The QUT Creative Industries Research Seminars – Creative Industries in China will be LIVE blogged from this platform on Friday the 10th of May from AEST 12-2pm.

QUT Creative Industries Research Seminars present:

The Tier 4 in Asian Creative Transformations book launch: Michael Keane, “Creative Industries in China: Art, Design Media”. In conversation with China media and culture specialist Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, UNSW.

Join Michael Keane and special guest Stephanie Hemelryk Donald for a stimulating discussion:

Are Chinese people less creative than citizens of the ‘free world’? Can Chinese people think creatively? Professor Michael Keane’s new book, “Creative Industries in China” explores how Chinese policy makers, artists, designers and media practitioners are changing a widespread perception that China is an uncreative nation. This raises an important issue – creativity varies in different societies at different periods. So what kind of criteria should one use to measure it? And how applicable is this ‘gold standard’ Western concept of creativity, and creative industries, to the People’s Republic of China?

The book is a result of a decades’ research, two large research grants from the Australian Research Council and collaboration with a lot of colleagues, fieldwork and interviews.

Live blog:

About the Speakers:

Professor Michael Keane is a Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation, and director of Asian Creative Transformations Tier 4 Research Cluster. Dr Michael Keane’s research interests include:

• cultural policy in China
• creative industries and innovation in China
• audio-visual industry policy and development in China, South Korea, and Taiwan
• television formats in Asia.

He is the author of China’s New Creative Clusters: Governanance Human Capital and Investment (2011) , and Created in China: the Great New Leap Forward (2007). He is editor of How Creativity is Changing China by Li Wuwei (2011) Michael has published more than 100 articles on Chinese media and culture over the past decade.

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is currently Future Fellow and Professor of Comparative Film Studies at the Univeristy of New South Wales Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (School of Humanities). Following a first degree in Chinese at the University of Oxford (1979-83), a Masters in European Politics and Culture at Southampton (1991-1992) and a DPhil on Chinese film at the University of Sussex (1997), she emigrated to Australia, where she has worked ever since.

Her research covers film, the media, and children’s experiences in the Asia-Pacific region, with a particular focus on visual culture.

In this book I describe three clusters of activity: art, design and media. In doing so, I have attempted to produce a book that will reach beyond the scholarly community. I assemble a diversity of sources, some from government reports; some from industry; but most from academia. The clusters are heterogeneous, crossing disciplinary boundaries.

I look at a broad range of creative sectors: painting, performance, industrial design, urban design, fashion, television, film, and online video. I examine the political and institutional environments that enable and constrain innovation; for instance political factions, media regulation, censorship, copyright as well as regional variations in urban planning and cultural governance. Throughout the book I evaluate China’s attempts to renovate its national soft power, that is, China’s cultural attractiveness within the international community.

In writing this book I was presented with a methodological dilemma. Creativity obviously varies in different societies at different periods. So what kind of criteria should one use to measure it? In recognising a strong tendency to attribute Western origins to creativity and to the creative industries, my concern is to show how applicable this ‘gold standard’ is in the People’s Republic of China, a nation that is itself endeavouring to transform in to an ‘innovative nation’ by 2020.

How can we understand non-standard varieties? How many of the outputs listed in government reports in China are examples of originality or novelty? By the same token, the standard definition (of creative industries), incubated by the UK Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) in the late 1990s, has undergone significant mutation in its travels throughout Asia. I show why this has occurred and reveal the consequences of such transformation for regional governance in China.

In my recent work, and throughout this book, I have opted for a functional definition of creativity.  I seek to downplay the emphasis on novelty that pervades innovation literature, which idealises heroic risk-taking creative entrepreneurs. In this book creativity is the ‘fitting of new ideas and alternative visions to existing norms, values and patterns’. Accordingly, the industries that governments like to promote as cultural and creative are frequently typified by mundane practices. To be sure, they represent aggregations of so-called creative classes—artists, writers, filmmakers, designers and developers—but much of what is produced (and counted in reports) is the result of pragmatic variations to existing models and templates.

The term ‘creativity’ has a certain promiscuity, which allows it to be applied in many contexts. In many cases in China it is effectively harmonized, stripped of its critical elements. To understand its uptake in China I consider its dissemination within a society where freedom of expression has been devalued as a means of social organisation. This is not to deny the inventiveness, ingenuity and imagination of Chinese artists and craftsmen—or the desire for openness. As I argue in chapter 2, cultural exchange has had a long history in traditional China; but innovators have had to contend with extended periods of Confucian (and neo-Confucian) orthodoxy. In modern China conformity to political dictates has rendered creativity a zone of uncertainty.

The upside of promiscuity is that the uses of creativity cut across different disciplines and fields of endeavour, psychology, business, aesthetics, science and education such that there are many views and many ‘experts.’ To take the example of visual art, anyone can become a connoisseur by following art trends, joining art circles and reading art history. However, as the Canadian conceptual art group the N.E. Thing Goes company showed anything can be art; art only has to be thought by someone as art for it to be so. The question of value is another consideration. As the sociologist Richard Sennett points out, the lament ‘You do not understand me’ is ‘a not entirely enticing selling point.’

The book examines many of the selling points of Chinese culture. But more than this it looks at the sustainability of an indigenous model of creativity based on expedient adaptation. Is this the model that China should retain and risk being typecast as a follower nation rather than becoming an innovative nation?  I show how China is seeking to exploit creativity to climb the global value chain but I also demonstrate the limits imposed on creativity by a politically induced focus on quantity over quality, harmony over risk-taking, and economic development over human rights. While the government’s call for extending China’s soft power has increased productivity of its cultural sectors this has yet to impact on the most important indicator, China’s international cultural attractiveness.

China has the oldest recorded written civilisation in the world and is a land of many cultural treasures. But internationally, is China’s culture admired or is it just respected? Is ‘brand China’ attractive? In 2011, former President Hu Jintao lamented China’s cultural weakness, saying: ‘The overall strength of China’s culture and its international influence is not commensurate with China’s international status. The international culture of the West is strong while we are weak.’

Enter the cultural and creative industries. These ‘new’ industries have generated frenzied debate amongst China’s policy makers: but where should the emphasis be: on creativity or culture? The cultural industries, the terminology favoured by conservatives in the Ministry of Culture, are touted as ‘soft power industries’, a far cry from the propaganda state model that existed from the 1950s to the 1970s in which commercial culture had no place. In 2011, the Minister of Culture, Cai Wu, announced that cultural industries would become ‘pillar industries’ (zhizhu chanye), contributing 5 per cent of GDP by 2016 (the estimated value in 2010 was 2.78 per cent.

Cultural pursuits are the subject of numerous government-funded reports that list increases in cultural production driven by increasing urban affluence as well as massive state and private investment in cultural and media sectors. The cultural industries embody the achievements of the nation-state and range from esoteric kunqu opera to animated videos, artworks, toys and fashion accessories. Artefacts are displayed for sale in theme parks, galleries and online sites. Content is generated in software farms, media clusters, incubators, factories and art zones.

