Page 320 - Proceedings Collega2023

(Boyd-Barrett & Mirrlees, 2020). Wallerstein and his World System Theory (WST) is another framework
that points to the global creative economy as centred among the core nations while the other countries
within the peripheral and semi-peripheral zones are mainly consumers, buying and viewing movies, DVDs,
iPods, video, books and television programming from the 10 mega dream merchants of Time Warner,
Disney, News Corp, Viacom, GE-NBC Universal, Bertelsmann, etc. (McPhail, 2010).

EMERGENCE OF CREATIVE ASIAN CULTURAL PRODUCTION

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Researchers began to notice an important development in the later part of the 20 century
especially during the last two decades’ movement of media globalization in Asian countries. Asia began its
foray into the global marketplace after instilling plans for national development in the CCI sectors. Also,
Asian governments began to check the spread of western flow of E& M products. Countries such as China,
Japan, India, initiated cultural policies to counter media imperialism tendencies of Western media flows.
Policies for counter-flows for semi-peripheral region began to move forward and formulate cultural
policies to ensure the continuous enhancement and cultural resilience.

Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to investigate the departure of leadership in the production
of cultural products from the Western countries especially North American, and Western Europe to the
cultural epicenter in Asia and Southeast Asia especially in the Malaysian cultural production context.
Secondly, the objective of this paper is to compare performances of Western cultural capital cities and to
illustrate the emergence of creative Asian cultural production especially pertaining to Malaysian creative
economy.

Asia has shown that the continent is ready to join the ranks of global media players and several Asian
capital cities have left the peripheral positions and has instead reached the epicenter of the lucrative global
media marketplace. Therefore, this paper has extensively studied documents, ethnographic surveys, and
media reports. The methodology enables the researcher to analyze and present a summary of the findings
by global researchers which confirm that Asian cultural and creative products present valid evidence of
development in the production, in the marketing of cultural products which ultimately contributed to the
GDP of Asian nations which later develop into cultural capitals position in the Asian cultural marketplace.

MALAYSIAN CREATIVE ECONOMY: TOWARDS A POSITIVE DIRECTION

Malaysia is a multi –ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-lingual country that comprises of the Malays,
Chinese, Indians and the indigenous population. Malay language, or the Bahasa Melayu, is the main
language, the national language. Other languages like Mandarin, Tamil, English and other Chinese dialects
such as, Hokkien, Cantonese are also spoken, and the native languages of the indigenous groups in Sabah
and Sarawak. Thus, the media and cultural industries are divided into mainly three ethnic based
productions of Malay, Chinese and Tamil languages.

The Malaysian government has steadfastly maintained an interest to control all aspects of storytelling,
from the era of the oral traditions by elders and the roles played by tradition in recreating, transmitting,

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