Formats, cultural security and China’s going out policy

This article investigates the relationship between television formats, cultural security and China’s ‘going out’ policy. Cultural security is a term used within Chinese policy circles to advocate the strengthening of media and cultural pursuits with a view to making them effective instruments of national ‘soft power’, a term coined by Joseph Nye (1990). Whereas ‘going out’ refers to Chinese business expansion internationally, in this article it describes media and cultural industries. We argue that these three elements constitute a new soft power coalition. Building on the existing demand, particularly among diasporic communities for historical dramas, formatting of talent and reality shows allow Chinese cultural identity to be reformed, remade, re-presented and modernized. The article provides background to the emergence of television formats, showing which kinds of programming passes both government scrutiny and the audience test. In the final section it looks at three examples of music talent shows, The Voice of China, I am a Singer, and Sing My Song that effectively function to reconnect domestic and diasporic audiences.