The book addresses the issues of China's soft power in Southeast Asia during the rise of China. This soft power includes Chinese language education and popular culture. With regard to Chinese education, prior to the rise of China, Chinese schools were catered to mainly overseas Chinese children. Non-Chinese seldom received Chinese education. However, the rise of China and the export of Confucius Institutes (CIs) changed the landscape as CIs are meant for the non-Chinese population as well. China's educational soft power penetrated the larger non-Chinese community, making Chinese soft power more effective. Chinese popular culture has also infiltrated the non-Chinese population. Various chapters in this book show that rising China's soft power in Southeast Asia has grown quite significantly, particularly in terms of the Chinese language and Chinese popular culture. Nevertheless, its popularity still lags behind American soft power. The Chinese language is still not as popular as the English language. The same could also be said for Chinese popular culture. The growth of China's soft power faces tremendous challenges in the Southeast Asian region. Its further growth would depend on China's continuous economic power and cordial relations with the Southeast Asian countries.

The book addresses the issues of China’s soft power in Southeast Asia during the rise of China. This soft power includes Chinese language education and popular culture. With regard to Chinese education, prior to the rise of China, Chinese schools were catered to mainly overseas Chinese children. Non-Chinese seldom received Chinese education. However, the rise of China and the export of Confucius Institutes (CIs) changed the landscape as CIs are meant for the non-Chinese population as well. China’s educational soft power penetrated the larger non-Chinese community, making Chinese soft power more effective. Chinese popular culture has also infiltrated the non-Chinese population. Various chapters in this book show that rising China’s soft power in Southeast Asia has grown quite significantly, particularly in terms of the Chinese language and Chinese popular culture. Nevertheless, its popularity still lags behind American soft power. The Chinese language is still not as popular as the English language. The same could also be said for Chinese popular culture. The growth of China’s soft power faces tremendous challenges in the Southeast Asian region. Its further growth would depend on China’s continuous economic power and cordial relations with the Southeast Asian countries.

East Asian pop culture can be seen as an integrated cultural economy emerging from the rise of Japanese and Korean pop culture as an influential force in the distribution and reception networks of Chinese language pop culture embedded in the ethnic Chinese diaspora. Taking Singapore as a locus of pan-Asian Chineseness, Chua Beng Huat provides detailed analysis of the fragmented reception process of transcultural audiences and the processes of audiences’ formation and exercise of consumer power and engagement with national politics. In an era where exercise of military power is increasingly restrained, pop culture has become an important component of soft power diplomacy and transcultural collaborations in a region that is still haunted by colonization and violence. The author notes that the aspirations behind national governments' efforts to use popular culture is limited by the fragmented nature of audiences who respond differently to the same products; by the danger of backlash from other members of the importing country's population that do not consume the popular culture products in question; and by the efforts of the primary consuming country, the People's Republic of China to shape products through co-production strategies and other indirect modes of intervention.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of China's use of "soft power" and assesses the impact this is having on the world and on the process of international relations.

This volume examines the relations between popular culture production and export and the state in East and Southeast Asia including the urban centres and middle-classes of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Thailand, and the Philippines. It addresses the shift in official thinking toward the role of popular culture in the political life of states brought about by the massive circulation of cultural commodities and the possibilities for attaining "soft power". In contrast to earlier studies, this volume pays particular attention to the role of states and cross-state cultural interactions in these processes. It is the first major attempt to look at these issues comparatively and to provide an important corrective to the limitations of existing scholarship on popular culture in Asia that have usually neglected its political aspects. As part of this move, the essays in this volume suggest a widening of disciplinary perspectives. Hitherto, the preponderance of relevant studies has been in cultural and media fields, anthropology or history. Here the contributors explicitly draw on other disciplinary perspectives – political science and international relations, political economy, law, and policy studies – to explore the complex interrelationships between the state, politics and economics, and popular culture. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian culture, society and politics, the sociology of culture, political science and media studies.

Immigrants from China started settling in Calcutta, the British capital of colonial India, from the late eighteenth century. Initially, the immigrant community comprised of male workers, many of whom sojourned between China and India. Only in the early twentieth century was there a large influx of women and children from China. To address the educational needs of the children - both immigrant and locally-born - several Chinese-medium primary and middle schools were established in Calcutta by the community in the 1920s and 1930s. Using many hitherto unexplored textual sources and interviews in India, China, and Canada, this detailed and unprecedented study examines the history and significance of these Chinese-medium schools. It focuses on the role they played in preserving Chinese cultural identity not only through the use of educational curricula and textbooks imported from China, but also with the emphasis on the need to return to the ancestral homeland for higher education. This study also breaks new ground by examining the impact of political and other factionalism within the community as well as the India-China conflict of 1962 that resulted in the closure of most of the Chinese-medium schools in Calcutta by the 1980s.