A feeling that China is internationally regarded as a derivative nation, one that copies rather than creates, resonates with latent nationalism. The proposition that greater investment in cultural and creative industries will transfer the unattractive ‘world factory’ label elsewhere while resolving environmental problems is appealing; it is a good news story.

A colossus in the export of manufactured goods, China is a relative minnow in terms of cultural influence. Weak perceptions of China’s cultural products compare poorly with the strong ‘brand’ reputations of neighbours Japan and Korea. Over forty per cent of cultural exports in 2012 were designed by businesses outside China. The Chinese Mainland is the low-cost processing destination of choice for Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Significantly, the leading cultural export provinces are Guangdong, Fujian and Zhejiang, known for factories, migrant labour and sweatshops. In these provinces we find significant numbers of Asian bosses (laoban).

The state is enacting policies to revitalise (zhenxing) Chinese culture and to make it attractive internationally. Most of these policies are focused on reclaiming China’s lost soft power, the sense that the ‘middle kingdom’ was once the most influential country in the world. To further this objective Confucius Institutes have sprung up amid growing consternation about a clash with international values of academic freedom.

China Central TV (CCTV), the torch bearer of Chinese Communist Party propaganda beams its messages to the world in multiple languages. Is the world impressed by CCTV’s expansion, by its diversity of programming? Are people in China feeling a sense of pride as CCTV ‘goes out’?

In 2009 CNTV (China Net TV) was launched. CNTV claims to be China’s largest online video repository of copyrighted content. Undoubtedly, this is true given its direct connection with CCTV archives but this connection doesn’t necessarily translate into consumer loyalty. CNTV’s stated mission to broadcast ‘China’s history and culture’ is probably a recipe for consumer indifference, particularly in international markets habituated to modern stories and wary of state propaganda. While China seeks to impress the West with its cultural soft power, many people believe that it is yet to impress the ‘rest of Asia’.

China’s movie industry is regarded by its government as one of the great successes of cultural policy. More than 500 feature films are produced annually in China; however many are political (propaganda) works that never make it to mainstream theatres. According to The Annual Report on International Culture Trade of China 2012 published by Peking University, China exported 52 films to 22 countries in 2010, most of these destinations were Asian; of this number 50 were co-productions, mostly with Asian partners. The total export revenue in 2010 was 2.024 billion RMB, a decrease from 2.77 billion RMB in the previous year and 3.517billion RMB in 2010. China, it seems is not doing so well without Asian assistance.

Aside from the highly inflated art market and the potentially lucrative online games/ applications market, China’s culture is undervalued, especially outside national borders. So where does China fit in the creative value chain? Is it a producer of high concepts that embody value-adding or is a producer of low-cost, derivative formats?

Perhaps a more pertinent issue is the value of Chinese media among regional audiences. In marked comparison to the imaginative outputs of Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong and Taiwanese film, television and animation industries, China’s media is characterised by formulaic stories; its television is awash with lookalike entertainment programs localized from international formats. Remakes, reversions and sequels of traditional tales dominate movies and TV serials.

Cognitive dissonance

A key challenge for China in harnessing ‘soft power’ (ruan shili) is cognitive dissonance: that is, traditional culture, political culture and contemporary culture symbolize three different historical periods. These historical layers coexist in most cultural products; for instance, TV drama, cinema, visual art, animation and literature elicit different responses from audiences. In the minds of audiences outside Mainland China—and indeed many within the nation’s borders—politics is the ‘spoiler.’

Evaluations impact on perceptions: ‘bad’ China is the land of corrupt officials, propagandists, cheap products, knock-offs (shanzhai), and piracy—but ‘good’ China is the home of taiji (tai chi), kung-fu, pandas and acupuncture. ‘Brand China’ is therefore weak. However China’s problem is more complex than whether or not its national image is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Joseph Cooper Ramo says that ‘China’s image of herself and other nations’ views of her, are out of alignment.’ An alternative perspective is that ‘foreigners’ just don’t know how to ‘read’ Chinese texts.

But foreigners include people who ought to be able to read China’s culture, people living in Singapore, Taipei and Hong Kong, people who understand Chinese history, culture and philosophy. Being one step removed culturally puts China’s Asian neighbours in an interesting position. Despite the problems of bureaucracy and censorship in China film makers, designers, artists and writers are moving to the Mainland, especially from other parts of Asia. With the Chinese market exerting such a pull, can the rest of Asia change China? Can China’s soft power learn from the experience and skills of the ‘best minds from Asia’? Or should we be phrasing the question another way: will China’s ascendency in cultural production, its massive market pull, rescue the fragile film and media industries of Asia?

According to the title of a book by Li Wuwei, one of China’s leading policy advisors: ‘creativity is changing China’. Examining Li’s argument closely, it is clear that the field is economics (the creative industries). China can, according to Li, ‘change its former position at the lower end of the global value chain’ (21). In moving up the value chain China wants to play to its strengths: one of which is traditional culture. However, this may be counterproductive considering that Asian creativity is already highly internationalised, exploiting and generating contemporary pop culture genres.

A second strategy is to use technology. The ‘convergence of technological innovation and cultural creativity’ (keji chuangxin yu wenhua chuangyi ronghe) is a policy initiative designed to ‘revitalise’ (zhenxing) culture. It relies on exploiting technological innovation (keji chuangxin), specifically new media systems and applications. The aim is to ‘upgrade’ (shengji) and disseminate culture in new formats, making Chinese ideas and values more accessible. The government has currently designated 16 experimental ‘convergence bases’ which complement the hundreds of creative clusters now located in and around China’s cities.

In 2010, Li Changchun, then Propaganda Department chief, proclaimed that scientific innovation would assist China’s culture to become more globally competitive, thus maintaining the sovereignty of national culture. Integration of cultural industries within the government’s informatization agenda is evidence of a desire to transform non-performing media content sectors.

Difficult questions

One of the deep problems that beset China’s creative industries is adversity to risk taking. Many associate creativity with ‘thinking out of the box’, with challenging conventions, with asking difficult questions. Many of the great directors and screen writers of Hollywood were iconoclasts who created their work as they went: for instance, this is the theme of the recent bio-pic of Alfred Hitchcock starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren. If you work in China your film script has to be vetted by SARFT before production, much to the consternation of co-production partners.

Creativity has come to be a central part of modern lives, education systems and environments. Yet periods of great inventiveness, scientific innovation and aesthetic achievement existed throughout Chinese history, along with extended periods of conformity. This was the golden age of Chinese soft power, not only in the cultural field but in terms of cultural presence. The formula for soft power is now more complex and is mostly invoked in the field of political science. But we need to bear in mind the global power of media. The effect of the Korean Wave is both regional and global, as illustrated by the breakout of Gangnam Style. Could China have incubated a Gangnam Style phenomenon? It’s unlikely. But looking to the future we need to ask: will the migration of East Asian talent to the mainland help their Chinese counterparts to take more risks? Will Asian creativity change China or will it be diluted by the Chinese propaganda machine?

