Chinese Creator Economies: Labor and Bilateral Creative Workers

The paradoxical relationship between Chinese creative workers and the state

Chinese Creator Economies dives into the paradoxical lives lived by creative professionals in emerging economies across China. Jian Lin contextualizes the socioeconomic conditions in which cultural production takes place and pushes back against the dominant understanding of Chinese media as a centralized, state-controlled apparatus by looking at how individual creative workers grapple with governance and precarity in the Chinese cultural industries and develop their bilateral subjectivities within the politico-economic system of Chinese media.

Drawing on intensive empirical research conducted on creative labor practices across television, journalism, design, and social media, Chinese Creative Economies looks at both Chinese and foreign-born content creators, exploring the tensions between Beijing’s limits on individual creativity, and its aspirations to become a global hub for cultural production. Lin maintains that it is the production of bilateral creatives that generates and maintains hope for the future of those who live and work within the cultural economies of China.

Jian Lin is a Hundred-Talent Young Professor at Zhejiang University, having obtained a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam that was jointly awarded by Western Sydney University. He is co-author of Wanghong as Social Media Entertainment in China.