The question of how knowledge capital is circulated and deployed in generating successful cultural and media products leads me to reconsider the utility of the term precarious creativity. Rather than simply being a negative indicator, precarious creativity is adding to the knowledge capital of China’s creative industries. In other words, many workers are moving from low-cost production to higher-end production and from low wages to higher salaries. People are moving from traditional broadcasting to new media, where the salaries are better. In the process, some are identifying ways to innovate and internationalize rather than relying on the domestic market. To see how this plays out, I explore the cultural innovation timeline, a concept I have used elsewhere to explain the uneven development of China’s creative industries. Essentially the cultural innovation timeline depicts how production moves from low to higher value offerings. In describing these processes, it underscores the centrality of knowledge capital and the role of cultural intermediaries.
The base level of the cultural innovation timeline is standardized production; for instance, deterritorialized production and outsourcing of call centers gives low-cost locations an opportunity to be included in global trade networks. Factories are established because land is made available for cultural and creative industry projects, often with the help of local governments.39 Human capital in most of these instances is unskilled. Workers are paid low wages, and they work long hours. While there may be some status working in a design sweatshop or an animation outsourcing company, there is no desire to innovate; this is just a job. That is not to say, however, that there will be no learning on the job.
The second level of the timeline is imitation. Without the capacity to experiment or expend resources in content development, many producers of content follow the path of copycatting. China has a global reputation as a copy-nation, but again this needs to be put into the context of precarity. In the main, copying is a safe way of proceeding; if something has made money, it is reasonable to try it again, or tweak it a little bit. Shaun Rein says copying exists because you don’t have to pay high upfront costs. While an offender might get fined by the government, this is usually cheaper than paying for the rights.40 In addition to the economic dividends, there are cultural reasons for copy culture that would require a lengthy exposition.
In fashion we see clear evidence of this process. The fashion industry is populated by copyists; in responding to the question “How do you keep reinventing?” Ralph Lauren once said, “You copy. Forty-five years of copying. That’s why I’m here.”41 In China today, fashion and textile manufacture coexist in a symbiotic relationship. Workers toil to produce textiles while the country’s leaders exhort people to build an “innovative nation.” The worker on the Chinese-owned production line in Shaoxing, the capital of the textile industry in Zhejiang Province, is unlikely to be concerned with the idea of an innovative nation; work is a means to put food on the table, hopefully providing a stable income. This is the ultimate sweat industry: long hours, cramped conditions, and low wages. Workers produce capital through duplication; in this context creativity is redundant.
In many foreign-owned design workshops, creative capital is configured differently. According to Tim Lindgren, an independent designer who took his production to Shanghai several years ago because costs in Australia had escalated to the point where he could not employ staff, “It’s hard to keep high quality staff: they learn on the job and then leave to start their own business or find higher pay.”42 The mobility of workers in this situation is understandable. For the foreign design enterprise, it entails a search for staff replacements, not always so easy in a cross-cultural work environment. According to Lindgren, the other side of this dilemma is that patterns and designs (copyright) are lost, often appearing as high-priced garments in local markets.
Collaboration follows imitation, as content producers seek out alternative ways to capture value. Two examples of collaboration are pertinent to knowledge capital: film coproduction and TV formats. Coproductions in film are an interesting vehicle of knowledge capital transfer. They are categorized in three ways: the first is joint production (lianhe shezhi, or hepai), in which domestic and foreign parties make a joint investment of capital, services, or materials, and jointly share the benefits and risks of such “codevelopment.” The second is known as assisted production (xiezuo shezhi, or xiepai). This is where a foreign party makes an investment to produce in China: equipment, apparatus, sites, services, and so on are provided by the Chinese party, which receives a fee for services. The third model is entrusted production or commissioned production (weituo shezhi, or daipai). Here the Chinese party is “entrusted” by the foreign party to produce content in China.
Joint productions are considered domestic productions. In discussion with producers in Australia, I have observed a preference for codevelopment over assisted production—that is, producers are endeavoring to make stories that will sell in the Chinese market, taking advice on how to proceed from locals. There is a sense of optimism, some believing that Chinese audiences will learn to appreciate stories that have new ingredients. Codevelopment suggests that the Chinese side is interested in cocreating with foreign entities rather than just supplying low-cost production services. To date this road is littered with failure. It is precarious from a market sense as well as reputation. If producers edit their stories to appease the Chinese government, the danger is that critical acclaim in international filmmaking communities will diminish. Yet the road most traveled is likely to be documentaries about the wonders of China, not the treatment of its dissidents.
In effect, different risks exist depending on whether a project is a joint production or a commissioned one. East Asian businesses in many cases have a better appreciation of the precariousness of working with Chinese scripts; for instance, Chinese screenwriters and producers invariably have a well-developed sense of how to self-censor. Chinese content is imbued with allegory, parody, and oblique references, one of the reasons it encounters audience resistance when exported.
While coproductions have helped Chinese television improve its markets and have injected new ideas, China’s TV industry has struggled to export its brand. In television China’s comparative advantage in overseas sales comes from adaptations of the four classics of Chinese popular literature (sida mingzhu),43 as well as historical serials about emperors, eunuchs, and court intrigues. This advantage has conspired to produce a glut of second-rate productions; even home audiences have turned away in large numbers, precipitating edicts from the SAPPRFT to rebalance production slates toward contemporary stories. In short, economic success in the home market does not equate to success abroad, and critical success abroad (as in the case of art house cinema) does not necessarily translate into economic success at home.
In the case of TV formats, a transaction is made between the domestic licensee and the format holder or distributor. According to the managing director of a leading international TV format distributor, Chinese television stations generally want more knowledge than other international partners. The TV format distributor in question not only sells the copyright of the TV format to the local TV station or production company but also provides direction on program localization, consulting on production, and even direct participation during the production and postproduction periods. This represents a difference from the format licensing business elsewhere; in China the foreign party is regarded like a consulting firm.44 The Chinese want the know-how.
Following collaboration, the fourth level in the cultural innovation timeline is cultural trade. By the first decade of the millennium, the impetus to move programs out of China into international regional markets had increased. Coincident with the cultural trade impetus was the consolidation of production and management, first in media conglomerates and later in media bases or clusters (the late 1990s, early 2000s). This consolidation constitutes level five of the timeline. I have earlier mentioned the virtues of clustering and the spillover effects that can accrue. Of course, this is the ideal. Clustering has a checkered history in China’s reform period. In many instances, clusters function to attract business investment (zhao shang) more than attracting creative talent (zhao chuang).45 Moreover, the fact that China has hundreds of clusters in which outsourcing is the bread and butter indicates that there is still a market for semiskilled labor.46 The massive injection of government funding in clusters is driving competition for talent and investment. Places are competing for creative talent and investment on a scale unprecedented in China, with local governments providing preferential policies, tax breaks, and free rent. In effect, precarity has a broader context in China. While employment is volatile and profits are uneven across the broad spectrum of commercial creative industries, the high level of government subsidy in constructing zones and parks has created a bubble.
In previous work on cultural and creative industries, I have described level six as constituting “peer communities” and “creative communities.”47 This is the online world, with more than 650 million participants. The activities of online producers are indeed precarious, so much so that much content is predominantly parody. It is posted, reposted, and then taken down, often by persons employed by the government to monitor unhealthy commentary. It is this meaning of precarious creativity, I feel, that characterizes China more than debates about job losses in the “creative industries,” which are invariably construed as symptomatic of neoliberalism, a move that arguably succumbs to its own kind of reductionism.48