How are East Asian film practitioners contributing to the professionalization of Chinese cinema? It is no secret that South Korean, Hong Kong, Taiwanese and Japanese film makers have advantages when it comes to producing ‘quality content.’ In recent times film makers in the People’s Republic of China have sought to catch up by drawing technological expertise and knowledge through selective collaborative ventures. South Korean collaborations in particular are pushing the technological frontier in the Chinese film industry, especially with respect to high-end digital effects – most notably through the distinctive visual sensibilities and practices of Lee Yong-gi and other Korean post-production specialists whom Lee has trained or inspired at home and abroad.

Lee is Korean cinema’s so-called grandfather of colour grading; he is a pioneer in methods of manipulating the colours of a film during the post-production and final printing processes, which are now completely digital (and known as digital intermediary or DI). DI, which has become an essential medium for filmmaking across the globe, enables filmmakers to manipulate a film and prepare it for digital projection before it is distributed to cinemas or processed for other screen formats.

Between 1997 and 2011, Lee ‘coloured’ and digitised more than 200 domestic feature films made by leading directors such as Bong Joon-ho (Mother, 2009; The Host, 2006), Park Chan wook (Old Boy, 2003; Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, 2005; Thirst, 2009), Kim Jee-woon (The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, 2008; A Bittersweet Life, 2005) and Lee Myung-se (M, 2007). He accomplished this after pioneering Korean cinema’s transition to digital equipment and workflow processes between 2002 and 2005.

In 2008, while still working on films in Korea Lee began consulting for the Chinese-owned firm HFR in Beijing. His chief task was to purchase and install state-of-the-art digital post-production equipment, then costing upwards of around $500,000 USD. Lee made a permanent move to Beijing in 2009. He and a growing number of Korean colleagues are currently among the most sought-after DI and visual effects experts in China. Their ambitions with regard to working in China are clear: China is the new wild frontier, a stimulating environment which however offers Korean players many challenges, including opportunity costs – the sharing of trade secrets and intellectual property, among other things.

In the recent past, DI in China was a cost-prohibitive luxury offered by a small number of U.S., Canadian and Australian firms working with a select group of leading Chinese directors and their big-budget films. However, the arrival of Lee and other Korean representatives (working for Seoul-based companies such as Digital Idea, Digital Studio 2L, SK Independence and CJ Powercast), coupled with lower costs and a high level of technical capability, has enabled both established and emerging Chinese filmmakers to utilise this key process.

Not only has Lee brought his experience and knowledge garnered from numerous award-wining and critically acclaimed Korean films to China but he has transferred state-of-the-art technology by overseeing the purchase of new equipment with which he has become very familiar through attending key annual industry trade shows such as the NAB Show. Each year Lee tries to attend at least one of these events where he can demonstrate new equipment and hold detailed discussions with technicians and their sales teams.

Screen shots from David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002). The accentuation of darkness and the gradient shades of black created by Fincher and his cinematographer Conrad W. Hall present a muted non-lit appearance to the dramatic night scenes using a mixture of minimalistic lighting, careful camera exposure settings, selective lenses, and low-contrast film stock – all critical elements for achieving a particular visual style in the pre-digital filmmaking days. Lee is eager to credit Fincher’s films as a source of inspiration for his own work.

Back to Neutral

Lee completed the DI on his first film in China, Tsui Hark’s 2010 martial arts drama Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame in 15 days. In fact he created an initial colour-corrected version in about 2 days – at least according to how he thought it should look. At the peak of his career in Korea, Lee had mastered the assembly-line approach to DI that he used here; producers and directors would instruct him: “give my film the ‘Old Boy’ or ‘Thirst’ look”, which meant: keep it dark and mysterious with lots of shadows.

Despite his expertise as a digital colourist Lee’s initial DI of Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame was rejected by Tsui and his creative team, which hails from Taiwan and Hong Kong. He was asked to reverse the low-contrast effect he had given it; that is, to go ‘back to neutral’. Adjusting to these new demands has been no easy task for Lee. Director Tsui is known to prefer a high-contrast visual style incorporating bright daylight scenes. Tsui’s colour sensibilities, which are also reflected in countless historical drama films made by other Chinese commercial directors, have challenged Lee’s vast experience with the use of deep blacks and low-contrast shadows to convey the dark and depressing emotions which are widely used in the genre-bending films for which Korean cinema is so well known.

Screen shots from Wuershan’s supernatural-fantasy-action film Painted Skin 2: The Resurrection (2012). Lee and his Korean DI colleagues Ethan Park and Peter Ahn created a high-contrast colour style for this project. Their approach differs significantly from that taken by Fincher and Hall in Panic Room as well as by other Korean films with night or dim interior scenes such as Old Boy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and The Host.

Since his arrival in China, Lee has learned to apply DI in new ways, to modify his approach in order to convey a different set of emotions, including hope and optimism, not by applying a darkening effect but a brightening one. Because of the limited range of genres in Chinese cinema [dictated by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television [SARFT] less latitude is available for experimenting with darker subject matter (and thus darker colours). Lee and other DI technicians in China are operating on a trajectory that differs markedly from that taken by Korean cinema.

The so-called professionalization of post-production practices and, more to the point, the transformation of the visual sensibilities of Chinese cinema still have a long way to go to match global tastes with local creative aspirations.

The work of Lee and other East Asian practitioners active in China today reflects the uneven transfer of knowledge, the result of structural conditions including intellectual property issues, political regulation and educational levels in China. In other words, the assimilation of new technology, knowledge and innovation is a more complex process than meets the eye. Films produced or post-produced by Korean and Hong Kong filmmakers and companies in partnership with Chinese filmmakers, companies and distributors, such as Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame and Tsui Hark’s 3D film Flying Swords of Dragon Gate produced in 2011, are evidence of this effect.

However, this creative ‘gap’ may be reducing as a result of the growing number of individual content creators and production and post-production firms that are pursuing an increased level of transnationalism, not only to increase their bottom lines, upgrade their technological capabilities, build skills and expertise, and grow professional networks, but also to cross-subsidise their work on an increasing number of domestic Chinese productions.

The benefits of such collaboration for individuals and companies from Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan working in China today are being realised as Chinese film practitioners ‘go out’ by staying home.

Brian Yecies is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong and an associate member of the Institute for Social Transformation Research (ISTR). His research focuses on cinemagoing in colonial Korea (1910-1945) and contemporary South Korean-Chinese-Australian film and digital media collaboration. Brian is a past Korea Foundation Research Fellow and a recipient of prestigious grants from the Academy of Korean Studies, Asia Research Fund, and Australia-Korea Foundation. His Routledge book Korea’s Occupied Cinemas, 1893-1948 (with Ae-Gyung Shim) was published in 2011.

Over the past 30 years, the most successful films at the international box office have been laden with visual effects, so it’s no surprise that the number of VFX production facilities has grown dramatically. Asia is emerging as one of the global leaders with new facilities launching in such places as Mumbai, Beijing, and Kuala Lumpur. Local governments have been keen boosters of the effects industry as well. In Wuxi, China, for example, the government spent close to $300 million converting a former steel mill into an elaborate film studio with digital post-production facilities as the centerpiece. Aiming to position itself as a global facility, Wuxi Studios promote themselves as a low-cost producer with state of the art technology in visual effects and animation. In nearby Shanghai, DreamWorks Animation has entered into a joint venture with local partners to develop DreamWorks Oriental, the anchor studio of a major development project that is part of the city’s ambition to burnish its reputation as a leading producer of Chinese screen animation.

