Be creative for the state: Creative workers in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises

Abstract

This article studies creative labour in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises (SOCEs). Based on the empirical analysis of fieldwork data, it analyses the governmentality of creative labour in Chinese SOCEs through an investigation of the condition of autonomy and the discourse of self-realization within selected Chinese media companies. The autonomy of creative work within the system is made contingent by the party state’s ideological concern, while since the commercialization reform of SOCEs, creative workers are also expected to ‘be creative for the state’ under the discourse of self-realization. In practice, as the case of loafing on the job illustrates, the system causes marked contradictions that furnish creative individuals with possibilities to distance themselves from the expected subjectivity of ‘being creative for the state’. This article offers an exemplary case study of how the governance of creativity and creative labour works in Chinese SOCEs, and of how it distinguishes itself from the creativity dispositif in the West. It suggests that the theorization of creative labour needs to go beyond the western neoliberal perspective and take into account the diversity of socio-political contexts across the world.