key: cord-0060072-1jv17ecm
authors: Craig, David; Lin, Jian; Cunningham, Stuart
title: Policy and Governance
date: 2021-02-26
journal: Wanghong as Social Media Entertainment in China
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-65376-7_2
sha: 1f265a0abc785788ab2dc98fb34db4269579dfd7
doc_id: 60072
cord_uid: 1jv17ecm

This chapter builds on the core themes of the cultural, the creative, and the social by demonstrating how policies embodying distinctive Chinese interpretations of western concepts of cultural industries and creative industries have been deployed. Cleaving to a traditional view of cultural industries, China has developed a more assertive cultural nationalism, while at the same time embracing the industrial modernization offered by creative industries policies including intellectual property rectification and growing global brands. But it is China’s pivotal embrace of the full potential of digital platformization of economy and society that marks Chinese policy and governance as world leading—both for its integration of social amelioration objectives as well as a concerning level of social surveillance.

As we noted in Chap. 1, governance refers to not only state-based policy and regulations, but the larger system of control by multiple stakeholders in any system. Examples of governance in the SME and wanghong industries would include practices of self-regulation by platforms and creators, often in response to or threat of state regulation. Other stakeholders include legacy media and advertising as well as intermediary firms operating between platforms, creators, the state, and affiliated industries. In this chapter, we will historicize and contextualize governance that contributes to the development of the wanghong industry and its differences from the SME industries of the West.

We first focus on the evolution of formal state policy frameworks vital to our understanding of the governance of wanghong. We historicize the analysis as the base layer, conceptualized as "cultural industries", is accreted by the terminology of "cultural and creative industries" and then by "digital creative industries". But our social theme is also key to understanding the significance of both the pivotal thirteenth 5-year Plan and its use of digital platformization to address both social amelioration and the increased governance focus on social morality and social surveillance. We then compare critically in some detail western SME platform governance. In principle, there is a stark contrast between western ideas of "governing at a distance" (Rose and Miller 2010) and, as we noted in Chap. 1, core information media and communication that have always been conceptualized in Chinese principles of governance as part of the state's political apparatus, having the function of propaganda arms of the state and party. In practice, however, the two systems, when compared, are full of contradiction as well as difference in their response to similar themes of cultural, industrial, and social disruption.

Given the structure of China's polity, state-based interventions are far more direct, dramatic, and consequential both supporting and constraining the wanghong industry. According to Yu Hong and Eric Harwitt (2020) , China's industrial policies help to protect and promote the tech sector, the growth of digital economy, and a competitive platform landscape. Increasingly, as well, policies have featured ever-increasing restraint that signals the return of social ideology to "guide" and mold online expression and behavior. As outlined in our case study of China's livestreaming sector later in the chapter, wanghong platforms and creators have become focal points in the increasing tensions between the cultural politics and economic ambitions of digital China.

What is the analytical status of policy documentation of the sort we encounter in some detail in this chapter? While, in general, there are no necessary guarantees in liberal systems that policy papers and even official government pronouncements can and will be enacted due to the always contestable nature of democratic politics and public administration, in China it is different. Official policy discourse, especially at the national level, has provenance as a much more likely guide to what will be implemented, as lower level actors vie with each other to interpret and enact what is announced. "Cultural IndustrIes", "Cultural and CreatIve IndustrIes", "dIgItal CreatIve IndustrIes"

With its core being the production of symbolic meaning and the dissemination of representations, the wanghong economy first of all falls into the governing framework of cultural industries. As outlined in Chap. 1, cultural industries have been regarded as a fundamental framework for understanding and supporting the established industries in this domain. Rather than the traditional Western cultural policy perspective that places the arts at the core of the cultural industries, the Chinese Communist Party places the broadcast and print information media at the core of China's cultural industries. The Chinese authorities have always tended, especially at the national and supreme Party level, to make a distinction between the cultural (or culture-invoking its Marxist heritage) industries-which are core propaganda outlets, and the creative industries (which are often characterized as small and medium enterprises typically outside the stateowned sector). There is also a distinction between an emphasis on cultural industries at the national and an allowance of the use of creative industries at the provincial level, especially in the Shanghai and southern China regions. Additionally, pragmatics dictates that the cover-all phrase cultural and creative industries is often used. But, as we saw in Chap. 1, long-term, structural changes in economy and society, explicitly pursued at the highest level of economic and social policy in China, set the stage for a strategic adoption of the notion of creative industries-now that they can be tied much more closely to the digital economy-thus the "digital creative industries". This thoroughly blended use of concepts is definitely policy the Chinese way.

