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Professor keeps finger on local media pulse
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UNLIKE most other visitors to the Shanghai Disney Resort, 36-year-old Aynne Kokas didn’t come just for the park’s thrilling rides and beautiful vistas. Instead, she’s interested in studying the project as part of her research into both local media and Sino-US business cooperations.
“It’s interesting that many of the visitors were middle-aged or elderly people, whom I would have hardly expected to see in Disney,” says Kokas. “It was probably because it’s Monday, and some of them were with their grandchildren.”
The scholar and fluent Mandarin speaker visited the park while in town for the recent Shanghai International Film and TV Festival, where she participated in forums and observed the festival’s industry proceedings. “Shanghai, in my view, is more like a Tomorrow Land than the one in the Disney dreams,” says Kokas.
As an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, Kokas believes it’s important for students in the US to go to the source when it comes to observing China’s media. In fact, on the first day of class, she has her students download WeChat to better understand the popular app’s uses and importance in the country’s social media scene.
“It is not just about WeChat being an extremely popular app. It’s also an effective way to help students expand their horizons and see what’s going on outside the US,” says Kokas.
In the West, she explains, different social media platforms serve different functions — such as Instagram for photo sharing and Facebook for staying in touch with friends. WeChat, however, combines many of these functions into a single tool.
“They’re like ‘oh my gosh’ there’s this whole social network used by millions of people that I didn’t even know about,” says Kokas. It was a similar sense of astonishment that evoked Kokas’ abiding interest in China.
Kokas first came to the country while still a student herself at the University of Michigan. In 1999, she took part in an exchange program at Peking University.
“I found (Beijing) to be an engaging and dynamic city. There was just so much going on, I really loved it,” says Kokas.
During her stay, she shared an apartment with a Chinese girl in a residential compound of the Beijing Film Studio, an experience which exposed her to nascent field of US-China film collaborations.
Kokas would later work as a management consultant, helping US companies enter the Chinese market. She eventually shifted into academia, where she focused on Chinese media studies.
As a consultant, Kokas discovered that many US companies were eager to tap the country’s market, but few were willing to do their homework.
“There were a lot of agreements that didn’t work out well, and a lot of them were due to linguistic and cultural misunderstanding. I saw my role at that time as a business person learning how things work in China, so that when I talked to my American colleagues they would have a better understanding themselves,” says Kokas, who adds that much progress has been made on bridging such gaps over recent years.
One area of collaboration she’s particularly interested in is film. While an increasing number of US-China co-productions come out each year, Kokas admits that the number of truly successful collaborations is still small.
“To be honest, there isn’t a single template yet. And that’s why I think this is an exciting area. So many people are trying to identify the right formula,” says Kokas. “There have been quite a few cases where a co-produced film did well in one market, but was less popular in the other, such as ‘Lust, Caution’ and ‘Iron Man 3’.”
Kokas remains fascinated by the Chinese media and the preferences of local viewers. Not only is the market growing quickly, but the habits and tastes of viewers are also evolving in ways that many outside the country might consider surprising. One particular phenomenon that interests Kokas is that many Chinese will go to watch a movie because they think it is silly or frivolous. Many do so in order to comment about it online.
“I think it also speaks to the Internet community here. Just like other communal experiences, people are looking for ways to share,” says Kokas. “That’s really cool. This is probably a reason why Chinese cinema is growing so much faster than it is in the US. With a strong surrounding Internet, being able to discuss films is actually a way to be relevant.”
Kokas will share more of her observations on Chinese film and US-China collaborations in her forthcoming book “Hollywood: Made in China.”
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