These trends are part of the larger transformations that are washing across East Asian media industries as they emerge as significant content creators as well as low-cost competitors. Yet the recent new reports out of Hollywood offer cautionary tales about the prospects of such ventures.

On February 24, The Life of Pi won the Academy award for best visual effects. Rhythm and Hues, the company responsible for this achievement, was also nominated in the same category for its work on Snow White and the Huntsman. Extraordinarily successful, the company is also considered one of the best employers in the digital media business: a creative and supportive work environment where employees enjoy good pay and benefits. This has helped it retain some of the best talent in the VFX business and allowed it to use its reputation to develop satellite production facilities overseas.

Yet less than 24 hours after receiving its Oscar, Rhythm and Hues announced that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Like six similar companies that have failed in the last couple years, the company succumbed to the pressures of a marketplace dominated by the major media conglomerates that hire them to add luster to their blockbuster movies. R&H executives nevertheless declared that they would like to reorganize the company under the leadership of an outside buyer.

Only two days later on February 27, DreamWorks animation laid off 15% of its full-time workforce, a loss of 350 jobs. Like Rhythm and Hues, DreamWorks is considered one of the best employers in its field of animation, but executives explained that the fulltime payroll at the studio had grown too large to manage in the face of rising costs and global competition.

In some ways, these developments may appear to be a good sign for overseas competitors in animation, special effects, and postproduction services. With high-tech infrastructure, low labor costs, and government support, many facilities in Asia confidently assert that they can compete with their Hollywood counterparts in terms of quality and cost. This seems to be the rationale behind the significant investments that governments have made to develop new facilities and to provide tax breaks and subsidies to local effects houses. Nevertheless Rhythm and Hues offers a cautionary case example, for the very same pressures and industrial practices that brought the company to its knees are likely to confront competitors in Asia as well. Among the challenges that postproduction companies confront are adverse contracting practices and unrelenting pressure from overseas competitors.

The key to understanding these challenges is the subcontracting system that prevails among the producers of major feature films that Hollywood executives refer to as “tentpole” productions. Tentpoles such as Skyfall, The Hunger Games, and The Dark Knight Rises, are the leading attractions each year among the slate of films released by each studio. Although they are financed and distributed by the major studios, the actual production of each film is conducted by hundreds of employees, most of whom work for independent production companies, such as Rhythm and Hues, that sign contracts with the producers to provide specific services at a set price.

These contracts are negotiated during the initial planning stages of a film, well before the actual production begins, and therefore companies must fashion a bid that will appear competitive but also one that leaves enough cushioning for the inevitable revisions that take place during filming and post-production. Such revisions can be driven by creative choices of the director or by decisions made by other talent or executives attached to the project. Yet contracts never include a clause for cost “overages” nor do they include a profit participation clause that might bring additional revenue to a VFX company that invests extra effort to help make a film such as Life of Pi an Oscar winner with more than $600 million in global ticket sales.

Under these conditions, executives at companies such as Rhythm and Hues are under constant pressure to bid aggressively against competitors in Los Angeles and increasingly against competitors overseas, many of whom enjoy tax breaks and subsidies from local governments. Some Canadian provinces are offering 33 percent tax breaks on VFX production costs.

Chinese and Korean officials have played a significant role in financing new production infrastructure. And Indian effects shops enjoy significant labor cost advantages. Thus R&H executives must find ways to contain their production costs in the face of stiff competition. Like many other Hollywood shops, they resorted to overseas expansion, opening facilities in Canada, Malaysia, and India. This global footprint allowed them to exploit the advantages of each location, but it also increased their ongoing overhead costs, which in some ways made them more vulnerable to fluctuations in demand from the major studios.

Like all independent film and television companies, Rhythm and Hues executives were pressed to strike a balance between creative excellence and cost containment, but they were forced do so in a business with very thin profit margins that range between 3 and 5 per cent. Consequently there was little room for error in the bidding process and although the company had a long and distinguished track record, it lived in the shadow of financial insolvency. If one or two major projects were cancelled, delayed, or failed, the company could be pushed over the line.

These adverse market conditions are indeed what precipitated the bankruptcy of Rhythm and Hues. According to industry insiders, the company had been flourishing on the revenues flowing from tentpole features for Fox and Universal that brought in roughly $90 million per year… until last year.  In 2012, the two studios both cut back on effects-driven titles, engendering a perfect storm for R&H, as its revenues from studio films plummeted to $18 million. Lacking a nest egg from profit participation on successful films of the past, the company ran out of operating cash on the eve of its Academy Award for best visual effects.

During recent bankruptcy proceedings, Rhythm and Hues was bought by a group of investors with ties to Bollywood media interests. One source claims that although the studio will continue its operations in LA, some 80 percent of the production work is likely to be conducted overseas, much of it in Asia. That would reverse the company’s previous distribution of labor, averaging 80 percent in the US and 20 percent overseas.

Even though this will give a boost to Asian effects professionals, it also casts a pall over the business as a whole, as VFX shops in Asia are likely to face the very same pressures going forward. Given the current limits of the contracting system, it is only a matter of time before Asian effects companies begin to confront the same downward spiral, as studios relentlessly seek out the low-cost (or highly subsidized) providers.

In such an environment, victories and profits will prove elusive, and perhaps the only reliable point of reference will be a telling quote from one Hollywood producer who said, “If I don’t put a visual effects shop out of business (on my movie), then I’m not doing my job.”

Michael Curtin is the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also Director of the Media Industries Project at the Carsey-Wolf Center. His books include Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV and Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders. Curtin is currently at work on Media Capital: The Cultural Geography of Globalization and is co-editor of the Chinese Journal of Communication and the International Screen Industries book series of the British Film Institute.

What makes a great city? This is the question that the construction of world city or global city indexes has sought to answer.

The CCI Creative City Index (CCI-CCI) is a new approach to the measurement and ranking of creative global cities. It is constructed over eight principal dimensions, each with multiple distinct elements. Some of these dimensions are familiar from other global city indexes, such as the MORI or GaWC indexes, which account for the size of creative industries, the scale of cultural amenities, or the flows of creative people and global connectedness. In addition to these indicators, the CCI-CCI contributes several new dimensions. These measure the demand side of creative participation, the attention economy, user-created content, and the productivity of socially networked consumers.

Global creative cities can often seem alike, in respect of per-capita measures of factors such as public spending on cultural amenities, or the number of hotels and restaurants. This is to be expected when people and capital are relatively free to move, and where economic and political institutions are broadly comparable. However, we find that different cities can register far larger differences at the level of consumer-co-creation and especially digital creative ‘microproductivity’.

Our new model of a creative city index emphasises consumer co-creation and microproductivity, as well as examining how these factors have been previously overlooked. We show how we have measured these additional factors and indicate the effect they have on creative and global city indexes. We then present the findings from a pilot study of six cities, two Australian, two German and two from the UK, to indicate how the new index is calculated and applied. Our results indicate much greater variance arising from the new arguments between cities. The full report can be found here:

Competitive global cities

A key insight that all city indexes point to, as ours most certainly does, is that creative global cities are increasingly engaged in intense competition with each other in the evolving process of globalization.