Cultural and media creativity (文化创意 wenhua chuangyi) and information technological innovation (科技创新 keji chuangxin) have both been integrated into the national agenda to transform the national economy "from made in China to created in China" (Keane 2007) . The Chinese central government officially adopted the cultural industries as one of the national strategies for economic development in early 2000. Dozens of official promotional and planning policy documents have been issued in the follow decades. In 2003, the Ministry of Culture released Opinions on Supporting and Promoting the Development of Cultural Industries (Ministry of Culture 2003) . This document defines the cultural industries as "the commercial sectors that produce cultural products and provide cultural services" (Ministry of Culture 2003). As commercial and market-driven sectors, the "cultural industries" (文化产业 wenhua chanye) are distinguished from the "cultural institutions" (文化事业 wenhua shiye) which are non-profit public enterprises and mostly financed by the government. Both the cultural industries and the cultural institutions are crucial constituents of Chinese socialist cultural development (文化建设 wenhua jianshe). Art and theatrical performance, the film and television industry, the audio-video industry, cultural entertainment, cultural tourism, the internet cultural industry, publishing, art education and artwork trading were identified as the primary sectors of Chinese cultural industries (Ministry of Culture 2003).

These documents also promoted enterprise reform in Chinese stateowned cultural entities, formulating a series of regulatory and preferential policies to incubate "competitive market entities" including not only the state-owned but also private cultural enterprises, which have been touted as an indispensable constituent of the Chinese cultural industries (The State Council 2005) . Information and internet technology have been seen as a crucial driving force for the Chinese cultural economy. The new technologies, as one of the policies asserts, will not only transform and upgrade traditional cultural industries, but also give birth to cutting-edge industries such as platform and Artificial Intelligence (AI) economies, which can "develop high value-added cultural products that combine world-leading technologies and independent intellectual property with national characteristics" (The State Council 2009). Furthermore, the state has been eager to advance the export of Chinese cultural goods, the so-called "cultural going-out" (文化走 出去wenhua zouchuqu). Local artworks, exhibitions, films, television dramas, animations, internet games, publications, folk music and dance, acrobatics and other cultural products that have "national characteristics" are specifically encouraged and supported for export and international trade.

However, what distinguishes the Chinese creative industries approach from other instances is that behind the economic and commercializing discourse there is a political agenda which aligns culture and media not only with economic policy, but also with ideological control and social governance. Despite the fact that the justification for the "cultural industries" is seen to lie in its potential to contribute to the restructuring of the Chinese national economy, its authorization is also premised on the Party-State's configuration of culture as tool for social governance, or, in the official language, "socialist advanced culture" or "social benefits".

According to Wang Yongzhang, the previous director of the Cultural Industries Division at the Ministry of Culture, creativity, "the least problematic in the Western context", becomes for the Chinese party-state the "thorniest question" due to its promise of "individualism" and "creative destruction" (Wang 2004, p. 13) . This equivocal stance is evidenced by the state's reluctance to use terms like "creativity" and "creative industries" at the national level. In 2005, when "creative industries" (创意产业 chuangyi chanye) discourse travelled to China, the central government insisted on using the older term "cultural industries" (文化产业 wenhua chanye) in policy documents even while allowing provincial initiatives to go ahead under the creative industries banner. One crucial reason, according to Wang, for not using "creative industries" was that the cultural industries in China not only refer to economy and commodity, but also have an ideological character (意识形态属性 yishixingtai shuxing): "creative industries" mainly focus on design and individual creativity… if we use "creative industries" in our policy documents, there would be a risk that certain cultural sectors would fall out of the state's ideological control. (Wang 2007) Chinese officials and cultural traditionalists are suspicious of the "individualism", "change" and "creative destruction" promised by the "creativity" discourse (Wang 2004; Keane 2009 ). If in the West debates around the term "creative industries" are mainly about its latent neoliberalism and depoliticizing effects on culture and media (Galloway and Dunlop 2007; Lee 2016) , "depoliticization" also troubles the Chinese authorities but in a different way. As Wang Yongzhang's remark illustrates, the creative industries discourse is thought to overlook the "ideological character" of the cultural industries and as potentially giving rise to the decline of the state's role in ideological regulation-for social stability, national identity, and moral order (Keane 2009; Tong and Hung 2012) .

