Stephanie DeBoer's Coproducing Asia is a welcome effort in locating and critiquing transnational popular film and media co-production projects from East Asia. It understands the regional film and cultural industries as undergoing constant centring and decentring since the Cold War era of 1960s into the new millennium (p. 12). DeBoer not only offers new contexts and trajectories of regional co-productions across Japanese and Chinese media capitals through these decades (p. 14), she also proposes a series of critical lenses and frameworks for addressing the dynamics and tensions inherent in regional co-production and its networking.

Considering the monograph a project delineating a much contested genealogy for Asian cultural (co-)production, DeBoer carefully frames her interrogation along three post-war moments to examine how film and media co-production trace an ever shifting topography of regional power relations. The main body of the book is threaded along a historical purview of these three moments, exploring the entangled and sometimes contesting yearnings for progress and visions for new regionalisms.

In the introduction, the author elaborates on crucial theoretical toolkits and key terms as she reviews the theories and methodologies used to examine regional co-production. For DeBoer, co-production needs to be approached as “a technology of assemblage” in order to “underscore its function as not only a material but also an epistemological set of articulations” (p. 5). As she further posits, if “articulations” are directed into the knowledge that supports regional productions, then the “assemblage” of co-production is constitutive of “variously scaled production practices” which are not confined to “the promotional and production practices,” but also entail the desire, imaginaries and aspirations unevenly pursued by the regional film and cultural industries (pp. 5, 28).

The first chapter focuses on a series of wide-screen co-productions between Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the early to mid-1960s, a period of Cold War de-imperialization (such as the romantic feature Night in Hong Kong, directed by Yasuki Chiba). DeBoer shows that technological advancement and location shooting, while promising “the bright Asian marketplace,” also paradoxically foregrounded the unevenness and incongruence of regional co-production. She also elucidates “the desiring link” these co-production projects configured “between an imperial past and unfettered regional future” (p. 29). Chapter two examines various genres of Hong Kong–Japan co-productions from the 1950s to the 1970s, evolving through the “technology transfer” used by Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers to generate remakes of Japanese “originals,” particularly via the agency of several key Japanese filmmakers (p. 21). Resisting the idea of simply equating Hong Kong production practices as “copying” and restating the binary division between the developed and the underdeveloped, the author considers that Shaw's co-production practices mirrored the local industry's knowing and mobilizing of the locations. This disturbs and dynamizes the positioning of Hong Kong and Japan onto the regional landscape of cultural production at a transitional moment for both societies.

In chapter three, engaging with the critical concept of “presence” in tackling co-productions “within which cross-border media cultures meet the legacies of the past” (p. 87), DeBoer juxtaposes two series co-produced by Japan's NHK and PRC's CCTV, namely the TV documentary series The Silk Road in 1980 and TV drama A Son of the Good Earth in 1995. While acknowledging that the presence and penetration of media technologies have facilitated Sino-Japan friendship and exchange, the author also points out that rather than overcoming the trauma of wartime and the Cold War past, both co-productions illustrate how the “crises of regional exchange” are “mediated by hopes for a multinational future” (p.114). Chapter four takes a close look at how Tokyo was foregrounded in several Japan-initiated film and media projects as the central media capital to conduct and organize Asian co-productions from late 1980s to early 1990s. For DeBoer, Tokyo-based omnibus film projects such as Asian Beat (1991–92) and Southern Winds (1992), together with the NHK Asian Film Festival-supported film productions by Asian filmmakers, attest to the aspirations of Japanese producers toward producing “Japan-centric cultural power in the region as well as their limits” (p. 149). The fifth chapter examines film production assemblages from the first decade of the 2000s such as Battle of Wits (dir. Jacob Cheung), Tea Fight (dir. Yeming Wang) and the Longest Night in Shanghai (dir. Yibai Zhang) to show how mainland China has been “worked through” as a new locus to redefine and regenerate regional co-production networks, linkages and even imaginaries (p. 181).

Coproducing Asia could be understood as a project formulated to address “How does Asia mean?” (p. 15) by focusing on its cultural production. Co-productions are approached as media texts while locations are understood as “ways of regional knowing and becoming” (p. 11). Such perspectives have engendered new interpretive horizons to rediscover the significance of lesser known co-produced works in the region, and tease out discursive regimes that have arisen from the competing desires and imaginaries across the locations.

Although understandably constrained by the limits of her project, DeBoer only briefly touches upon the roles played by South Korea or Southeast Asia as locations and media capitals. As she also notes in her Conclusion, however, the emergence of co-production project markets, together with affiliated film festivals, creates new entry points for interrogating co-production assemblages as the articulation of “Asia.” The book might have been enriched also by the inclusion of media co-production practices from the independent sector, which may configure a more complicated landscape for articulating locations. Meanwhile, theoretically the book might have benefited from a more consistent integration of its highly inspiring yet slightly dispersed toolkit of key words.

These quibbles aside, DeBoer has indeed opened up a refreshing critical terrain to interrogate media globalization, drawing on perspectives from cultural industries, cultural studies and film studies. This monograph will become a timely and useful reference resource for all three disciplines.