Labour, Policy, and Ideology in East Asian Creative Industries

Teri Silvio, Lily H. Chumley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000448931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

This book addresses some of the questions that have been brought to light by the varied experiences of culture industry workers and consumer publics across East Asia over the past decade.

For over twenty years, the creative industries have been seen as the engine driving global economic transformation, as a way out of the dilemmas of de-industrialization, and as key to the projection of national soft power. The chapters in this book cover the former 'Tiger Economies' of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as Japan and China, and focus on a number of different industries – cinema, television, graphic design, fashion, and literature. The authors include sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars, who approach the topics of creative work, government policy, and entrepreneurial strategy from a variety of perspectives. The chapters examine the varied political, economic, and social structures that influence the development of creative industries within the region and reveal how the careers of creative industry workers in different cities and different industries can vary. They also show how the development of the creative industries can affect many aspects of society, including city planning, policing, democratic politics, and ethnic and national identities.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique.

1 Introduction: After creativity: labour, policy, and ideology in East Asian creative industries

Teri Silvio

For over 20 years, the creative industries have been seen as the engine driving global economic transformation, a way out of the dilemmas of de-industrialization, and as key to the projection of national ‘soft power’ (Nye 1990), that is, non-military geopolitical influence. Some of the industries often placed in this category have histories of a century or more (e.g., cinema, advertising), while some are much newer (e.g., software programming), but the category itself, and the policies around it, are transforming them all.

The term ‘creative industries’ (along with related terms like ‘creative economy’, ‘creative class’ and ‘creative cities’) emerged in the UK and US from the 1990s through the early 2000s, and by the mid-2000s had been translated and taken up by governments throughout the world, along with new government agencies, public-private partnerships, policies, infrastructure projects and educational programmes aimed at developing national creative industries. Definitions of the creative industries, practices through which creativity is supposedly manifested, and policies designed to encourage creativity have diversified with the globalisation of the discourse. As Kong et al. (2006) discovered, governments in Asia consulted American and European creative economy gurus such as Richard Florida and John Howkins, but each one adapted their terms and suggestions in different ways. South Korea, for example, made massive investments in infrastructure and support for the cinema and music industries, which many credit for the global success of the Korean Wave. The earlier, and continuing, success of Japanese media products, in contrast, has occurred with relatively little government support.

After more than a decade, we can see that in East Asia, as in the US and Europe, the implementation of policies to develop creative industries and creative cities have had some unanticipated results. These range from the opening up of a space for openly LGBT-owned and operated businesses to flourish in Singapore, where colonial antisodomy laws still exist (Yue 2007), to work in design, advertising, and architecture being seen as such a reliable pathway from the working to the middle class in the People’s Republic of China that parents now force their children to spend years arduously preparing for hyper-competitive art school admission tests (Chumley 2016).

This issue of Culture, Theory and Critique addresses some of the questions that have been brought to light by the varied experiences of culture industry workers and consumer publics across East Asia over the past decade. The papers cover the former ‘tiger economies’ of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as Japan and the PRC, and one paper looks at the organisation of media co-productions among China, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Australia. They focus on aesthetic labour in a number of different industries – cinema, television, graphic design, fashion and literature, as well as government policy and business strategy. Read together, these papers show how diverse the political, economic and social structures are that influence the development of creative industries within the region, and how different the conditions for production and consumption of creative industry products may be, both between different countries and cities, and for different industries.

The papers here draw on a wide range of academic disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, literary criticism and art history. They are in dialogue with the body of inter-disciplinary work on the creative industries that has emerged over the past two decades, with research based on the situation in North America and Europe, and with research within East Asia. One of our purposes in bringing these papers together is to go beyond the goal of provincialising or expanding ‘Western theory’, although of course the papers do, in different ways, try to achieve that. Like last year’s issue on Queer Asia as Critique (Culture, Theory and Critique vol. 58, issue 2, ed. Howard Chiang and Alvin Wong), we aim to use ‘Asia as Method’ (Chen 2010). We want to show not only how conditions in different East Asian contexts challenge influential theories of creativity and its relationship to the global economy, but also how insights that arise from studying and comparing creative industries and creative work in those sites can lead to new theories of the current global condition that can be productively applied across contemporary cultures. Here I want to outline a few themes that draw the papers in this issue into dialogue with each other.

