Up and till approx the 40s we imported our culture from Europe -as did much of the rest of the economies of the world. American culture exports didn't become popular till the US became an economic power to contend with.

In Asia, however, the cultural exporters, at the moment, are Japan and Korea, not so much China, despite its economic size. Fortunately and unfortunately, Asia is more pragmatic about cultural imports. There isn't the OMG our indigenous culture is being subverted and devoured!!

The pragmatism is in the form of foreign ideas with Asian values which seems to make the ideas less problematic.

Never the less, I think in many places, it's uncertainty or inferiority and superiority complexes which give rise to ideas of wanting to preserve culture. A fear of change. In the US people lament the change in our culture for 'the worse', as some believe. In other places, similar local changes are interpreted as 'westernization'. But really, do they want to go to how their culture existed in 1900, for example?

Culture exports carry with them morals, ethics, and value systems. Different countries have different m/e/v, and they may not want America's. There's nothing to say America has the right set of m/e/v; hell, people bitch about America's puritanical nature on this very website all the time. In which case it's easy to see why a country might be concerned about importing America's culture, given the m/e/v that come with it.

> There isn't the OMG our indigenous culture is being subverted and devoured

South Korea has laws literally banning Japanese TV and music. One South Korean song was banned from broadcast because it had one Japanese word in it.

Those are politically motivated posturing. The masses, the consumers, they don't care the way people in some countries decry 'debased american/western culture which undermines our local spirit'.