Along with the promotional policies on the cultural economy, the Chinese authorities thus continued to configure the cultural sectors "in terms of what ought to be state-owned and what could involve the private sector, and thus what sorts of content were 'safe' and what 'political'" (O'Connor and Gu 2006, p. 276) . Media and communication, as pointed out by Yuezhi Zhao (1998) , have always been regarded as part of the state apparatus, and the marketization and commercialization reform since the 1990s have been initiated by the state and constantly subject to the state monitoring and guidance (Keane 2013; Zhao 2017) . For example, although in Decisions of the State Council on the entry of non-public capital into the cultural industries (The State Council 2005), non-state investment had been allowed and supported as part of the Chinese cultural and media economy, non-state capital is still not permitted to set up independent news agencies, publishing houses and broadcasting networks for radio and television, or to conduct the import of books, journals, film, television and other audio-video products that are regarded as being of ideological importance (The State Council 2005) . These examples demonstrate that there is a very particular version of marketization reform in Chinese cultural and media sectors, known officially as the "reform of the cultural system" (文化体制改革 wenhua tizhi gaige). Within the Chinese policy framework of cultural and media industries, there is a "state discursive formation". As McGuigan (2006) states with reference to cultural policy worldwide, the state discursive formation emerges from the belief that "the modern nation-state should command the whole of society, regulate the economy and cultivate appropriate selves" and therefore cultural policy should function to "engineer the soul" of the public (McGuigan 2006, p. 36) . For contemporary China, the promotion of a commercial cultural economy is intertwined with a set of regulatory policies which aim to shape the whole cultural industries in accordance with the role of developing a national culture assigned by the party-state.

Take, for example, the two recurring discourses of "soft power" and "cultural security". The party-state has been eager to promote its national imagery to wield Chinese "soft power" on the global stage on the one hand, while it expects a conforming culture that ensures social stability and national unity on the other. Coined by Joseph Nye (1990) , soft power-the ability to influence the behavior or thinking of others through the power of attraction and ideas-has been a popular term in international diplomacy, and cultural export has been touted as its key element. This term was embraced by Chinese government in the last decade and soft power became one of the prime objectives of developing the cultural economy-through the "going-out of Chinese culture" (Keane 2010) , especially the traditional Chinese culture represented by state-approved legacy media and cultural products. According to president Xi Jinping, building Chinese soft power constitutes the Chinese Dream as the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation (Xi 2015) . At the same time, joining the WTO officially opened up China's doors to foreign popular culture such as Hollywood movies, American pop music and Korean and Japanese music waves. This cultural globalization agitates Chinese cultural traditionalists. "Cultural security" becomes a watchword for those who fear the cultural invasion of the West and the loss of Chinese identity and traditional culture.

A crucial pivot in China's rapid evolution of policy thought and praxis was the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016) (2017) (2018) (2019) (2020) . This, the quinquennial iteration of the highest-level, longer-term, policy framework, did not presage any dilution of the official, national-level, adherence to cultural industries, but it did show how integral the "digital creative industries" had become in policy development. According to the Communist Party of China (CCP) Thirteenth Five-Year Plan of China (Central Committee of the CCP 2016), the "digital creative industries", along with next generation information technology, new-energy vehicles, biotechnology, green and low-carbon technology, and high-end equipment and materials, have been recognized as strategic "emerging industries" (新兴产业xinxing chanye). Compared with the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, the development objective of the cultural industries has been renewed as "accelerating the development of modern cultural industries" (NDRC 2016, p. 130) . Online audio-visual, mobile media, digital publishing and animation and games are emphasized as key sectors for promoting the digital creative industries and the integration of culture and technology (NDRC 2016, p. 130) . One of the clear signs of a paradigm shift, as argued by Terry Flew, Xiang Ren and Yi Wang (2019) , was that the Plan's emphasis on the "digital creative industries" has superseded in terms of investment importance the previous approach of "creative clusters" that aimed at converting disused industrial spaces in urban areas to creative uses of "traditional and arts-centered" cultural sectors (Flew et al. 2019, p. 167) . The new policy is much more ambitious. It moves from repurposing legacy spaces to the goal "to build upon the clear strength in digital services industries" that can directly challenge the hegemony of the Silicon Valley internet giants. It begins to build a policy scaffolding around the plan that digital platformed, user-generated media entertainment can advance Chinese media culture "going-out" and thus dramatically shift the focus of soft power strategy.

