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Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor (Curtin and Sanson)
Chapter 16: Unbundling Precarious Creativity in China – “Knowing-How” and “Knowing-To”

Chapter 16: Unbundling Precarious Creativity in China – “Knowing-How” and “Knowing-To”

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Page ID: 175236

Michael Keane
University of California Press

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Job security is under unprecedented threat in many developed nations as a consequence of the mechanization of work.¹ In addition, rising production costs are seeing the relocation of production to low-cost locations. This is a well-known story. Emerging economies are achieving substantial growth by providing cheap labor and preferential investment policies. For China, already an economic powerhouse, a foreign country’s insecurity is a their security: the “made in China” phenomenon manifests in products that are designed elsewhere and fabricated in China. Much of this outsourced production involves components. Economists call this “tradein-tasks,” “unbundling,”² or OEM (original equipment manufacturing).

16.1: Introduction
Introduction to the goals of the chapter: unbundling the concept of creative precarity and analyzing the relationship between creativity and knowledge capital, focusing on China.
16.2: Contextualizing Precarious Creativity
Contextualizing creative precarity in China, with an introduction to the concepts of “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-to.”
16.3: A Chinese Political Economy Framework
Considering the social and political context of labor in China, and how this distinguishes the meaning of precarious creativity in China from that in other countries.
16.4: Knowledge Capital
Definition of knowledge capital, and how it relates to both knowing-that and knowing-how.
16.5: Media – The Game Changes
Recent changes in the Chinese media industry, including a rise in workers trained in multinational companies transferring their knowledge to Chinese companies, the commercialization of broadcasting industries, and the growth of private-owned production companies which are still subject to state censorship.
16.6: The Cultural Innovation Timeline Reconsidered
An argument for the concept of creative precarity in China being not simply a negative indicator, using the cultural innovation timeline (standardized production, imitation, collaboration, cultural trade, production/management consolidation, peer/creative communities).
16.7: Concluding Remarks – The (Precarious) Elephant in the Room
How creative precarity in China is distinguished from creative precarity in other developed nations, by censorship and the existence of an additional dimension of knowledge capital (“knowing-to”).
16.8: Notes