Cultural policy between the state and the market: regulation, creativity and contradiction

Abstract

China’s spectacular economic development has altered radically not only the accepted understanding of the relationship between cultural work and the state, but also the social foundation of state cultural policy. Cultural industries are subject to a set of new regulatory forces. This essay discusses the emergence of these new forces that govern cultural work and considers how cultural practice must respond to both the state’s political demands and market imperatives. We will pay special attention to the new conditions under which the state ideology is forced to limit its traditional role and to seek to assert its legitimacy and authority in new forms. Thirty years after the reforms, it is no longer possible to insist on the total authority of cultural policy emanating from the state ideology. In addressing contradictions in the management of cultural work brought about by the reforms, this essay will consider challenges faced by the Chinese government, including such issues as national cultural identity, protection of regional and minority art forms, social responsibility of art and the tension between high and commercial culture.

Keywords:

• cultural policy and governmentality
• socialism and marketisation
• cultural industries and cultural market

Notes

1. The discourse of China ‘going capitalist’ began with President Jiang Zemin’s speech to mark the 80th anniversary the CCP’s founding in 2001, in which he for the first time announced private entrepreneurs‘ eligibility for the party’s membership (Jiang 2001). The New York Times reported on the speech the following day under the title: ‘China’s Leader Urges Opening Communist Party to Capitalist’ (Smith 2001).

2. Twenty years later, Theodore W. Adorno revisited the concept and elaborated on it thus: ‘The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. The individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit into each other, ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap. This is made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as well as by economic and administrative concentration’ (Adorno 1975, p. 12).

3. Li Changchun, China’s chief cultural administrator, argues for the need to guide cultural production and to ‘maintain the unity of the ideological, educational, artistic, and aesthetic nature of literature and art’; he believes that the government should ‘resist the trend in manufacturing low and vulgar cultural products’, ‘promote masterpieces that respond to the demands of the masses and market’, ‘train more cultural workers, especially cultural masters, who are artistically accomplished, morally sound, and popular among the masses’ in order to ‘maximize culture’s role in setting correct social values and educating the people’ (Li 2010).