Why do we need better representation on TV?
Asian tropes abound - whether narratives about martial arts or Triad and Yakuza gangsters, women who are hyper sexualised but submissive and men who are either monosyllabic fighters or emasculated bystanders
There is a dearth of East and South East Asian stories told in the UK.
Symbolic annihilation - you need to see people that look like you in media, otherwise you don’t think you’re important. How those people are portrayed affect how we think of ourselves.
Representation in the media follows stereotypes
Output requires input - to change the current situation, we need more BESEA content creators
Diamond TV Race and Ethnic Diversity data (October 2020)
Diamond is the TV industry’s diversity reporting system. You can read the full report here: Racial and Ethnic Diversity: a deep-dive into Diamond data
East Asians in Scripted Television
Writers - Redacted due to low sample size*
On screen representation in Drama - 1.4%
On screen representation - Supporting Actors: 3.3%, Actors: Redacted due to low sample size*
Off Screen representation in Drama - 0.1%
Executive Producers - Redacted due to low sample size*
* Diamond redacts reported data where the numbers are too small and/or could lead to identifying individuals. Diamond defines East Asian as Chinese and any other East Asian background (including South East Asian).
Data on East and South East Asians in the UK are not reported directly. Estimates range from 400,00 to 1.2 million which would represent approximately 0.7 to 2.1% of the population - Dr Lu Gram (UCL) believes it to be closer to the upper end.
East Asia is considered to be China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan.
South East Asia encompasses regions that are geographically south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent and north-west of Australia. These include: Cambodia, Laos, Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. In many of these countries there is considerable ethnic diversity.
One reason it is difficult to make good estimates of East and South East Asians in the UK is that the Census doesn’t collect the data. In the 2011 Census you could only choose Chinese, Asian Other, White and Asian, Other Mixed - which meant that various other ethnic categories were mixed into those numbers (including South Asians, for example).