Globalization is a centuries-long process that results in the increased interdependence of peoples’ economic, cultural, social and political lives. Globalization progresses as ‘factor mobility’ increases, and accelerates when people, capital, money and ideas are free to move about the world to settle where they are most valued. In the past few decades the world has experienced its greatest wave of globalization. From 2008 a majority of the world’s population – over 3 billion people – now lives in cities, making humanity an urban species for the first time. In completely new ways and at unprecedented scale, human experience is city life, a reality to which current thinking and policy settings have not yet adjusted.

Mobility, urbanisation, and technology have converged on the contemporary city, which, although fixed in place, is best analysed as a dynamic hub in a global network. Cities are now the most important unit of social-cultural and economic organization. It also means that cities compete globally. Nation-states are no longer the key units of global competition; instead, cities compete with one another for valuable scarce factors of production. The most important factor, by far, is ‘human capital’ – enterprising, talented and creative individuals. The focus of modern globalization is creative people; and creative cities are the product of their interactions, driving socio-cultural and economic evolution.

Competing city indexes

What is the effective measure of a creative city? This has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. It is not simply a matter of adding up a city’s capital infrastructure and knowledge exports, or adducing a measure from population size, although these factors are important. Degrees of openness and diversity also need to be included in any measure of a global creative city. These have been key additions contributed by the most influential players, the Florida index, MORI Foundation index and GaWC indexes. The current state of the art is that manufacturing-based indexes have been updated to account for the openness, global integration, attractiveness and liveability of a city to produce much improved measures of global city indexes and rankings.

Yet there remain significant gaps in this enterprise, most notably in accounting for consumer imagination, user co-creation and amateur production, and the social learning dynamics of the creative citizen, who is connected both to ‘small world’ networks and to global complex systems via digital social networking, including digital platforms like Facebook. These factors remain unaccounted in current indexes for at least two reasons: (1) they are difficult and seemingly subjective measures to make; and (2) in traditional industrial economics there was little reason to suppose that these factors mattered.

Between them, these approaches indicate that ‘consumer’ activities, the non-professional creative productivity of ordinary citizens in digitally linked social networks, should be regarded as part of the innovation system of complex cultural economies; and that the paradigm example of such systems is the contemporary world city.

Cities are crucibles of everyday human inventiveness through the rapid experimentation, market feedback and social copying processes that drive creative endeavour. Some cities do this better than others, and those that do can become great creative cities.

But how do we recognise this ‘on the fly’, as the processes unfold, and as novelties emerge? How can we identify when and how a city is doing well, even as it is doing so? That is the purpose of a creative city index. Our report presents an analysis of why we need a better index model, and a working prototype of such an index.

The challenge lies in selecting a set of indicators to feed critical information to a dashboard index, including one that can measure a city’s absolute performance (how creative?) and its relative performance (compared with which other cities?). The report details our endeavour to construct such an index from first principles, along with the rationale for why we have included the indicators that we have.

Most important, we present a worked example of the index applied to six cities – two each from Australia (Brisbane & Melbourne), Germany (Bremen & Berlin) and the UK (Cardiff & London). We chose London because it regularly features in the top three of any index of global cities (along with New York and Tokyo); but by the same token it is far from typical. Thus, we paired it with Cardiff, a more compact city that is also a capital and has its own claims to creativity.

Our index is unweighted, yet even without such calibration, it offers a superior measure of the creativity of a city compared with other indexes, by assembling not only its industrial output and its cultural attractiveness – the two factors that dominate extant indexes – but also the contribution of its creative citizens. We believe this third impulse to be the main motive and driving causal factor in creative city development.

Our index is built on an approach that can be dubbed ‘cultural science’. It integrates both economic and cultural analysis and recognises that a city is creative to the extent that it is complex, dynamic, and capable of evolution. The inputs into the index are appropriate indicators of evolutionary complexity in cities.

Method and Findings

The proposal for a new type of index is based upon recognition of the strengths of existing creative and global city indexes. It seeks to maintain the useful and effective elements of those measures, while also acknowledging and seeking to correct their weaknesses.

The strengths of the extant indexes – including Richard Florida’s creative city index, the MORI index, the GaWC index, Charles Landry’s creative city index, and others – revolve about measurement of creative city attractions, infrastructure, research and human capital, public support for arts and culture, public participation in culture, and openness, tolerance and global connectedness. We have sought to reproduce those same aspects in the CCI Creative City Index. However, there are several aspects of the creative economy and creative society that are commonly not included in other indexes, and which we have sought additionally to include.

At the core of this strategy is the role of what are variously called ‘youth culture’, ‘consumer co-creation’, ‘digital literacy’ and other factors that relate to the role of the creative and engaged citizen (and not just passive consumer) in making and producing (i.e. uploading and not just downloading) creative cultural content. The significance of this point is that our own research at the CCI has underscored the role of the creative citizen, and especially those from the margins, including the young, in recreating culture and the industries and economies that are built upon it (see Hartley 2009; 2012; Potts 2011).

As we have emphasised, a global city must first be a creative city, and a creative city is invariably powered by energy and the entrepreneurial experimentation of the young, of the outsider, of those seeking to create new ideas and to challenge existing ideas. A creative city will invariably be complex and challenging, ‘lovable’ more than ‘liveable’, edgy rather than middle-of-the-road, often with a clash of cultures, demographics and ideas in its mix. Our index has sought to integrate these measures, including for example measures of youth and student populations as well as uploads and social networks for music.

The index has eight main dimensions, each with multiple weighted components (between 1 and 14), making for 72 distinct classes of measures. Furthermore, each of these is often composed of multiple measures (with between one to as many as ten individual distinct elements). Over 250 distinct measures are included in the index for each city. Specifically, consider the dimension and number of weighted measures:

This provides for a rich index that captures many aspects of a city’s creative life, economy and potential. Our findings are summarized in table 1 (see below).

Table 1: Summary of CCI Creative City Index Results

With respect to the rank order and index magnitude our findings were in accord with expectation. London was expected to come out well on top, as it did. Of particular interest was the extent to which London dominated, often by an order of magnitude, and sometimes more. This is a feature that was not often seen clearly on many previous city indexes, which have tended to focus on variables that have less magnitude of per capita variation in them (such as number of hotels), or tended to cluster together (such as measures of openness).

On the ‘economy of attention’ dimension, London, and then Berlin, completely dominate the other cities, including Melbourne. It may indicate that the difference between cities at the head of the scale differ from those at the tail exponentially, according to a power law scale rather than a linear one, resulting in a ‘winner takes all’ profile of leading cities compared to ‘long tail’ cities. This same ‘super-scaling’ pattern was also observed in microproductivity. These findings indicate that there is something special about cities that are both highly creative and simultaneously global cities, in that they are more than just bigger versions of smaller ‘creative cities’.

While these findings in themselves are interesting and illuminating, a proper analysis would require a larger sample of cities to be studied. At this stage, the proof-of-concept of the index has been successfully undertaken and the CCI Creative City Index offers a best practice platform to benchmark creative city rank and progress.

