New Media, Creative Industries and Cultural Entrepreneurs in China

This event will bring together Swiss-based and international scholars who will examine both well-established and emerging examples of Chinese cultural entrepreneurs in the field of literary creation and publication, visual arts production and curation, cinema, social media, news media, digital media, and online gaming.

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The cultural sphere of twenty-first century China displays a high degree of interaction and integration between realms such as literary creation, cinema and gaming, artistic production and social media, traditional news media and online citizen journalism, and so on. At the same time, the economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping, and especially since the 1990s, have allowed for the (re)emergence of the figure of the cultural entrepreneur. This figure—who straddles the business world and cultural field—has often embodied the above-mentioned interaction between different realms of the cultural sphere sensu lato—Zhang Xianliang (1936-2014) and Wang Shuo (b. 1958) counting among the trailblazers. Nowadays said interaction and integration centre around the Internet and online creativity—for example, online fiction being adapted as films and games. The workshop will also examine the role of gender and the emergence of women cultural entrepreneurs in the new mediasphere.

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If market-oriented reforms since the 1990s sow the seeds of an entrepreneurial ‘creative class’ in mainland China, the Party’s emphasis over home-grown ‘innovation’ since the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2006) has spurred its growth. In a context where a Party-controlled framework tries to function within an imperfect market environment, the dominance of said framework is ‘challenged by creative entrepreneurs empowered by powerful consumers demanding creative content without state interference’ (Shaun Chang 2009: 264). China’s central authorities seek to develop the national culture industries into a ‘pillar’ sector of the economy and wish for their rise to global influence in the near future. As the Party-state leadership orders state-owned cultural enterprises to grow in size and profitability, it also instructs all players in the field of cultural production and distribution—including private companies—to deliver ‘social benefits’ and promote ‘core socialist values’ with their business activities. The tension between competing policy aims and priorities foregrounds the ambiguous and yet ever-prominent status of culture and creativity in a ‘new era’ of socialism with Chinese characteristics.