Creative industries and governmentality

One of Richard Florida’s most influential propositions in his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, was that the development of a ‘creative class’ of workers requires the creation of environments that attract innovative, risk-taking people. The cities in the US that attract a high concentration of creative workers and creative businesses, he argued, are those which encourage diversity and openness, including a vibrant experimental arts scene. The correlation between tolerance and diversity and the creative industries has been challenged by the success of new creative industries in countries like the PRC and Singapore, where governments strictly regulate many aspects of citizens’ lives, and artists are regularly censored.¹ Several papers in this issue attempt to take a more nuanced look at the relationship between government surveillance and the creative industries by looking beyond the question of how artists negotiate with censors to the larger context of relations among the creative industries, government regulation, and the public sphere.

Ju Oak Kim’s paper looks at this question most directly, by exploring one of the many scandals that led to the candlelight protests that brought down the administration of Park Geun-Hye. Like the three previous presidents of South Korea, Park strongly promoted the creative industries, and encouraged the population to take pride in the global success of the Korean Wave. When it was revealed that Park had kept a blacklist of artists unfriendly to her administration, and worked to exclude them from government and private support, many ordinary South Koreans were outraged. Kim uses Foucault’s distinction between sovereignty and governmentality to argue that Korean artists’ and consumers’ emotional investment in the creative industries is deeply tied to ideas of creative work as both actualisation of authentic national and personal identity and as a public good.

The global success of Japanese media products, unlike Korean ones, has occurred largely without government aid, but the government has been eager to use that success to promote national pride and international tourism, often without understanding these products’ subcultural appeal (Daliot-Bul 2009; Miller 2011; Choo 2012). Kukhee Choo’s paper examines another, more indirect way, in which the government of Tokyo has been inspired by creative industry products. Choo analyses a popular 2007 anime, Coil – A Circle of Children, a futuristic fantasy in which an augmented reality environment is accessed through special glasses and policed by armed surveillance robots indifferent to human life. She argues that the anime prefigures the city government’s installation of ubiquitous surveillance cameras in Akihabara, the neighbourhood which is the centre of anime/manga fan subculture. The mixed utopian and dystopian aspects of the anime’s fantasy world mirror the ambivalent stance of the Tokyo government towards Akihabara and its subcultures, simultaneously seeking to promote them as a tourist attractions and purify and police them.

Teri Silvio’s paper, on how two Singaporean graphic novelists represent creative labour and labour conditions, also moves beyond the well-researched issue of how Singaporean artists negotiate government censorship to focus on how these artists redefine creativity both in tension with and incorporating the ideology of profit-oriented pragmatism that the government has promoted since the 1960s.

Nation branding by and for whom?

Another theme that runs through several of the papers here is national branding. Over the past decades, creating a brand image for the nation has increasingly been seen as critical to projecting soft power overseas and instilling national pride domestically, and developing creative industries and creative cities is seen as critical to the nation branding process. Adina Zemanek’s paper addresses this issue directly, looking at the motivations and aesthetics of three Taiwanese graphic designers doing ‘grassroots’ nation branding. Zemanek’s paper is in dialogue with a growing body of research, much of it done in Eastern Europe (Graan 2016; Kaneva 2012), which compares the nation and city branding strategies of governments with those of local residents, much of which finds that bureaucrats’ ideas of what will attract foreigners often clashes with what citizens actually identify with. Zemanek finds that while Taiwan’s official tourism bureaus and city planners focus on displaying traditional high culture and globally generic infrastructure projects (such as high end shopping malls), grassroots creative workers prefer to create products that reflect the heterogeneity of contemporary urban life, choosing parodic and bricolage aesthetics over the serious and purified. One aspect of Taiwanese design that Zemanek notes is its emphasis on the everyday, on the nostalgic rather than the antique or hyper-modern. In this, independent Taiwanese designers seem quite similar to those in Hong Kong (Chu 2012; Ling 2012). The papers by Choo, Kim, and Silvio may also be read as addressing the contradictions between bureaucrats’ and creative workers’ ideas about the fraught relationships among creative industry work, government-led nation branding initiatives, and the affective politics of national identity, about what gets displayed and what gets hidden in different types of creative projects and products.

