Information Policy Series. Cambridge; London: The MIT Press, 2019. xv, 296 pp. (B&W photos.) US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-262-04317-5.
Zoning China provides a comprehensive, rigorous, and enthralling analysis of the development of China’s online video industry before 2014, and particularly the logic of cultural zoning in China’s audiovisual industries, according to which online video has been subject to more lenient regulation than broadcast television. Author Luzhou Li situates her analysis of online video within a much broader historical—and intermedial—background, going as far back as the 1930s and 1940s while focusing primarily on the post-reform era. To put together her analysis, she draws on a wide array of methods and data, including participant observation of trade fairs, interviews with industry professionals and regulators, and discourse analysis of media texts. The way she weaves her informants’ riveting life histories into the political and economic analysis of China’s creative industries not only adds to the appeal of the book, but also vividly shows how different actors resourcefully navigate the complicated and evolving regulatory regime in China and interact with broader political and economic forces to co-shape the online video industry.
Li’s analysis contributes to a nuanced understanding of the “guerrilla policy” style that characterizes China’s cultural policy making. A central question she tackles throughout the book is why the regulation of online video is lax, investigating whether it is due to the regulators’ lack of will or to a lack of capability. Weighing plausible explanations on both sides, she leans more towards the former. To her, multiple factors contribute to the formation of the dual cultural sphere, including the different norms, expectations, and audiences associated with television vis-à-vis online video, as well as bureaucratic rivalry in a fragmentary regulatory regime; yet, most fundamentally, it is the Party-state’s attempt to balance economic development and ideological control that gives rise to cultural zoning, a governmental logic that has been revisited and revised since 2014 with the tightening of China’s ideological governance.
The book is organized according to chronological order and the dual structure of China’s audiovisual industries. Chapter 2 takes a historical detour and sketches out the transformation of China’s cultural sphere in broad strokes. Chapter 3 focuses on television drama production after 2000, when it became increasingly market-oriented due to cultural reform and the influx of private capital. The rest of the book concentrates primarily on the development of online video in China. The author traces the shifting configuration of telecommunications infrastructure, investment capital, and government regulations; in particular, Li examines the distinct trajectory of online video’s development, which is bound up with piracy and online spoofing culture. Li then looks at the changing copyright regulations that have led online video sites to focus more on the acquisition of intellectual property rights and in-house (co-)production. The book ends with an acknowledgement of the tightening ideological control in the cultural sphere after 2014, leaving room for future inquiries into the post-2014 development of online video.
Li is very cautious in her invocation of the “duality” of cultural production in China; she perceptively maps out the interactions between the relatively formal and informal circuits of media production and, in the concluding chapter, points to the subtle variation within the broadcast television sector. That said, the emphasis on such duality understandably trades off some attention to the heterogeneity within each of the two domains, especially that of the online video industry. With the formalization of the industry and the concomitant concentration of ownership in the hands of a few tech giants, the extent to which online video still reflects a grassroots ethos is open to discussion; in fact, it depends on which kind of online video(s) one is looking at. Against the mainstreaming of professionally generated content, newer niches and segments within the industry have taken shape and have continued to evolve. On the other hand, as broadcast television stations proactively ventured into the online sphere and created digital spin-offs, their digital productions have increasingly converged, both aesthetically and otherwise, with those made by professionalized online video sites. The continuity between broadcast television and online video warrants further scrutiny in the analysis, which would help strengthen the connection between chapters 2 through 3 and chapters 4 through 7.
Moreover, the fascinating title and cover of the book (an arresting snapshot of urban China juxtaposing skyscrapers and traditional-style bungalows) carry strong geographical and spatial connotations. However, the material spatiality and geographical implication of cultural zoning, albeit mentioned here and there, as in the analogy between cultural and economic zoning tactics, are not adequately addressed in the analysis. The formation of creative clusters within a handful of Chinese metropolises is, of course, not simply a function of national and local policy support, but of the market allocation of resources leveraged by tech giants and aspiring individuals. The geographical distribution of creative clusters further exacerbates the regional disparities in economic development. This trend plays out not only in online video, but also in other emerging sectors such as live-streaming and short-form video.
Overall, this book makes a timely contribution to existing studies of online video and visual culture in China and beyond. Comprehensive in scope and rich in detail, it lays the groundwork for further analysis of the entanglement between Chinese politics and popular culture after the mid-2010s.
Sheng Zou
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor