The conditions composing, and composed by, these labouring subjects pose many questions for discussions on the self-valorising possibilities for the creative worker in Shanghai, but also more generally. The processes of subjectivation that give rise to this workforce are complex. They are entangled in currents of desire and self-organisation, self-governance and entrepreneurialism. Within more radical European political discourses on such labour configurations, reference is made to a particular trajectory of praxes and concepts that are predicated on collective and common struggle and agitation. It is not surprising that within Shanghai, as in contemporary Western circuits, these fail to resonate within current structures. Furthermore, the Shanghainese context throws up considerable difficulties to their translation.
Given these difficulties, how might it be possible to think about self-valorisation in contemporary Shanghainese creative and knowledge labour practices? It is my intention to open a space for discussion. I propose that what is needed are re-conceptualisations of self-valorisation that address the opportunistic leverages produced in the spaces of capital. These require alternate vocabularies to those Eurocentric definitions of resistance and refusal. They require observation of emerging social and labour mobilisations from perspectives that accommodate the microcosms of the everyday and that traverse to more visible, common expressions, paying attention to those sites usually forgotten or dismissed by political activisms. At the same time, the multiplication of autonomies and complicities through the multiplication of different kinds of labouring roles and subjects, needs to be accounted for. So do the ambivalences these entail, for instance the appropriation of self-organisation by capital, and a willing absorption of technologies of valorisation into all spheres of social and bio-political life.
I would therefore like to encourage reflection on questions such as: can there be a non-collective refusal? Can autonomy occur in complicity with the state? If we answer no, does this mean that these gestures and social assemblages cannot be understood as political? How can we formulate social and political radicality in a city such as Shanghai? And moreover, how can we contemplate these questions underpinned by circuits of creative, knowledge and innovative production?
The creative, cultural and knowledge sectors have garnered much attention from both the academy and state institutions. Much of this has focused on the creative and cultural industries, and while the labour constellations I am including exceed these narrow definitions, it is helpful to set the scene for the questions at hand.
The last decade saw an acceleration of a ‘new economy’ of creative discourses and industries in China. This was in part to do with the increased promotion of non-manufacturing and service sectors in many of the more developed cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Suzhou, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Changsha and Guangzhou. Within this shift, creative industries were framed as a means by which to ‘upgrade the economic structure’.[1] This coincided with state development of commercial creative industry zones and public spaces. The past ten years also witnessed an expansion in creatively focused higher education, with hundreds of thousands of students majoring in fields like animation, game design and advertising, aggressively encouraged by the Chinese government. This was supported by positive perceptions of the economic viability of entrepreneurial ventures, toward a vision of strong Chinese socio-economic growth through an individualisation of the labour sectors.
Despite stringent censorship on internet communications by the state, the access to pirated software, peer 2 peer and social networking sites played a large role in the explosion of the creative fields, not only in the distributive capacities for creative talent and marketing, but also in the production, circulation and consumption of creative subcultural life worlds, for instance the independent music and arts, design, and fashion industries. According to the blog China Youth Watch, which sells itself as ‘catching the pulse of China youth’:
'China sees not only a growing supply of creative products/contents but also a huge size of creativity-seekers in the young generation. There’s the saying all the artistic youth in China gather on Douban (author note: one of the largest online communities in China with about 10 million registered users, as of late 2009). Whatever ‘cool stuff’ you are talking about, you are assured to find at least one group on it'.[2]
Obviously there are commonalities in the commodification of social labour regardless of its sites of articulation. Whether in Asia or Europe what is primarily capitalised upon is artistic innovation in the form of imaginative and affective relationalities. This is what drives consumer desire, made visible through social networks and communicative faculties – the becoming labour of language and empathy. It has been noted, however, that while creative fields in the West are imbued with histories and fantasies of the liberated artist and the transcendence of aesthetics, this is not the case in China. Peculiar also to the development of the cultural and creative fields in China is an intense symbiosis of state and corporate apparatuses. The tension between, on the one hand, mass collective labour and economic expansion and on the other, individuation and self-expression, is also worthy of note given the historical conditions of Chinese communist labour regimes. These aspects grate against European understandings of creative labour, and antagonise any easy translation of political vocabularies trans-contextually.
Within China, Shanghai is claimed to have ‘by far the most ambitious creative industries programme’ and as ‘the most “western” city in China on its own admission, is thus set to take the lead in the creative industries’.[3] This is seen in the sharp increase in arts infrastructures: there are more than 80 creative clusters, compounds or zones reconfigured to generate and reiterate creative businesses and lifestyles, which house over 4 000 companies and employ over 27 000 workers, according to the Shanghai Creative Industry Centre.[4] By the end of 2010 the creative industries are expected to be generating around 10% of Shanghai’s GDP.[5] Given this staggering escalation of the field since its 2005 inception, what was of interest were the new kinds of social assemblages arising from these recent labour constellations, and the trajectories of organisation and regulation that they have engendered.
These concerns infused some of the pathways of enquiry two local researchers, Han Xue, Yu Tianzheng and I undertook with workers in fields such as design, art, advertising and administration/ management. This fieldwork occurred within the frame of the Shanghai platform of the ‘Transit Labour’ project organised by Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, Soenke Zehle and myself. Questions ranged across issues of labour organisation and work, remuneration/ wage and salary, psychosomatic effects, bio-politics of welfare and living conditions, and differential movement within cities and regions. Of most interest here were some of the responses given to the issue of self-organisation in creative, knowledge, and innovative fields.
The challenges confronting self-organisation in these fields in China are not dissimilar to those in Europe. There is no framework for unionisation in the independent and freelance creative workforce, and in areas where there is a salaried system, for instance advertising or design, there appears to be minimal desire for union participation, in part due to the collusion of trade unions and the Communist government. This lack of framework may have informed the tone of responses given in Shanghai around the possibilities for collective forms of action. When asked ‘what would a strike mean to you’, one graphic designer and artist responded,
'There is no strike here, so if you are on strike you are like, hey sorry I cannot do that, and you end up probably like the clients say fuck you there’s tonnes of people that we can ask for, so that’s the problem I think there’s no work unit and those kinds of concepts here.'
The fragmentation spoken of by the designer was echoed across the interview spectrum. Similarly this was reflected in the unanimous puzzlement over popular European forms of occupation and appropriation, which had in the UK and Germany resurged over the past years within political creative networks.
Another Shanghai based artist recounted a recent event that had occurred in February 2010 in Beijing that to him resonated the most with such practices. He explained that a few years back an artist’s village had been established on a long-term contract of five to ten years. After a period of one or two years the artists were served with eviction papers. The artists, having invested much time and energy into the space refused to leave. The owners responded by cutting off power and water for four months during the winter. The artist was unsure whether many of the artists were actually inhabiting the premises, but did know that they spent a considerable amount of time there. Through this experience they were, he said, united. However one night, around 200 organised thugs came to the premises and attacked the artists. Some of them were badly injured. A high profile artist Ai Weiwei then organised a march on Tiananmen Square, which was interrupted by police. The march had the effect, however, that attention was drawn to the crime and the thugs were arrested. The artists were also compensated in the sense that they received funds to move out of the studios.
‘This’, commented the artist ‘is a protest basically, its not a strike right but this is something’. He then went on to talk about a website where artists design logos which are auctioned off for between 100-500 RMB. What this illustrated for him was the combination of fierce individualisation and atomisation, cheap labour and self-exploitation that nullified the possibilities for collective action on an everyday level. ‘Maybe strike is not working here’, he concluded, ‘there’s no strike concept because they don’t care about strike, but I think it would be great if there was a service or organisation that can deal with these issues’.
From conversations with several creative practitioners in Shanghai, it seemed that despite, or perhaps because of, the infrastructural degeneration of Beijing’s arts scene, it maintained a greater renown for the kinds of radical assemblages more recognised from a European perspective. What also became clear was that it was commonly held that Shanghai itself lacked a critical political consciousness. Many thought the aspirationationalism of those working within the metropolis undermined common action. As media and chinese cultural studies scholar Jing Wang notes in her text ‘The global reach of a new discourse: How far can “creative industries” travel?’,
'The rising ‘creative class’...have deep pockets, networking capital with the state, and a lifestyle characteristic of the nouveau riche. Totally indifferent to public issues concerning the truly socially dislocated (i.e. rural migrants) those twenty- and thirty- somethings are a species that even the most enthusiastic advocates of creative industries would find difficult to romanticize'.[6]
At the same time however, some arts practitioners were far more ambivalent. One instigator of the self-organised creative space Xindanwei pinpointed this so-called political lack as something deeply historical and structural, and highlighted the problems of a direct translation or comparison with Western systems, stating
'I wouldn’t say that Shanghai is politically indifferent, its just those people compared to the West are still quite small. I mean this is quite normal when you have a country that’s been censored for a long time and has a planned economy and people don’t really have too much of a sense of expressing ideas, but its coming, definitely. If you check twitter you have many followers from Shanghai and every day they are talking about politics'.
This consideration is not omitted by Wang though, who also reflects ‘how do we begin to envision a...discussion of something like creative industries in a country where creative imagination and content are subjugated to active state surveillance?'.[7] The issue raised by the artist and Wang here is central as it lays bare this symbiosis of state, capital and creativity so prevalent in China and especially in Shanghai, which antagonises Eurocentric vocabularies of self-valorisation and refusal. The Xindanwei space, for instance, describes itself as self-organised and makes associative claims to underground activism. At the same time it maintains a biometric access system and defines itself as a social enterprise, a socially driven organisation that uses market strategies and structures to achieve a social goal. The organiser we spoke to was candid about its operation. When we asked about the intersections between culture and commerce, she recounted a story concerning the model of organisation they desired. ‘A meeting’, she told us ‘was held with supporters of the space to gauge their opinions. Half of the group recommended the discourse around co-working and collaboration be dropped to limit confusion in favour of positioning the space as a service or business centre. The other half recognised the 'competitive advantage' of the space being its uniqueness and its distinction from conventional models. This difference’, she said, ‘is what allows Xindanwei to fill a niche in the market, because such spaces are almost non-existent in Shanghai and this is why it attracts interesting discussion and debate not found elsewhere’.
The majority of creative workers that we spoke to conceived of themselves as politically engaged. Given the events recounted here, what kinds of social and organisational assemblages are occurring in these fields? How do these navigate the ambivalences thrown up by the importation of Western labour models and discourses? The intense capitalisation of social, linguistic and affective relations means self-organisation and self-governance are mechanisms for both autonomy and complicity. In China where the state colludes so thoroughly with capital, the scene is even more fraught. If the above situations sit awkwardly within our formulations of political criticality, do they become void? Where might we see potential in ambivalence? Is there a way to read aspiration beyond capitalist accumulation? And how might we begin to think of vocabularies more sensitised to agitational, messy, aspirational and individuated gestures that are both autonomous and complicit? These are but some of the questions that need to be asked when considering the modes of subjectivation producing, and produced by, China’s creative, knowledge and innovative workers.
[1] http://chinayouthology.com/blog/?p=355
[2] Ibid
[3] Justin O’Conner and Gu Xin. 2006. ‘A new modernity?: The arrival of ‘creative industries in China’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 9(3): 281.
[4] http://www.scic.gov.cn/english/article/Article_Show.asp?ArticleID=75
[5] http://www.hktdc.com/info/mi/a/imn/en/1X005I6C/1/International-Market-News/Creative-Industries-In-Shanghai-Turn-To-Abandoned-Industries.htm
[6] Jing Wang. 2004. ‘The global reach of a new discourse: How far can ‘creative industries’ travel?’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 7(1): 17.
[7] Ibid: 13.
