There are several ways of understanding precarious creativity in China. The first is to recognize that China, like many other countries, faces new opportunities from information abundance. Technology is having an impact on traditional patterns of life, as distant friends and potential customers are connected instantaneously through apps like WeChat and Taobao. Second, rapid urbanization has significantly altered the demographic pattern of Chinese society. One study estimates that China will have more than two hundred cities of over one million inhabitants by 2025.15 Urbanization changes the mobility of the workforce as more people are drawn to opportunities in big cities. Third, the One Child Policy, instituted in 1978 to curb population growth, has skewed population demographics, giving rise to a generation without siblings.16 Fourth, recent liberalizations in the household registration system (hukou),17 have increased people’s ability to change employment. In tandem with unprecedented mobility and technological change, skill shortages are appearing in the workforce, a problem that is bound to continue over time as a result of the One Child Policy, with fewer young people transiting into the labor market.
Industries need labor. In China the term industry has an ever-present relationship with economic modernization. Policy documents emanating from Beijing, particularly the five-year economic and social plans that underpin the allocation of key government resources, emphasize the industrialization of welfare, manufacturing, education, and even culture.18 Whereas the English word industry comes from the Latin industria and refers to “diligence, activity and zeal,” the dominant term in China until recently was gongye, literally the “activity of physical labor.”19 The use of the body, more than the mind, reminds us of the agrarian base of Chinese society until the mid-twentieth century. The sustainability of the Chinese economy from a so-called feudal agrarian system prior to the Chinese Revolution in 1949 to the socialist commune system of the late 1950s was founded on manual labor. The ensuing rise of export-led manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s entailed further separation of mind and body, resulting in an intensification of production lines throughout the country.
By the turn of the century, this “new factory system” was well entrenched, drawing migrant laborers into working conditions that were often unsafe and exploitative. Migration to cities led to increasing social fragmentation and exacerbated informal employment.20 Laborers, predominantly male, toiled in urban construction projects from high-rise buildings to ostentatiously named “cultural and creative clusters,”21 while female workers offered housekeeping (baomu) duties for urban residents or serviced the bodies of the middle class in thousands of massage parlors. Sweatshops proliferated on the fringes of cities, taking in work from overseas clients. As Loretta Napoleoni comments, “In the second half of the first decade of the twenty-first century China becomes the center of the global assembly line, the pieces produced at lower costs in neighboring countries and put together in Chinese factories.”22
However, it is difficult to equate precarity in such labor-intensive sectors with media and cultural industries. In the latter, we see widespread transfers of knowledge capital that can translate into social mobility. Indeed, the zones of attraction and influence for China’s creative classes are distinct from the labor-intensive Special Economic Zones (SOEs), which have led to a proliferation of sweatshops and global assembly lines. Beijing and Shanghai in particular draw creative migrants into their cosmopolitan orbits.23
While the precariousness of creative work is the subject of a number of important studies,24 precarity in China’s cultural and creative industries requires us to be cognizant of social and political context. I will return to this point in the conclusion. In most usages, precarious creativity refers to unstable employment in occupations that generate symbolic goods and services—for example, design, VFX and film, and software. Most international depictions relate to market economies where the hand of government is at a distance.25 In a country where freedom of expression is constrained by politics, the term precarious creativity implies something quite different. The hand of government is very visible. Even when it is less evident, for instance in design, fashion, and music, there is usually a need to appease a government official somewhere. This situation reflects the organization of cultural production under socialism, still the prescribed ideology in Chinese schools today.
