The production and consumption of animation in Taiwan: The interplay of global political and economic forces

This study examines how the interplay of global political and economic forces reshapes the production and consumption of animation in Taiwan.; In the early 1990s, Taiwan was a major offshore animation production center for Hollywood. Although the Taiwanese animation industry exported production mainly to Hollywood, Taiwanese mass media remained heavily dependent on animation imported from Japan. This phenomenon suggests that the production and consumption of animation in Taiwan are two disparate and self-contained systems; they are integrated into the global communication system, but in different ways.; The study attempts to shed light on the notions of media imperialism and globalization, particularly in the global age. Methods of historical analysis are employed to document how has transnational capital reorganized the world economy toward a more globally integrated, task-segmented system of production. The primary resources for this study were collected through ethnographic interviews in Taiwan. The key findings are: (1) as discussed by many scholars with respect to the global development of diverse industries in East Asia, the linkages to the Japanese and American market and different capacities of technological innovations are crucial factors for the development of Taiwanese animation industry; (2) the economic integration of the Great China Region has greatly reshaped the economic activities in the region; (3) the rise of pan-Asian audio-visual geo-linguistic region was confirmed; (4) notwithstanding all this, the logic of game and the central-peripheral relationships were not altered in the global age.