censorship, government intervention, unclear regulations and underdeveloped industry mechanisms” (Peng and Keane 2019, p. 10). The three companies face these obstacles to become even stronger competitors in the global streaming market. Nonetheless, while lots of studies are about what the Chinese media are not allowed to do, this study has demonstrated what these streaming services can accomplish despite all the strings attached.

Second, the private sector has become the main force of the first step of deterritorializing Chinese media content: removing the content from its country of origin and bringing it to the rest of the world. The Chinese government used to lead the venture of Chinese media into the global market (Zhang 2007). That role is now largely taken over by private-sector streaming services with their various platforms available throughout the world and vast content offering, both in terms of variety and quantity. These private-sector media companies can be more effective in engaging the global audience than state media entities. They are more sensitive and responsive to market demand and therefore can produce more compelling and entertaining content, while the state media are slow-moving and insufficient in providing compelling content (de Burgh 2017; Keane 2010; Keane and Wu 2018). They also don’t bear the kind of international stigma often associated with China’s state media: too much political propaganda and ideological preaching, which has resulted in low credibility, suspicions, and hostilities among global audiences (de Burgh 2017; Hu and Ji 2012; Keane and Wu 2018).

Third, the global reach of China pop is expanding cultural deterritorialization around the world as a process and consequence of cultural globalization, further disrupting the global cultural configuration. “There is little doubt that the availability of media material emanating from a major non-western center [i.e., China] of global media production complicates the discourse about international media” (de Burgh 2017, p. 4). Chinese streaming services have brought Chinese stories, Chinese people’s experiences, Chinese culture, values and world views to the rest of the world. These discourses and representations add to “the diversity, variety and richness of popular and local discourses, codes and practices” (Featherstone 1990, p. 2). The global reach of Chinese media content has contributed to “increasing interconnectedness of varied local cultures,” which gives rise to a “world culture,” where “the world has become one network of social relationships, and between its different regions there is a flow of meanings as well as of people and goods” (Hannerz 1990, p. 237).

Overall, the global reach of Chinese streaming services, as mapped out in this study, is significant both theoretically and practically. Global availability of Chinese content has contributed even more ingredients to an already complex global cultural mixture, adding to the uncertainty and ambiguity caused by deterritorialization (Hannerz 1990; Tomlinson 1999). The global expansion of Chinese streaming services further complicates the configuration of global cultural landscape: no more core versus periphery, but multicentered, multi sources; instead of one-way flow, it’s multiway flow; instead of the West versus the rest, it’s an interconnected world (Hannerz 1990; King 1990; Tomlinson 1999). At the same time, it also generates more possibilities, inspires more imaginations and perspectives. The cultural meanings from China can be part of the mixture of global audience’s lived cultural experiences and cultural identification, although it remaines to be seen and yet to be studied on how global audience, especially non-Chinese descendents, are consuming and engaging Chinese content.