Distinguished Professor John Hartley (ARC Federation Fellow) is Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology, in the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University. His Federation Fellowship project included research on fashion media in China. Hartley was lead investigator on Internationalizing creative industries: China , the WTO and the knowledge-based economy (ARC Discovery), convened the first conference on Creative Industries ever held in China (2005), co-edited special issues of Chinese Journal of Communication (2:1, 2009) and International Journal of Cultural Studies (9:3, 2007). His books Creative Industries, A Short History of Cultural Studies and others have been translated into Chinese. He has supervised numerous Chinese PhD students. He has also advised the Indonesian government on creative industries policy.

Jason Potts is an evolutionary economist who specialises in economic growth, institutional and behavioural economics, and the economics of technological change. He has written five books, including two on the foundations of evolutionary economic theory and one on creative industries and economic evolution. He is currently an editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics, and holds an ARC Future Fellowship examining the role of user collaboration in the early stages of emerging technologies. He is currently a Professor in the School of Economics, Finance and Marketing at RMIT University in Melbourne.

The title of the bilingual book “Laa-sai cit-gai” (in Cantonese) or “Lesser Design,” written by SIU King-chung and published by a Hong Kong-based company, MCCM Creations, in July 2012, is evocative in either language. To Cantonese speakers, the phrase “laa-sai” commonly contains negative connotations. It can refer to a person or a way of doing a job that is sloppy and unprofessional. These two characters are not standard written Chinese, and Mandarin speakers will not understand their meaning. As for the English word, “lesser,” the author explains that this term is borrowed from William Morris’s article “The Lesser Arts of Life,” published in 1882. Together with his group, Morris coined the term “lesser arts” as a contrast to elite art. SIU’s use of the term “lesser” in his book follows Morris’s view that “design” objects created by the grassroots class are worthy of study. SIU credits his friend, Phoebe Wong, for suggesting that this dual translation in both languages represents the subject matter of his book.

In the author’s own words, his book “attempts to explore works of design that are around us though they may be crass, local and grassroots,” (p. 7) in the context of Hong Kong. The content is arranged into four chapters in which he categorizes local Hong Kong folk objects as “trivial designs,” “ordinary folks’ extraordinary concepts,” “designing information,” and “neighborhood traditions and design.”

Those who have been to Hong Kong may have seen some of the “folk design” the author mentions in this book. Examples include the merchandise displays set up in open markets such as the Ladies’ Market on Tung Choi Street, Mong Kok; or the Night Market on Temple Street, Yau Ma Tei; self-serve storage cabinet for chopsticks, cutlery and napkins that fits under the table in a Cha-chaan-teng (Hong Kong-style teahouse); the expandable and moveable billboards that are called “faa-paai” locally; and the high-density polyethylene sheets that commonly come in red-white-and-blue stripes and are used everywhere in the city.

These unique vernacular objects must easily attract tourists’ attention, or the author would have trouble calling attention to appreciation of designs from local folks. He notices that the dense environment of Hong Kong is a museum of street-corner designs, which contain humble, everyday life “laa-sai” designs. However, as designers often claim much of their inspiration comes from their surroundings, one may wonder how designs from Hong Kong reflect a unique vernacular identity, yet the international design community and tourists are able to recognize and appreciate these folk icons of the city.

Thanks to more than half a century of graphic design development in Hong Kong, we are able to locate examples inspired by vernacular objects from some internationally renowned design masters from the local, such as Henry Steiner, KAN Tai-keung, Alan Chan, Tommy Li, Freeman Lau, and Stanley Wong.  How are their works representing design from Hong Kong, or the design identity of the city? How are their works connected to the original local “laa-sai” designs?

Obviously, the author does not intend to connect his vision of laa-sai designs with the high-design works of professional designers; yet, is it possible for a laa-sai design to evolve into high design or a professional form of design over a period of time? We know that it is possible because we have outstanding examples from many professional designers, but there is no fixed formula for that transition. The creative process that causes this transition is mysterious.

To a big nation like China, design is viewed as one aspect of cultural security, in which preserving or inventing a national design identity is important. There have been voices advocating the search for “Chineseness” in contemporary design over the past decade. Recently, the article by Aric Chen, curator of design and architecture for M+ Museum in Hong Kong, entitled “Zhongguo sheji zhi hua heshi kaifang?” (When will design in China be blooming?), released in Bloomberg Businessweek PRC Chinese version, pointed out the failing design development in China despite considerable corporate and government investment in advocating and promoting design. He concluded that the problems are core issues of the society not having an environment for nurturing design.

Indeed, as a researcher on Chinese graphic design history I am often being asked questions like what is design? What is good design? How do I do a good design? I share the viewpoint of Chen, in his own words with my translation in English here: A healthy design culture needs a healthy society. Without going into deeper critiques of the politics and social problems in China, it is possible to understand why design development in China has suffered a setback by just looking at the “chai” (demolish) phenomenon that has spread throughout the country in the past two decades. In the process of “chai”, living heritage and evidence of civilization are swept away with the rubble.

In the case of Hong Kong, although the national design identity is not a cultural security issue, establishing a design identity like the one Japanese design enjoys internationally is still not an easy task. Claiming laa-sai as a style of local design may be one of the steps; however, it is still a challenge to understand how the style can be developed into “formal” design and received transnationally. In a semi-planned society like Hong Kong is now, what is the government doing to assist local design development to reach this objective?

Design became one of the buzzwords, under the creative industries banner, within the economic remedies of Hong Kong after 1997. The 2003 Policy Address states that the government will assist the development of creative industries. As an immediate consequence, sustainable financial supports were plugged into the newly established Hong Kong Design Centre, and later on the ongoing annual event, Business of Design Week (BODW), as well as various conferences, creative awards and innovation funds, such as Create Hong Kong.

Without attempting to examine the success of Hong Kong’s investment in local design industries, here I would like to mention one recent example from BODW 2012 demonstrating the official position of the government in recognizing Hong Kong’s local design expertise. In the program for the event, entitled Asian Design: Histories, Collecting, Curating, hosted by M+ Museum for the BODW 2012, local participants’ names are mysteriously not listed on the official promotion website of BODW 2012, despite the fact that there is plenty of space in the page. One of the event speakers, the renowned “father of Hong Kong design history,” Professor Matthew Turner, shares his experience that the study of history of design in Hong Kong or Asia was simply viewed as “no history of design to speak of,” or “even if there were, it could have no value” in the 1980s British Hong Kong colonial period. Maybe it is still the case in the SAR era today.

Similarly, as in the case of China, does Hong Kong have a healthy society for a healthy design culture to develop? Vernacular design style like the laa-sai claimed by SIU or local participants in the M+’s Asian Design program seem doomed to anonymity. With the short-term memory of the government and the people, together with the deeply held belief that the “moon in foreign country is always more round” (yueliang shi waiguo di yuan), sheji zhi hua (flower of design) may not be blooming in Hong Kong to reach international status in our lifetime.

Long live of the power of laa-sai designs (or lesser designs) in Hong Kong, and thank you to the author, SIU King-chung.

