Creative Industries in China

Art, Design and Media

Michael Keane

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745661018, 9780745661001
• eBook ISBN: 9780745669601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Creative industries in China provides a fresh account of China's emerging commercial cultural sector. The author shows how developments in Chinese art, design and media industries are reflected in policy, in market activity, and grassroots participation.

Never has the attraction of being a media producer, an artist, or a designer in China been so enticing. National and regional governments offer financial incentives; consumption of cultural goods and services have increased; creative workers from Europe, North America and Asia are moving to Chinese cities; culture is increasingly positioned as a pillar industry.

But what does this mean for our understanding of Chinese society? Can culture be industrialised following the low-cost model of China's manufacturing economy. Is the national government really committed to social liberalisation?

This engaging book is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in social change in China. It draws on leading Chinese scholarship together with insights from global media studies, economic geography and cultural studies.

1

Culture in Flux

The state’s management of the economy in the People’s Republic of China has been a remarkable success. Division of labour, combined with a propensity for collective organization, have generated unprecedented returns. China’s development model has taken it from third world to economic superpower status. However, this model, sometimes described pejoratively as the ‘world factory’, is under increasing pressure both internationally and domestically. The factory system continues to pollute the environment and draw workers into exploitative and unsafe work environments (Ross 2006; Chang L. 2008). China is seeking to transform its model.

Over the past few decades rapid urbanization has changed the demographic pattern of Chinese society. One study estimates China will have 219 cities of over one million inhabitants by 2025 (McKinsey 2009). Migration to cities has led to increasing social fragmentation. Migrant labourers find employment in urban construction projects; many offer housekeeping (baomu 保姆) duties for urban residents or work in the thousands of massage parlours that prolifferate in cities. The relative affluence of middle-class city dwellers even precipitated a policy directive in 2006 called the ‘new socialist countryside’ (xin shehuizhuyi nongcun 新社会主义农村), which was intended to redress imbalances between urban and rural populations.¹

The gap between city and country is most evident in consumption practices. Affluent classes in China’s large cities have welcomed international brands. In a study of Chinese consumer society, Karl Gerth (2010) describes how wealthy urban elites yearn after brands like Armani, Prada and Calvin Klein. Meanwhile the less well-off and many young consumers opt for knock-offs produced in small factories, often in southern China.

This chapter looks at the transition from hard to soft industries, from the manufacturing to the service economy. Underscoring this transition is the reform of the cultural system (wenhua tizhi gaige 文化体制改革) and the roll out of cultural industry development policies. In 2011, China’s Minister of Culture, Cai Wu, announced that cultural industries would become ‘pillar industries’ (zhizhu chanye 支柱产业), and would contribute as much as 5 per cent of GDP by 2016 (the estimated value in 2010 was 2.78 per cent; Xinhua 2011). The fact that culture, formerly the domain of ideological representation, has become an industry is significant for how we understand China’s political transformation. For this reason the chapter begins by examining how cultural policy is produced in China. I show how reform of the ‘cultural system’ has led to the hegemony of the ‘cultural industries’ (wenhua chanye 文化产业), in effect superseding publicly funded cultural institutions (wenhua shiye 文化事业). I examine the key political discourses of soft power and cultural security. In order to place these developments in an international context, I consider contemporary uses of ‘industry’ and survey other contending formulations, namely ‘culture industry’, ‘creative industries’ and ‘creative economy’. I show how these different terms have been adopted in China as well as other parts of Asia.

Changes in Cultural Management

The reform of the cultural system in China is best illustrated by a widening of commercial forms of management and financing: these commercial forms are already dominant in broadcasting, advertising, design and digital media sectors. While commercial success drives the operations of many businesses, we need to bear in mind that China remains an authoritarian one-party state. Despite growing emphasis on audience ratings, profits and public share holdings, the policies underpinning China’s cultural and creative industries are far from what constitutes a free market in liberal democracies. Furthermore, institutions that govern market behaviour in China cannot be regarded as transparent.

A number of scholars have applied the term ‘neo-liberalism’ to China. Neo-liberalism’s global impetus was significant in the 1990s and early 2000s, although as a model of economic governance it has suffered in the wake of the global financial crisis. In China the need to adapt Marxism to globalization entailed trading collective welfare rights, such as pensions and health care, for the private benefits of capitalism, including home ownership and social mobility.

However, what neo-liberalism represents in China’s media and cultural sectors remains unclear. Sometimes described as Reaganism, Thatcherism or the Washington Consensus, neo-liberalism made inroads into Chinese policy think tanks during the 1990s (Wang H. 2003). According to Gamble (2006) the concept has two principle strands: a laissez-faire strand maintains that the market should have few impediments; that is, government should get out of the way; the second, a ‘social’ strand, maintains that government should be active in creating good market institutions; for instance, financial regulations and intellectual property regimes.

John Quiggan, a vocal critic of market fundamentalism, says that neo-liberalism is used primarily by academics, usually in an ideological sense (Quiggan 2012: 3). He proposes a more neutral term, ‘market liberalism’. Quiggan observes that political elites and business professionals, ‘who don’t see themselves acting ideologically’, react with some hostility when such labels are pinned on them (Quiggan 2012: 3). In China, Wang Hui epitomizes the academic ‘new left’ position. Wang attaches the label neo-liberalism (xin ziyou zhuyi 新自由主义) to those who view the market as the arbiter of economic and social reform (Wang H. 2003). Wang maintains that the state and neo-liberalism exist in a complex relationship of co-dependence; surprisingly, he draws close parallels between laissez-faire neo-liberals and hard-line neo-conservatives, the latter using the market and international trade rules to pursue statist agendas.

