16.5: Media – The Game Changes
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- Michael Keane
- University of California Press
One senses a strong belief among China’s creative workforce in the rising power of Chinese media and cultural production. At the moment workers are in demand in China; pay, conditions, and job satisfaction exceed many other service occupations. While data from the National Bureau of Statistics is not fine grained in term of occupational categories, it does indicate that salaries in “culture, sports, and entertainment” occupations are higher than other service industries, not a surprising finding considering the amount of investment, both domestic and foreign, that has taken place over the past several years. In addition, the largest increase in salaries is in the category “information transmission, computer service, and software.” In 2009, the average wage for workers in this area was RMB 58,154 (approx. US$9,500); in 2013 had become RMB 90, 926 (US$14,800). 28 Discussions of bonuses paid by domestic technology and games companies like Tencent can be found online. 29 Successful projects can deliver dividends to creators that often exceed monthly salaries.
Job opportunities are increasing, allowing workers to move from place to place, from job to job. The animation and gaming industry, despite its reliance on outsourcing contracts, is a case in point. Cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wuxi, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Dalian are competing to be the “animation capital” of China, and there is a relative shortage of “talent.” Video gaming is indicative of demand. Data shows that salaries in the games industry are highest in Beijing, where the category “technology R&D” (jishu yuanfa) dominates; in Shanghai and the Guangzhou-Shenzhen region, salaries are less than Beijing and more focused on “product design” (chanpin cehua) . 30 As I discuss below, while talent is frequently nurtured in foreign companies, workers are hard to retain because there is somewhere else to go and companies willing to pay more. 31 Shaun Rein, author of The End of Copycat China , says:
A lot of Chinese feel like they can’t make it to the top of their organizations in multinationals. They’re moving to the Chinese private sector where companies have a lot of money for research and development. And there’s no bamboo ceiling. So why be the country head of R&D for 3M when you can be the global head of R&D for a private Chinese company? It’s happening that a lot of multinational companies now have to realize that their biggest competitors are often people that they trained directly over the past decade. 32
This scenario now plays out in creative sectors. Many international companies have established offshoring operations, mostly in animation, software, design, and film production. In these environments, workers acquire knowledge capital through learning, sometimes in a “master-apprentice” system. Skills are molded by watching, listening and imitating, “learning-by-doing,” illustrating Polanyi’s tacit knowledge, essentially the acquisition of know-how. The foreign business introduces new ways of thinking about design while the locals provide cheaper labor. But cheap labor is not without transaction costs. Skills (and knowledge) are transferable, and many workers see no need to be loyal to the foreign master. When workers walk out the door, actual codified knowledge in the form of patterns (IP) might be lost. In the games industry, we observe a similar phenomenon.
In addition to a strong demand for graduates from China’s communication universities in the new media sectors, there is another side of development that allows us to further unbundle the nuances of the term precarious creativity in China: this is the commercialization of broadcasting industries. As mentioned above, prior to the 1990s, media production was regarded as a public service. The term generally used in this regard is public institution (shiye) . The largest shiye is China Central Television (CCTV), a cultural mothership that for most observers of China symbolizes the hegemony of the state. Ying Zhu has eloquently described CCTV’s turn toward the market in Two Billion Eyes . The introduction of contract labor with higher pay, as opposed to ongoing employment, signaled a move toward the kinds of outsourcing practices common in most international media industries. When the broadcaster launched its flagship current affairs program, Oriental Horizon (Dongfang shikong) , in the early 1990s, production work was contracted out, with less than 10 percent of workers remaining on CCTV’s payroll. 33 The contracted workers became central to CCTV’s talent identification. As Ying Zhu notes, CCTV poached talent from independent production companies, thereby refreshing its workforce. On the other hand, as her study points out, many of the best people at CCTV have left and moved into independent and digital media sectors.
Similarly, at Beijing Television (BTV) competition is coming thick and fast from digital media. In a focus group interview I conducted with several senior personnel, one person commented, “Jobs were relatively high paid a decade ago, but staff members have received no pay increases for eight years.” 34 The same person said that his department recently recruited about a dozen workers. The quality was high, many being overseas returnees with postgraduate qualifications and media experience. He noted, “The expansion of digital sectors is providing ‘talents’ with better working conditions and pay, and as a result there is a lot of mobile human capital. Mobility is accelerated and as a result the turnover rate is very high. This [competition] might force us to raise salaries in the future.”
At the time CCTV was renovating its operations in the 1990s, a number of leading production units emerged in television and film. Some of these, including Enlight Media, 35 were formerly within the system; in time they would become leading players in the provision of entertainment content, particularly television formats and live events. A new “variant” of precarity soon came into being. Regulations allowing licensing of private companies came into force in 2004. 36 With the exception of “foreigners,” any person or enterprise can form a media production company in China as long the State Administration of Press Publicity Radio, Film and TV (SAPPRFT) ratifies the license. The performance of non-state-owned production units, although precarious under conditions of censorship, has helped fulfill quotas of domestic content required to fill schedules, thus thwarting the incursion of foreign media content from the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, which had spiked in the early 1990s. 37 By the time China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the number of companies registered as private (mingying) had climbed to over three hundred, most of them plying their trade in TV serial drama production. By 2009, the number of independent production units in the broadcasting sector had exceeded four thousand, with 90 percent of drama production commissioned from such enterprises. 38
While private companies have changed the game, it is necessary to add a caveat to the meaning of the term independent : that is, their existence is dependent on the dominance of the state in determining what content is suitable for audiences. Compared with the independent sector internationally, state-owned television stations maintain dominance in contract alliances; for instance, private production units might produce a show that is successful, but the rights are generally owned by the broadcaster. There are other uncertainties built in that make production precarious. Censorship is something that private entities need to be mindful of because production licenses are renewable. Moreover, when a program is successful, it might be replaced if the TV station decides to make its own version. This demonstrates the fragility of the concept of copyright in Chinese media industries. To maximize revenue and remain solvent, many production companies seek out and produce advertising content.