Wendy Siuyi Wong is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology, in Melbourne, Australia. Previously, she taught at the Department of Design of Faculty of Fine Arts at York University in Toronto, Canada, serving as Department Chair from 2006 to 2009 and as Associate Director of the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) from 2005 to 2009. Dr. Wong was a visiting scholar at Harvard University from 1999 to 2000 and the 2000 Lubalin Curatorial Fellow at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York, USA. In 2009 and 2010, she was a visiting research fellow at the Department of Design History, Royal College of Art, and she served as a scholar-in-residence at the Kyoto International Manga Museum. She taught in Hong Kong and the United States before moving to Canada. She now resides in Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Wong conducts research on Chinese and Hong Kong visual culture and history, including graphic design, comics, and advertising images. She is the author of Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua, published by Princeton Architectural Press, four books for Chinese readers, and numerous articles in academic and trade journals.

If someone asked about your perception of the label ‘made-in-China’, what would you think: perhaps something that you see on the shelf in your local supermarket or hardware store? ‘Made-in-China’ often carries negative connotations such as the copycat phenomenon or cheap products. And yet that perception might not represent all the products of China’s cultural industries.

Believe it or not Chinese games occupy 90% of Vietnam’s market and they account for 68% games imported into Malaysia. These are not copycats; they are mostly original concepts that evolve from Chinese folklore, legends and historical stories. A good example is Genghis Khan, a game situated in the warring Yuan Dynasty (1279 to 1368) when the Mongol Empire spanned almost the entire land mass of Asia from China to Russia, even extending to what is now western Europe.

A Beijing-based domestic online game company Qilin Youxi capitalized on this historical period by developing a series of fantasy war themed Massively Multi-player Online Role-playing Games (MMORPG). Faced with an ultimate goal of conquering the world, gamers can choose between four factions and twelve classes, including crusader, warrior, pyromancer, swordsmen, warlock, prophet, monk, shaman, guardian, rifleman, assassin and archer.

Not only did Genghis Khan garner awards for ‘Most favorite online game in year 2009’ (Outstanding Game Awards 2009) and ‘Top Ten most popular national online game’ (the China Game Industry Annual Conference 2009), but it was exported to overseas markets including Singapore and Malaysia.

Genghis Khan is one of many Chinese online games that have had found success in overseas markets. In 2012, a total of 177 online games, developed by 40 domestic companies, were exported to overseas markets. The total sales were estimated US$570 million.

Game exports matter to China – both for game companies and for the nation. Game exports contribute significantly to the national economy. According to statistics provided by the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), Korean game exports reached US2.2 billion in 2011; in fact exports accounted for more than 25% of the total sales volume of Korean games.

In the same year, Chinese game accounted for approximately 5% of their total sales revenue. The difference suggests that there is a huge potential of game export for China’s national economy although it needs to be recognized that domestic consumption in China constitutes huge numbers so even if China’s exports doubled to 10% this would be a major achievement.  Many Chinese online games carry elements of Chinese culture. For this reason exporting games to foreign markets is a way to strengthen China’s soft power overseas—at least this is what the Chinese authorities believe, and want to achieve.

The US political scientist Joseph Nye writes that ‘soft power rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others… with intangible assets such as an attractive personality, culture, political values and institutions, and policies that are seen as legitimate’.  Soft power is the opposite of tangible military or economic power; it demonstrates a nation’s cultural influence as well as its attractiveness.

Many online games in China are embedded with cultural representations. Can such games positively influence the perceptions of users in other countries? Can online games can be deployed as a new form of media that sells, embodies and brands a ‘new China’, one that is extending its influence globally.

In view of the strategic importance of this nascent export sector, the Chinese government has implemented concrete efforts to promote online games in overseas markets. On top of tax reductions and various forms of funding and administrative support, the state introduced the National Ethnic Original Production of Online Game Overseas Promotional Project in 2006.

As well as the proactive role played by the central government, giant Chinese game companies are aiming to expand commercially overseas. In fact, they had achieved export success even before the state’s initiatives. The Ministry of Culture only addressed the importance of promoting international cooperation in this sector officially in 2011. However, the trend emerged as early as in 2004, illustrated by the export of Voyage Century to South Korea.

The question remains: what makes Chinese online games appealing to overseas audiences?

Firstly, overseas Chinese communities contribute significantly to the demand for Chinese online games. Numbers are hard to quantity but reports put the overseas Chinese as between 39 and 48 million. The cultural specificity of Chinese online games, which evolve from folklore, legends and historical stories, can create a cultural resonance among these overseas Chinese easily.

Secondly, the cultural proximities between China and its neighbor countries also make Chinese online games appeal to the regional market in particular. For instance, the great classical novel The Romance of the 3 Kingdoms had been adapted in many online games, Chibi by Beijing Perfect World Network Technology in 2007 for example, is well-received in Japan.

The cultural specificity is what defines the uniqueness of Chinese online games. While most of the most popular online games in the world sell across the globe, and in doing so ‘discount’ their cultural origins, online Games in China tend to be very culturally specific. As a cultural vehicle, exported Chinese online games strengthen the cultural influence of China and thus extend the soft power of the Chinese regime. And yet, from the inconsistent timeline between the growth of online game exports and government policy, the soft power extended through the online game exports is a market-driven phenomenon, although it coincidently matches the state’s political agenda.

As they say, the Chinese are coming. And yet, this time they are not coming with the copycats but original online games with the accent of Chinese culture.

Anthony Y.H. Fung is Director and Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. His research interests and teaching focus on popular culture and cultural studies, gender and youth identity, cultural industries and policy, political economy of communication and new media studies. He authored and edited more than 10 Chinese and English books. His recent books are Global Capital, Local Culture: Transnational Media Corporations in China (2008), Riding a Melodic Tide: The Development of Cantopop in Hong Kong (2009) (in Chinese), Policies for the Sustainable Development of the Hong Kong Film Industry (2009), Imagining Chinese Communication Studies (2012), Melodic Memories: The Historical Development of Music Industry in Hong Kong (2012) (in Chinese) and Asian Popular Culture: the Global (Dis)continuity (forthcoming).

Featured image thanks to Chris Webster

Public policy analysts sometimes make a distinction between the protective state and the enabling state.  In media policy the protective state is concerned with protection of morals, children, social harmony, the integrity of news etc., through various means of controlling and classifying the flows of media content.

The protective state has also had a cultural dimension which seeks to maintain and nurture a national audiovisual media culture in the face of global flows of media content and the perceived threats of a homogenized global mass culture. The UK academic Philip Schlesinger has written on how states have engaged in communicative boundary maintenance using taxes, subsidies, quotas and other policy instruments to support and grow local media industries in the face of lower-cost imports, typically from what Toby Miller and his colleagues term ‘Global Hollywood’.

But the protective state approach is not in itself sufficient: its capacity to be effective in policy objectives declines as media outlets proliferate; as more and more media content is accessed in digital form; as more households acquire fast broadband Internet connections; and as national populations become increasingly multicultural and hence less tied to a singular historically-based national culture.