This renewed focus on digital and platformed creative production has officially legitimized the booming wanghong economy. The affordances of wanghong platforms have allowed a great diversity of the Chinese population to become wanghong creators. (It has also, through the global penetration of Chinese platforms like TikTok, offered the wanghong experience to other-than-Chinese entertainers.) As Chaps. 5 and 6 will show, the overseas success of Chinese creators like Li Ziqi is distinguished from the previous unsuccessful going-out efforts of state-endorsed legacy media, forming an alternative path of wielding Chinese global soft power. However, as we explore in the following section, the "digital creative industries" approach does not grant immunity to wanghong industries from state regulation. The Chinese authorities have been extremely wary of the cultural disruptions that wanghong creativity might cause. As reiterated by state media, the key to a sustainable growth of wanghong economy "depends on the proper regulation of the industry" (Yang 2020)-which refers to an effective censorship and regulation of online culture.

In her field-setting book, Networking China, Yu Hong (2017a, pp. 10-13) shows the Chinese government has pledged to place information and communication at the center of the national economic restructuring plan, using information and communication technology (ICT) as industries and infrastructure to transform traditional industrial sectors. In his annual speech at the Chinese national congress in March 2015, Premier Li Keqiang announced China's "Internet +" agenda. "Internet +" is the continuation of the state's economic restructuring plan as seen in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, aiming to replace the unsustainable "export-driven", "investment-dependent" model with a "consumption-based" and "innovation-driven" economy. The new policy agenda puts the internet at the center, aiming to integrate network connectivity and the "disruptive business and managerial model" (of decentralized, private sector-focused, post-Fordist corporate management) with a wide range of traditional sectors, from manufacturing, agriculture, energy, finance and transportation to public services and education (The State Council 2015a; Hong 2017b).

The "Internet +" strategy pledges to propel a new digital economy that can foster and benefit small start-ups, entrepreneurship, and innovation. It dovetails with another policy agenda championed by the government under the name "Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation" (大众创业万众 创新 dazhong chuangxin, wanzhong chuangye) (The State Council 2015b). The official document lays out a policy to mobilize the creativity and innovative power of grassroots individuals for national economic growth and boost employment among the vast population. Similar to Internet +, Mass Entrepreneurship is designed to induce a step-change in the Chinese economy from the previous labor-and energy-intensive economy to an innovation-driven model, while it also promises to further boost employment especially among the vast population of migrant workers, college graduates, and retired soldiers (The State Council 2015b). "Internet +" thus complements the "Mass Entrepreneurship" strategy in the sense that the prosperous digital economy provides opportunities for grassroots individuals to find employment and become entrepreneurs.

Building on "Internet +" and "Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation", the central government further specifies its policy measures in Guidelines on Developing Digital Economies and Expanding Employment issued in 2018 (The State Council 2018). In this document, employment has been given primary focus in developing digital economies, which are expected to create new employment opportunities through the new digital industries including e-commerce and the platform economy. At the same time, the convergence of traditional industries with digital technologies and platform services are believed to provide new and "better" opportunities of employment and entrepreneurship to the workforce in what are bluntly described as "outdated" sectors such as agricultural and manufacturing industries (The State Council 2018).

The national agenda of "Internet +" and "Mass Entrepreneurship" has given the green light to a surging digital and platform economy. According to The 44th Survey Report-Statistical Report on Internet Development reached RMB 3810 billion, making up 20 percent of the total retail sales of consumer goods. Geographically, this thriving digital economy is not necessarily limited to the urbanized east coast and other developed regions. As disclosed by the White Paper on Chinese Digital Economy and Employment 2019 (CAICT 2019, p. 37), in 2018 there were over 9.8 million e-commerce companies located in Chinese rural areas, creating 28 million employment opportunities for local farmers. The online retail sales of agricultural products increased by 33.8 percent, to RMB 231 billion, in 2018. Less developed provinces like Anhui and Guizhou and non-coastal cities such as Chengdu, Nanjing and Wuhan have been lining up to promulgate incentive policies to promote digital industries and digital convergence. The digital economy, by state design, has the potential to break increasing spatialized disparity and inequality and contribute to a more balanced and diversified regional economic dynamic (China Internet Network Information Centre 2019, p. 74).