Entrepreneurial careers and the gig economy

By now a fair amount of research has been done on how the transformation of culture industries into creative industries is changing the conditions and meanings of labour in the arts. Several aspects of labour in the creative industries have been noted by researchers in North America, the UK, and East Asia. These include the spread of precarious, contract-to-contract freelance labour from the fine arts to related fields (design, architecture) and beyond; the increasing lack of separation between work and play, amateur and professional; the increasingly utilitarian value assigned to artistic labour and competition based on narrowing criteria; and the increasing class and geographical separation between creative workers who design products and the supposedly ‘uncreative’ workers who manufacture them (for example, see McRobbie 1998; Ross 2003, 2009; Hesmondhalgh 2007; Hartley 2008; Pang 2012; Win 2014).

In Japan, ethnographic work has been done on the more secure but still overworked and underpaid labour of animation workers and on the flows of aesthetic elements and personnel between fandoms and professional manga publishers and animation studios (Condry 2013). In China, creative industries research has focused on the way that international intellectual property law and Chinese workers draw different boundaries between what is ‘original’ and what is a ‘copy’ (Pang 2012; Wong 2013), and on the way that creative workers are trained and their professional self-styling (Chumley 2016).

In this volume, the papers by Zemanek and Silvio give some examples of individual creative workers’ motivations and how they manage their careers in the marginal gig economies of Taiwan and Singapore. These designers and graphic novelists see their work as intimately tied to projects of constructing new national identities. Audrey Yue’s paper looks at the career of Pauline Chan, a ‘Vietnam-born, Hong Kong-educated, US-trained, Australian film director, television actress, and media producer’, who has accessed what Yue calls her ‘diaspora advantage’ to create new cooperative projects and enterprises between Australia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and the PRC. Yue challenges the usual national frame in which creative industries are studied, and draws attention to the way that individual creative workers are negotiating not only with national creative industry policies but also with changing international relations and immigration policies.

The artists studied in these three papers are among the most privileged of creative workers, who have not only achieved a relatively rare degree of economic success within the gig economy, but also national and even international recognition. Nellie Chu’s paper provides an important counterbalance to these papers, looking at workers within China’s creative economy who must struggle to be recognised as ‘creative’ at all. Her ethnography of Guangzhou’s Xi Fang Hang wholesale fast fashion market focuses on how the discourse of creativity works as an arena of contestation between migrant entrepreneurs and local building managers. Designating clothing designs and how they are selected and displayed as either original or copied becomes a weapon in struggles over the distribution of the enormous risks of an unpredictable and constantly changing global market.

Chu’s insight here resonates throughout this issue. Creativity has been defined as an industrial resource, a quality of individuals, groups, or things, and a universal human potential. But as these papers read together show, it might be best to treat it as a contested and floating signifier. The creative industries, creative economy and creative class are likewise not categories that can be deduced from empirical research, but concepts that are constructed and reconstructed through their deployment (in both words and deeds). Creativity is a concept evolving through dialogues among differently positioned actors within and between industries, governments and publics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

References

Chen, Kuan-hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Choo, Kukhee. 2012. ‘Nationalizing “Cool”: Japan’s Global Promotion of the Content Industry’. In Nissim Otmazgin and Eyal Ben-Ari (eds), Popular Culture and the State in East and Southeast Asia. London: Routledge, 85–105.

Chu, Stephen Yiu-wai. 2012. ‘Brand Hong Kong: Asia’s World City as Method?’ In Chan Kwok-bun (ed), Hybrid Hong Kong. London and New Yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: After creativity: labour, policy, and ideology in East Asian creative industries
• 2 Korea’s blacklist scandal: governmentality, culture, and creativity
• 3 Cool governance: Japan’s ubiquitous society, surveillance, and creative industries
• 4 Nation branding in contemporary Taiwan: a grassroots perspective
• 5 Representing creative labour and identity in Singaporean graphic novels: Sonny Liew and Troy Chin
• 6 The ‘diaspora advantage’ of Pauline Chan (1956–): from multicultural filmmaker to cultural broker
• 7 The paradoxes of creativity in Guangzhou, China’s wholesale market for fast fashion
• Index