It is now time to consider the enabling state in relation to national media and cultural policies. One of the reasons why creative industries policy discourses took off in East Asia in the 2000s is because the ‘dot.com crash’ of 2001, occurring as it did on top of the financial crisis of 1997-98, revealed the limits of thinking about ICT policies in isolation from media, communications and cultural policies. It was not enough to be thinking about technological hardware; policies for the development of cultural software were also required.

There are many examples of such policies in the Asia-Pacific region. Michael Keane’s work has looked closely at such developments in China. In South Korea, the Korean Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) aims to make Korea one of the world’s five leading nations in digital cultural and creative content and to respond proactively to the convergent media content environment. Taiwan has a ‘Technology and Innovation-Driven’ Industrial Development Policy that includes the ‘Two Trillion and Twin Star’ program to develop the mobile and digital content industries alongside its strength in electronic hardware production.

The Australian Government’s recently launched its Creative Australia national cultural policy statement which aims to better align Australia’s arts and creative industries to the Asia-Pacific region in response to the Government’s Australia in the Asian Century White Paper, launched in October 2012:

Australia’s increased focus on our engagement with nations in Asia provides unprecedented opportunities to grow our creative economy. Creative products and services are in high demand in Asia, and Australia already has a strong reputation for expertise and vision in architecture, design, visual and performing arts. Creative Australia provides a strong basis to build on these early successes and for our creative companies to become leading providers in significant Asian markets (p. 92).

Meanwhile, there continues to be a problem with articulating media policy (as we have traditionally understood it) to the creative industries and creative economy strategies that focus on digital content sectors. In the Australian case the Creative Australia cultural policy statement and the media policy reforms announced the previous day do not articulate onto one another, despite the extensive discussion of what media convergence means for traditional content initiatives such as Australian and local content requirements found in the Convergence Review whose final report was released in April 2012.

The recent Media Convergence Review undertaken by the Media Development Authority in Singapore illustrates the challenges of adapting policy to media convergence. This Review had three guiding principles:

a)      Parity – regulation should be applied in a consistent, even-handed and fair manner to provide a level playing field for industry players;

b)      Pragmatic application – a flexible approach should be adopted to allow industry players to meet desired policy outcomes without the Government being overly prescriptive in how compliance would be achieved; and

c)       Partnerships – with the burgeoning volume of content available in the converged media landscape, it is not feasible for the Government to directly regulate all content; partnerships with the private and people sectors must be forged and strengthened.

These were to be informed by the underlying values of:

a)      Reflecting societal values and community standards;

b)      Strengthening national identity;

c)       Balancing commercial and public interests.

Its recommendations aimed to:

a)      Update the framework for regulating content to encourage industry development, empower consumers and safeguard interests of society;

b)      Enhance the vibrancy of local content to build shared experiences and strengthen communities;

c)       Develop policy and regulatory response to copyright and digital piracy challenges;

d)      Update licensing frameworks to provide greater clarity and consistency in a converged media environment.

As with many of these exercises, the policy recommendations of the Singapore MDA look inwards more than they do outwards. While there is discussion of new initiatives to support local production, such as a Convergent Content Production Fund – also recommended in the Australian Convergence Review – the focus remains one of seeking to adapt the existing national media regulations to the converging media environment. This means trying to figure out how to get foreign broadcasters to agree to local licensing arrangements, or ‘deeming’ international content regulation standards to apply in the Singaporean market.

The wider challenge for Singapore as a small nation in a booming East Asian media content market is how to produce compelling content with a regional appeal. However this is not addressed through the Media Convergence Review proposals.  Moreover, Singapore faces a demographic challenge: non-citizens now account for almost 30 per cent of the population (as compared to 10 per cent in 1990); this community feels little stake in the forms of local content fostered through television broadcasting quotas and other traditional instruments of media content policies. The transformation of media policies in East Asia will be reflective of many such twists and turns, and underlying tensions.

Terry Flew is Professor of Media and Communications in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), in Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of New Media: An Introduction (Oxford, 2008), which has gone into three editions (fourth edition forthcoming), Understanding Global Media (Palgrave, 2007), and The Creative Industries, Culture and Policy (Sage, 2011). He is a leading international figure in creative industries research, having undertaking invited presentations on creative industries in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the United States and New Zealand. He has been engaged in research into creative industries and cities in China and East Asia, including the ARC Discovery-Project Internationalising Creative Industries: China, the WTO and the Knowledge-Based Economy. He has also headed research projects into citizen journalism and the role of suburbs in creative industries development, and was a member of the ARC-funded Cultural Research Network from 2005-2009.

Polity Press (UK)

The front cover of Adrian Athique’s new book is a succinct snapshot of what the contemporary media landscape in India is like – crowded! It features a photograph of Anil Ambani (Chairman of the Reliance ADAG conglomerate) surrounded by cameramen from some of the hundreds of news media companies that have emerged in India over the last decade. Ambani’s own conglomerate has interests in media alongside finance, power and telecommunications. On the surface, this would appear to be a mere symbol of India’s economic development and forces of mostly commercial nature. But what lies underneath is a web of complex relationships involving also the cultural, political and technological developments. Athique uncovers these relationships in his latest book Indian Media and provides global perspectives on India’s unique media landscape amidst a newfound global interest in this field.

The globalization buzz of the past two decades has contributed to the growth of an enormous Indian middle class. This has resulted in the emergence of a new “leisure economy” in India with media at its core. This leisure economy is complex to navigate, is massive in scale and is diverse in its elements. It is these aspects of scale, complexity and diversity that Athique uses as an overarching context to trace the evolution of Indian media from its early beginnings in colonial times.

While the first three chapters provide a historical context on the evolution of the media sector, the later chapters unpack the connections between Brand India and Digital India, and media’s role in it. Athique talks of “Digital India” as one that evolved alongside growth in sectors like ITeS (Information Technology Enabled Services) and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing). He provides the background required to understand these connections, a topic often overlooked in literature on Indian media. Athique also notes the significance of the IT infrastructure created for the ITeS and BPO sectors in enabling a base for media industries to grow as well as facilitating a robust public sphere.

The chapter on Piracy delves into the issues of intellectual property and cultural production in the context of a “two tier” model – the corporatised and the not so corporatized – which exists across different levels of commercial activity across the media industry value chain.

In the last chapter Athique concludes, “Since it is unlikely that the half-a-billion Indians living a hand-to-mouth existence are likely to join the ranks of cosmopolitan consumers any time soon, we can expect to see the continuation of both tiers of leisure infrastructure for many years to come.” This he suggests is just another reason that the one-size-fits-all model for media content may not work any longer. The book thus poses many interesting questions for researchers not just of Indian media but of global content industries.

Overall, the book is a succinct reader for anyone looking to gain a grasp of how Indian media operates in under 200 pages. It contextualises the contemporary media landscape from film to news to online media and tackles all the relevant topics. A must read for those starting media studies in India and a good reader for those outside to gain insights about the Indian media’s unique place in a globalized world.

Vijay Anand Selvarajan is a PhD Student in the Creative Industries faculty of Queensland University of Technology. His research examines tensions between formal and informal economies and established and emergent creative industries business models in India’s film industry. He also keenly tracks the development of Creative Industries Policy in the rest of South Asia.