In 2019, the State Council issued Guidance on Promoting and Regulating the Platform Economy, the first policy issued by the central government dedicated to the promotion of the platform economy. The platform economy is celebrated as "the new productive force and momentum for economic development", believed to "optimize distribution of resources, stimulate industrial convergence, mass entrepreneurship and innovation, upgrade the industrial structure, expand the consumer market and, especially, boost employment" (The State Council 2019). According to the policy, the major tasks in developing the platform economy are to facilitate "private and social capital" in participating in the platformization of service industries, and to promote convergence between internet platforms and manufacturing and agricultural sectors. Innovation in technology and organization, participation of medium-and small-sized enterprises and development of internet infrastructure are viewed as crucial strategies.

In practice, resembling their western counterparts Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, Chinese publicly-listed internet giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, Bytedance and Baidu, together with various private company platforms such as Taobao, Didi, WeChat, Jingdong, and Toutiao, have played a dominant role in the Chinese platform economy. Operating as business intermediaries or "multisided markets" (McIntyre and Srinivasan 2017; Nieborg and Poell 2018), these platforms facilitate a massive coming-together of stakeholders-for example, advertisers, service/product providers, end-users, and audience-into their online ecosystem, in which these platform companies hold the most dominant position. It is in this vast landscape that the wanghong economy finds itself positioned in the political economy of contemporary China. At the same time, the wanghong economy also falls into the existing policy framework of cultural and creative industries, for its immanent relations to media and culture, which often leads to great controversies around its culture and precarity in business and labor practice.

As a typical component of the platform economy, wanghong can appear to be a highly disruptive influence on media and cultural industries. According to the White Paper (CAICT 2019, p. 34), platformization has contributed to 55.5 percent of the total economic growth in broadcast, television, film and recording industries. Convergence is blurring the boundary between traditional media and the rapid growth of usergenerated content production, which of course is the ground base of the wanghong industry. Short video platforms, such as TikTok and Kuaishou combined, for example, can boast a user base of over 648 million with an average usage rate at 78.2 percent (CAICT 2019, p. 35). Both traditional media companies and grassroots individuals are facilitated to start and expand their content and business on these new media platforms. Considering that the state has controlled for decades most of the traditional media sectors, the rise of the digital media platforms, especially regarding the user-centered nature of wanghong culture and economy, has the potential to impact the larger cultural market and the embedded dominance of state media and legacy cultural industries.

Moreover, enabled by the data-driven digital technologies and build-in affordances of advertising and e-commerce, the potential of the wanghong economy reaches beyond the realms of culture and technology. As we return to often in this book, wanghong phenomena have become social industries for their cultural value-symbolic meaning-but also their impact on existing social and economic relationships. First of all, the wanghong economy creates career and business opportunities for grassroots individuals to become online content producers. Wanghong creators are by no means limited to those who are educated, located in urban areas, and employed in legacy media and cultural sectors. By virtue of the integration of e-commerce and advertising affordances in video and livestreaming platforms, these diverse creators further bring financial and market opportunities to those working in the traditional sectors, such as farmers, craftsmen, and consumer goods manufacturers. Chinese livestreaming platforms, for example, have managed to attract over 500 million users in 2019 and achieved total transactions through e-commerce of over RMB 433 billion (Qianzhan 2020) .

Together, platform companies, creators and diverse stakeholders form a platform-dominated network system-multisided markets in which places, localities, things, and people are connected in a commercial and dynamic online ecology. Within this ecology, the wanghong economy seems to have the capacity to transform various local places into mediaspaces (Couldry and McCarthy 2004) , personalities and identities into cultural commodities, for the production, consumption as well as exploitation of wanghong culture. It not only fits into the state's agenda for cultural industries and digital creative industries, but also in a larger sense the framework of social governance, exemplified by the wanghong economy's contribution to employment promotion as well as the recent "poverty alleviation" agenda. For example, livestreaming has been widely used by rural wanghong creators to sell products on Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Pinduoduo. In April 2020, hundreds of Chinese local county mayors even joined these livestreaming shows to help sell agricultural products, whose sales were heavily impacted by the COVID-19 (Wang and Xiong 2020) . Meanwhile, given their infrastructural role in supporting the state-led Social Credit System (Liang et al. 2018) , the immense popularity secures a maximum accumulation of individuals' online data and private information, which contribute to the state' digital surveillance of Chinese social and economic lives. sMe and wanghong governanCe CoMpared: sMe SME governance in the West has been historically shaped by United States liberal democratic dispositions and frameworks that celebrated American tech innovation and allowed the industry distinct freedoms. This is an extreme form of governing at a distance. The most fundamental United States disposition is the guarantee of free speech enshrined in the First Amendment. A crucial instrument of such governance is the DMCA rules of Safe Harbor in the 1996 Telecommunication Act, through which platforms were absolved of governance oversight of the content they carried, subject to minimum conditions. Key United States Federal agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission have therefore taken a studied hands-off approach to much online culture and practice. There has been a radical gap between tech affordance and growth and the social and cultural outcomes generated around such growth. Additionally, an equally hands-off approach to platform competition has resulted, through aggressive acquisition strategies, in United States platforms exercising unprecedented monopolistic or oligopolistic power. As we will see, especially in the next chapter, China's platform economy has a greater competitive dynamic than the supposed leading light of western capitalist achievement, the United States tech sector.

