The New International Division of Cultural Labor, Global Media Studies, and the Cultural Rise of China

Terry Flew

One of the recurring questions in studies of globalization is the weighting that should be given to internal and external factors in shaping the destiny of nation-states, and framing global development. The development of the media industries in China from the early 2000s to the present provides an important case study for consideration of such questions. China's rapid economic growth and development since the "reform and opening up" policies from 1978 onward has been based upon openness to trade and investment, access to global markets, and the utilization of Western technology and expertise accessed from around the world. With its huge workforce, strong internal governance through the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and global networks enabled by the Chinese diaspora worldwide, China proved to be ideally placed for the boom in outsourcing, offshoring, and global production that accompanied the transformations in transportation, communication, and computing technology that drove the rapid formation of global production networks in manufacturing from the 1980s onward.

Whereas the Chinese Communist Party under Mao looked inward, promoting self-reliance and resistance to the "foreign imperialists," the CCP leadership since 1978 has been strongly focused upon engagement with the rest of the world. This has been reinforced under President Xi Jinping's leadership. In his address to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2017, Xi described the global economy as "the big ocean that you cannot escape from" and referred to opposition to globalization as a stance that "runs counter to the historical trend." Xi's speech was seen as an important advocacy of openness to global economic forces, at a time when the 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president on an "America First" program and the UK's Brexit referendum result in the same year promoted the view that globalization had run its historical course and we were entering an era of competing nationalisms and economic protectionism.

At the same time, China has always engaged with globalization on its own terms, particularly in its media industries. Accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 brought only very limited changes in the degree of openness for foreign investors and content providers. Distribution quotas for imported Hollywood films have more than doubled but remain significant, while there is limited access to foreign broadcast television outside of hotel rooms and places with high concentrations of foreigners, despite the proliferation of Pan-Asian satellite TV throughout the rest of the region. The Google search engine and YouTube remain largely blocked within China, as are Western social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. While alternative Chinese internet and social media platforms have developed, and Chinese media themselves make use of platforms such as YouTube and Facebook for international promotion, there remains a sense in which the Chinese internet is something of a "walled garden," strongly regulated within China, and with limited take-up outside of the Chinese diaspora.

While the reform and development of the cultural and creative industries and cultural markets has been a priority in China since 2000, with a particular emphasis upon how to link their development to that of the information and digital technology industries, the results have been uneven. They have exhibited elements of what Zhang Xiaoming, an expert on cultural industries at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), referred to as a "limited open market ... characterized by the coexistence of shortages and excess":

On the one hand, limited market openness leads to excessive investment and competition in the open market and inadequate investment in markets that are not open, resulting in inefficient supply. On the other hand, imperfect market mechanisms result in a large number of unsuccessful investments. The most discussed area is the lack of original content, which is attributed to limited market openness and unproductive government support.

There have been a diverse range of responses within China to the challenges of what is known as the "cultural trade deficit" and the relevance of the media industries to addressing that deficit. One example has been the use of controls over market entry by foreigners in order to develop local enterprises that address a similar demand. The BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) and other Chinese digital media companies all benefited to a significant degree in their early development from the blocking of comparable service providers such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook. Strategic partnerships and coproductions have been particularly important in the film industry, while in television, there has often been a copying of Western formats, The New International Division of Cultural Labor whether through the "cloning" of successful elements or formal franchising arrangements. There has also been the more general phenomenon of Chinese culture "going global," which has been strongly promoted since the late 2000s and combines economic and trade policy objectives with cultural diplomacy and "soft power" strategies.

What we find in China are a very active and diverse array of policy and industry responses to the challenge of shifting its position in global cultural markets and international cultural trade. At the same time, the question of how such policies sit within...