MCLC: precarious state of creativity in China (2)

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
precarious state of creativity in China (2)
From: Sean Macdonald <smacdon2005 at gmail.com>
This is a very detailed description of media industries in the PRC and I would not want to be overly reductive. However, as the article mentions, outsourcing has been going on for at least two decades.  For example, animation studios in China have had plenty of opportunity to develop their own styles outside of serving as outsourcing studios for production or post-production houses. Blockbusters and video games are just the latest type of media production to engage global producers. Simply put, this process has been in motion for a sufficient period to allow Chinese producers to produce the way they want to and for the audiences they want to target. Possessing the knowledge is not the issue. “Creativity” is an interesting term for media production.  The state has been fond of tossing around the term innovation (chuangxin 创新). Is it a euphemism? I ask because although I’ve read a few articles by researchers in the PRC on this topic, I haven’t found a very satisfying definition. They seem to have been talking about this idea even back in the 1960s
The European Enlightenment is often used as a trope for all those Western things like liberal democracy, critical thinking etc. But as an umbrella term, it deserves attention, especially if it is used to construct a contrasting generalization about, let’s say, cultural production in China, including media production. In his articulation of the avant-garde in the nineteenth century in France, Pierre Bourdieu was fairly clear that there was this other type of writing (and art) he referred to as bourgeois that did not engage in the same sort of critical engagement with history. For Bourdieu this other kind of writing and cultural production had a completely different attitude to its own value in the market.
The European Enlightenment represented one type of knowledge for knowledge’s sake that gave birth to the university as a quasi-autonomous institution which produced scientists who did pure research without worrying about who funded what and why. I have been trying to get in touch with that scientist lately. People say he is very enlightening.
Sean
by denton.2 at osu.edu on September 26, 2014
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center  
To stop receiving these emails, click here.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20140926/ac8d46a5/attachment-0001.html>