For a good part of the platform era, the United States liberal-innovation model has been adopted de facto or de jure in most western jurisdictions. But that has been changing with increasing intensity. Social media entertainment culture and creators, used to managing in a largely unregulated environment, have been neglected, overlooked, and often deeply damaged as a range of new concerns and a consequent threatened and actual "new regulatory era" (Cunningham and Craig 2019, pp. 266-287) has been visited upon them.

An increasing range of global critical concerns about the political and socio-cultural disruption wrought by tech, including the SME platforms, has resulted in a "techlash" (Smith 2018) . Tech firms and owners have been rightfully criticized for their anti-trust violations, laissez faire attitudes towards self-regulation, and repeated but ineffectual apologies for their transgressive platforms practices in violation of socio-political norms. In addition to, and arguably as a direct consequence of, the consolidation of tech and platform power, an ever-multiplying array of concerns have emerged over privacy, data mining and algorithmic non-transparency, hate speech, cyber-bullying, and the promotion and monetization of extremist content, the failure of AI content moderation leading to the exploitation and psychological damage of human curators, and ongoing violations of children's regulatory policy. When you get an alignment of interests between notoriously conservative legacy media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and radically left-wing politicians like United States Senator Elizabeth Warren-both of which call on anti-trust policy initiatives to break up "big tech" (Stevens 2019)-you know you are in uncharted, tumultuous territory.

In the wake of the "techlash", United States platforms, including SME, have been faced with heightened, if often poorly conceived, regulatory scrutiny (Levy 2019). Numerous federal agencies have geared up to attend to public concerns but the cultural and commercial interests of creators have been ignored and their sustainability threatened by these policy interventions. While much of the United States state policy intervention has been too little, too late, SME platform governance has not, often leading to dire consequences for SME creators. YouTube's "adpocalypse" serves as one prime example. In response to press accounts of YouTube profiteering off extremist videos, the platform implemented crude filtering systems that amounted to a form of taxonomic tyranny. These filters led to the demonetization of responsible creators, most notably civic-minded, queer, and marginalized creators (Cunningham and Craig 2019, pp. 111-113) . In this example, we understand how top-down governance operates directly, with platforms arguably overreacting to the peril of policy interventions from government and press scrutiny.

The techlash has also consisted of more than a decade of European Union and major European countries pushing back on United States light touch (de)regulatory frameworks and platform practices. These moves are cultural (seeking to advance European cultural expression against the perceived dominance of American influence), creative-industrial (Europe should develop a more robust creative digital economy) and social (privacy and identity theft, for example, have been top of European agendas for some time). The West is fractured at the top-most level. The European Union has advanced a series of policy interventions directing at curbing the cultural and economic influence of these United States-based platforms. Much like recent United States policy recommendations and platform self-regulatory policies, these European Union regulations have ignored the interests of creators, even those advancing their own cultural fare. The European Union's "Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, otherwise known as Article 19, holds all web-based platforms responsible for the filtering out of all copyright infringement. "It's YouTube Content ID but for the entire Internet" (Jeong 2018) , and full contradiction of the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA along with Fair Use provisions that have helped SME creators thrive. The unintended consequence is the inhibition of platform competition and further consolidation of platform power. These conditions further limit the options for creators engaging in multi-platform practices to manage risk and promote sustainability.