On this issue, Breslin (2006: 116) remarks: ‘while the Chinese economy is far from totally liberal, its increasingly liberal form stands in strong contrast to a high illiberal political structure.’ Authoritarian elites have demonstrated a willingness to adopt and adapt neo-liberal strategies to generate growth. The media scholar Haiqing Yu speaks of a hybrid political structure in China that is ‘non-liberal, anti-liberal and neoliberal, all in one’ (Yu 2011: 34), noting that the concept is ‘always hard to pin down, and there is a lack of connection between rhetoric/definition and reality’ (38). She notes neo-liberalism underpinning commercialization of China’s media and the entry of transnational media (38). Elsewhere, Hong Yu, writing about vocational education for rural migrants, argues that neo-liberalism continued to play a strong role even after the Hu Jintao regime moved to rectify social tensions by launching the slogan ‘harmonious society’ (Yu 2010: 313).

Yuezhi Zhao (2008) has characterized neo-liberalism in regard to commercialization of television programming, noting an increase in content catering to urban audience tastes and a corresponding decrease in rural topics. Of course, this is an inevitable feature of all global television systems: urban stories rate better than stories about poverty and struggle. Zhao notes the commercialization of media in China taking place against a backdrop of privatization of state-owned enterprises, the seizure of farmlands and the commodification of a wide range of cultural forms.

Undoubtedly, the state’s accommodation of ‘market liberalism’ has allowed many would-be entrepreneurs to exploit vulnerable communities. Acquisition of land has occurred without representation. People were, and continue to be, forcefully relocated. However, the fact that people are displaced without adequate consultation or legal representation has much to do with local government’s propensity for increased tax revenues. It is another thing to assert that an ideological commitment to unregulated markets and the rational self-interested behaviour of agents alone is driving such processes. The reality is more akin to comprador capitalism, clientelism and embedded rent-seeking.

A more significant issue is ‘delocalization’, that is, the shifting of foreign enterprises to China (see chapter 3) (Napoleoni 2011). Foreign direct investment from international businesses in China’s special economic zones has provided economic growth. Yet what is transpiring in economic zones is different from market liberalism. Napoleoni contrasts the kind of ‘state capitalism’ practised in China to the neo-liberal shock therapies forced upon other developing nations (Napoleoni 2011: 81–91). Other authors, including Halper (2010) and Ramo (2004), have used the term ‘Beijing Consensus’ to differentiate the ‘Chinese model’. Even though China attracts massive amounts of foreign investment, the state has not retracted from its role in directing the market. Donald Nonini (2008) argues that while subcontracting and vertically disaggregated network organizations of supply-chain production in parts of China are evidence of complicated power relationships between Chinese actors and foreign enterprises, this is not a case of capital simply determining the conditions of existence.

Despite its application to aspects of creative industries policy in already ‘open markets’,² neo-liberalism remains a problematic approach in China. Definitional ambiguity, combined with a government predilection for intervention, make it ill suited to describe China’s media and cultural sectors. Many accounts simply collapse state power into market power, in the process bracketing off the crucial question of how the state intervenes to suppress creative expression. Laikwan Pang’s account of the ‘creative economy’ presents a critical account of neo-liberalism in China. She argues the case with reference to Mao Zedong’s cultural policies: ‘what is lost in this creative economy is not only the traditional Chinese and socialist sense of cultural sharing, but also a political sensitivity to culture’ (Pang 2012: 16). Pang argues that local cultures have been ‘depoliticized’ in the ‘economisation of local ethnic culture whose enormous political potential is depleted by the overall neo-liberal drive’ (109); the point here is that local cultural elites are presumably moving away from ideology in the interest of profit; elsewhere, however, Pang recognizes that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to maintain ‘direct centralised control over the cultural scene’.

However, the fact that local governments might be wishing to downplay ideology is itself evidence of increased autonomy vis-à-vis the centre; this autonomy echoes the relational nature of regional development (Sun 2010a). The issue of whether autonomy is weakening ethnic cultures is a harder argument to mount; local autonomy has in many instances (see chapter 5) strengthened local cultural traditions and has led to a greater number of translocal linkages and connections (Oakes and Schein 2006). Local autonomy can also be a means by which actors can make effective representations to the centre through local communicative networks.

Market liberalism is a model of statecraft in which state interference is inimical to successful markets. If we consider choices available to agents in cultural and media markets in China, it is clear that the state still plays a strong determining role. The Chinese state intervenes in media and cultural markets on a number of levels, over and above creating institutional frameworks. The central state determines the parameters of policy and planning; it sets out the guiding blueprint for the expansion of ‘cultural industries’ within the National Five Year Plan documents, it rewards regional actors that comply, often with special awards of recognition; it censors and encourages self-censorship, and it punishes transgressors.³ While media industries are pushed towards the market and while thousands of independent design and media service companies have emerged in the past decade, the state remains highly interventionist. Moreover, while media bases, creative clusters and cultural parks involve large amounts of capital, and bring in foreign investors, the key planning processes always involve Chinese Communist Party actors: these include local government officials, party secretaries and propaganda department heads (Keane 2011).

In characterizing the transformation of China’s cultural and creative sectors, I pref...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Map
• Abbreviations
• Figures and Tables
• Chronology
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Culture in Flux
• 2: Culture and Creativity
• 3: The Cultural Innovation Timeline
• 4: Desperately Seeking Innovation
• 5: Art
• 6: Design
• 7: Media
• References
• Index