Using well-known Taiwanese cultural worker Chiungyao’s mainland China-based TV drama production the Huanzhu Gege series as a case study, this dissertation examines the operational logic of a regional media market, the Greater China media market, consisting of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong. The process of cultural production within a regional media market is cumulative and aims to take advantage of regional division of cultural labor to address the complicated cultural flows of the globalization era, which will be illustrated in this analysis.
Following Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory, this dissertation also argues that popular culture production within a regional media market can be seen as a result of the interactions between the structural factors and human agency. Structural factors - center/periphery structural asymmetry, geopolitics, economics, communication technology and media policies adopted by nation-states - provide a contextual framework for cultural workers to exert their agency, such as cultural identity/proximity, interpersonal networking, the employment of localized genre and the cultural worker’s authorship. Through the case study of Chiungyao’s successful creative career within the Greater China media market, the author believes that the creative agency is one of the most important vehicles available for the cultural workers to break the structural asymmetry within a regional media market.
Finally, through the analysis of Chiungyao’s cultural production, the author demonstrates that media regionalization, which is represented by the operation of a regional media market, with the conjuncture of migration, technology, cultural identity, and globalizing flexible capital accumulation can serve as an important channel leading to media globalization.