ABSTRACT
There can be little doubt that though most of the relevant literature focuses on Europe and North America, non-Western societies with modern media apparatuses are similarly susceptible to episodes of moral panic.**In the case of East Asia, even an outside observer without fluency in the local languages has nowadays little difficulty locating examples of heated controversy over topics such as Internet addiction, anorexia, or excessive gaming in places like mainland China, Hong Kong, and South Korea (see, respectively, Technology 2009, Watters 2009, “South Korea Cracks Down” 2010). The most salient of such domestic debates are almost routinely (and now even more frequently, as China increases its global stature) taken up by transnational media and diffused internationally.
