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Over the past two decades, the East Asian region has witnessed various ebbs and flows in cultural saliency. As die cult of Hong Kong cinema waned in the mid-1990s, a Korean Wave [hallyu) unexpectedly surged, and die popularity of Korean cultural products such as pop music and television drama series rose to great economic and cultural significance throughout the region. Regional audiences currendy may be anxiously awaiting what might follow this Korean Wave. Not surprisingly, officials within media conglomerates and local governments might themselves actively seek to initiate or be part of the "next" wave, which could either sustain or replace the current one. Some critics and scholars are cautiously predicting and estimating the potential of an impending "Chinese wave."
This essay examines the distribution of Chinese-language films in South Korea, for which the most dominant foreign regional cinema is still Hong Kong and Hong Kong/China coproductions. I attempt to show how the South Korean majors' distribution practices restrict the dissemination of Chinese-language films because a significantly smaller number of theaters are allotted to Chinese-language films during their opening weeks in comparison to either South Korean or Hollywood blockbusters. This discussion also examines the popular discourse on Chinese and Japanese media in Soudi Korea, through which one can detect a more positive disposition toward the latter, even though both are "marginal" in terms of their saliency within Korean national culture. I will argue diat die difference should be attributed to Korean cultural policies as well as cultural novelty - not to audiences' economic aspiration for the consumed culture, contrary to the model advanced and discussed by scholars such as Koichi Iwabuchi.1
Hong Kong cinema has long been an integral part of the cultural memory of Korean audiences and filmmakers alike. South Korea was not immune to the worldwide phenomenon of Bruce Lee in the 1970s,2 followed by diat of Jackie Chan in the 1980s. Bruce Lee's Game of Death (Robert Clouse, 1 978) opened at a single dieater in Seoul and over two mondis (May 1 8 to July 31, 1978) attracted an audience of 28 1 ,000.3 A year later, Drunken Master (Jut kuen; Yuen Woo-ping, 1978) had an extended run over five months (September 29, 1979, to March 28, 1980), pulling in 891,000...