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396 Imma Tubellaunderstand the choice of Dallas, “the perfect hate symbol, the cultural povertyagainst which one struggles” (Mattelart et al., 1984) as a strong point of theCatalan television schedule. The feeling of Mattelart et al. (1984) was thegeneral feeling in Europe against American programs at this time. Ang (1985)had another vision: “People watch Dallas for pleasure and the ideology ofmass culture fails to recognize this. The high-minded defenders of nationalcultural identities in Western Europe have focused on the wrong level whenthey decry American Imperialism.” In fact, she talks mainly about the French,the leaders of the European normative “Television Without Frontiers” by thattime. She possibly did not know the case of the Catalans and Basques, whowere much more worried by Spanish imperialism than by American culturaldominance.Arjun Appadurai (2001: 19) introduces an interesting argument into thedebate: “It is worth noticing that for the people of Irian Jaya, Indonesianizationmay be more worrisome than Americanization, as Japanization may be forKoreans, Indianization for Sri Lankans, Vietnamization for the Cambodians,Russianization for the people of Armenia or for the Baltic Republics.” On theother side of the coin, France is extremely worried by Americanization at thesame time as it does not allow the expression of their own cultural identity toBretons, Catalans, or Corsicans, to mention some of the different cultural identitiescohabiting inside the French state.In this sense, Schlesinger (1991) suggests that, rather than starting withcommunication and its supposed effects on collective identity and culture, weshould begin by posing the problem of collective identity itself, asking how itmight be analyzed and what importance communicative practices play in itsconstruction. We find a good example in the People’s Republic of China wherepeople interpret and use foreign cultural materials quite differently dependingon their perspective of different civilizations (Lull, 1991). While Chinese televisionviewers enjoy and learn from programs imported from North and SouthAmerica and Europe, because they offer new vistas, new life styles and newways of thinking, they are less enthusiastic about Japanese productions. TheChinese government has even imported certain Japanese programs, hoping toinspire the Chinese to work hard and succeed like the Japanese, but Chineseviewers interpret Japanese programs in ways that differ from their involvementwith cultural materials that are imported from other civilizations moredistant in both in terms of geography and lifestyle, with a kind of symbolicdistancing. Moreover, Chinese consumers prefer Japanese commercial productsto American goods.Coming back to the Dallas example, at the beginning people did not feelcomfortable hearing JR speaking Catalan. For Catalans, the “normal”language of Dallas characters was Spanish. Nevertheless, very soon they feltproud to hear JR speaking their own language. The Disney strategy “Think