Chinese Creator Economies

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.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.

The most updated and insightful assessment of the working condition of Chinese creative
workers. Bilateral creatives work under the planned logic of state’s creative industries, and at the
same time, work creatively and subtly against the system of governance and cultural policy. The
most interesting and intellectually intriguing aspects of the book owes much to Lin’s five years
of fieldwork.

You will not read a better account that dewesternizes creative-labor studies than this book. Jian
Lin goes deeper than usual into creators’ lived experience and also wider—across state
enterprises and international workers as well indies and the digital class. Jian’s heart is open and
his mind is ablaze.

Essential reading. Jian Lin offers a critical and empirically evidenced approach to rethink
creative work studies beyond the confines of Western experiences and theorizations. Lin harvests
his insights adroitly, boldly, and compassionately. His penchant for the schizophrenic, the
multifaceted, the dilemma, the bilateral, is a rejection of any homogenizing account of the state
and the market, of cultural work and creative class. In its place, I read more futures.

The most rigorous and accomplished analysis of the working conditions of Chinese cultural
workers to date. This will be a key reference point in the burgeoning literature on cultural labour
not only in China but internationally.