Stigma of Joblessness, Digitalization, and the 'China Dream': Emerging Challenges and Responses of Cultural/Creative Labour in China

Abstract

The cultural and creative industries (CCI) in the globalized economy are widely perceived as increasingly significant sources of economic growth and employment. In China, CCI's total workforce rose from 8.73 million employees in 2004 to 17.59 million in 2013. This research represents a timely inquiry into CCI contextualized in China, which have been at to the top of Chinese government's strategic development agenda in the context of the country's opening up of the market to the forces of globalization (Keane, 2016), not only based on economic reasons, but also to export its cultural power as part of the country's soft-power-building agenda, contributing to a unique mode of cultural production and labour process. Case studies, interviews and participant observation are used to explore the nuances of real-life working conditions and the emotional experiences of the cultural/creative workers in China. In this case, the CCI workers in television, advertising and web services industries, face increasingly insecure and stressed working lives, with the boundary between their formal and informal employment status increasingly blurred. These emerging forms of anxieties, insecurities and dissatisfactions in China's cultural/creative workforce undermine the theoretical assumption that fulltime secure employment is more stable and secure, raising a reconceptualization of the traditional understanding of precarity accelerated by Standing's (2016) theorization of the 'precariat', which primarily focuses on flexible, temporary employment and the dynamic market situation. Under the socio-economic and cultural facets of the neo-precarity, the worker identities face continuous tensions between centrality of work and post-work ethics, between their employment expectations and objective reality, and between the pursuit of moral autonomy and stigma of joblessness. Under the techno-cultural facet, the technological transformation and the digitized work environment have escalated the speed of cultural production and contributed to the devaluation of creative labor. A disempowerment of creativity is shown, giving way to a high level of adaptability without concrete social and institutional support for professional development. Under the political facet, China has positioned its cultural industry as an anchor for soft power building and nation branding, and developed a 'created in China' paradigm. However, China's CCI remain heavily regulated and subject to surveillance, and government control is omnipresent. The dichotomous construct of creative autonomy and active state surveillance remains a struggle for and constraint on creative workers. The project's major theoretical contributions are documenting and conceptualizing the emergent types of work anxieties and pressures derived from the interwoven effects of broader cultural, political, socioeconomic and technological changes in the creative workforce of the post-socialist China, also categorizing the power of diverse cultural/creative workers at different levels of the cultural production process, also their divergent reactions and responses to precarious work conditions accruing from various factors including age, socioeconomic status, education, gender, place of origin, and work experience. The emerging forms of anxieties and insecurities facilitate three types of labor agency (the 3 Rs)— resilience, reworking and resistance (Alford et al., 2017). Finally, this research discusses what industrial measures, government policies and forms of labor activism can empower China's 17 million-plus cultural workers.