Schizoid creators: Creative work and subjectivity in the Chinese cultural economies

This study investigates creative labour conditions and the formation of creative subjectivities in China. Based on my empirical fieldwork in China (mostly Beijing and Shanghai) and archival research (e.g. policy documents and industrial reports), this study combines a political economy of cultural production in contemporary China with four empirical case studies focusing on creative workers in state-owned cultural enterprises, independent filmmakers, international creative workers and the newly emerged digital creative class on social media. By investigating the subjectivation of creative workers in relation to the complex and diversified labour conditions of cultural production in contemporary China, this study engages with questions concerning governance, precarity and subjectivity of creative labour. While unveiling how politico-economic inequalities are concealed by the production of creative aspirations in the Chinese cultural industries, I also attempt to affirm the experiences and agency of individuals working in a wide range of cultural sectors, including television, film, design, journalism and social media. These creative subjects, I argue, are far from docile bodies that are simply manipulated by (state) capitalist ideologies. China’s specific cultural economy produces space for individual agency as well as precariousness, leaving open the possibility for cultural workers to become what I term ‘schizoid creators’ – a concept borrowed and developed from Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis of contemporary capitalism (1983). Such schizoid creators are working both for and against the system. The vibrant network of cultural production in China both pushes and limits individuals’ aspirations to creativity and self-realisation. Expected by the state and market to always ‘be creative’ in particular ways, cultural workers also find possibilities to resist this imperative, developing a schizoid subjectivity that serves the governing system but challenges it at the same time