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Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to explore how a Japanese AV company cooperates with local company and local internet media to promote actresses and burnish actresses’ image in China mainland.

Paper long abstract:

Japanese AV is very influential in many Asian countries and areas, including China mainland. Because buying pirate CDs or downloading free videos from internet has been main method for male audience to consume AV products, AV production companies cannot get considerable profits through their products, although many an AV actress has become well-known in China mainland. With Japanese AV industry's depression and China economy's rise, Japanese AV companies now regard China mainland as a potential huge market and has begun to develop business strategies there. However, as a new phenomenon occurred in recent years, the business activities of Japanese AV companies in China mainland have rarely been discussed in academia.

Through field work and individual in-depth interviews, this paper aims to explore how a Japanese AV company cooperates with local company and local internet media to promote actresses and burnish actresses' image in China mainland with a typical example of Aoi Sola, an AV actress who has gained amazing popularity and has become more and more acceptable by china mainstream media and internet users. We can find that the Japanese AV company achieved Aoi Sola's image transformation from obscenity to decency and from margin to mainstream through targeting on China's emerging middle class and overcoming obstacles of social morality and government censorship. Aoi Sola's image-building process in China mainland implicates the possibility of cross-cultural business after a better understanding of cultural context and the changing social structure of other countries.