Other stakeholders in the governance of SME have emerged, particularly around concerns over the disruption of advertising norms by SME platforms and creators. These concerns involve "influencer marketing", a form of branded content advertising that has offered deep returns for brands and creators, as well as concern by users and consumers. The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) produced a set of Endorsement Guidelines directed towards creators to demand greater transparency of branded content deals (FTC 2017) . These guidelines were subsequently adopted by the United Kingdom's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) (ASA-CAP 2018). Yet, while FTC regulation demands that online creators be transparent about sponsorship and branded content, influencers describe this practice as "as unfair and discriminatory because television shows, music videos, NBA stars and Kardashians get a pass for publishing the same content" (Glazer 2018) . Industry experts accuse the FTC of double standards, applying weaker regulation in television around product placement than for individual influencers on these platforms (Guthrie 2019) . SME creators have relied in large part on the loyalty of their following communities, crowdfunding and their own entrepreneurial efforts to sustain their careers. Given that these efforts can be wiped out with an algorithmic tweak or threatened by blunt policy overreaction, creators have attempted to organize, or at least, align with traditional media and trade associations, guilds, and unions to secure greater protection and recognition as stakeholders in this industry. Hollywood unions and guilds, like the Screen Actors Guild, have made overtures to include creators in their ranks, while larger labor unions like the Teamsters and AFL-CIO may soon include creators alongside other tech employees or contractors within the emerging gig economy. In 2016, leading SME thought leaders, Hank and John Green (the "Vlogbrothers") launched the Internet Creators Guild to focus around increasing peril from "policies, platforms, and the press", as confirmed in our interview with Executive Director Anthony D'Angelo (2018); however, by mid-2019, the organization was shuttered in part from the difficulty with organizing creators globally (Alexander 2019).

There is no doubt that the state is the most powerful actor in the governance of wanghong. But the state is not unitary and power is unevenly distributed. Power is also enacted both as direct support and indirect facilitation as well as direct censorship, coercion and punishment and indirect "guidance". Platforms have been protected and sponsored through economic initiatives contributing to a more advanced, competitive, and better integrated platform landscape. Simultaneously, the platforms have been enjoined and indeed required to pursue algorithmic and human-curated content moderation aligned with the economic and ideological interests of the state. The surplus of rural Chinese agrarian and manufacturing labor, provided they remain loyal to the Party (large numbers are in fact Party members) and understand cultural protocol, have been transitioned into the Chinese digital economy-from farm and factory workers to working wanghong as well as censors and online monitors of wanghong. The policy frameworks of cultural industries and the platform economy are designed to manage aggressively what could otherwise be overwhelming Western influence over Chinese tech businesses, advance autarkic control of their own industries, and maintain ideological surveillance of their citizens. Increasingly, the policies are designed to advance China's soft power ambitions transnationally (see Chap. 6 for a discussion of China's going out policies and outcomes in practice). As the Chinese internet has been sponsored by the state, the state has also begun to articulate parallel interest and concerns over its growing social potential and disruptive cultural influence. As set forth by the Cyberspace Administration of China, "Nowadays, the boundary between reality and virtuality is becoming more ambiguous. Cybersecurity is not only related to the security of our country and the society, but more importantly, is related to the personal interests of every netizen" (Cyberspace Administration of China 2017).

Governed to a greater extent than non-Chinese SME by state policy, wanghong platforms and creators thus need to meticulously manage their creativity and business between market needs and state regulation. However, this does not mean that wanghong production in China is shackled as an apparatus to promote only state interests. Political scientists consistently point out that Chinese administration of policy is always full of tensions and negotiations (Lieberthal and Lampton 1992; Xu 2011). As Yu Hong (2017a, p. 4) states in her study of Chinese internet and communication policies, "fragmented class interests, incompatible regional experiments, self-serving bureaucratic interests, and competing developmental visions are pulling the rebalancing in different directions". Although China's political system is typically classified as an authoritarian party-state, its political system is also characterized by resilience and adaptability, which allow for "bottom-up" policy changes and political-economic experiments. Heilmann and Perry (2011, p. 11), for example, note that "China's vast and bureaucratically fragmented political system is animated by policy processes that allow for far greater bottom-up input than would be predicted from its formal structures". Yu Hong underlines this point: "Competing bureaucratic imperatives and vested state interests in the economy have created and continue to create nonaligned initiatives and diffused commitments", resulting in the non-unitary nature of the state (Hong 2017a, p. 10) . It is such diffuse and variable carrying out of broad national policy principles in contestable ways by competing actors that, we argue, creates spaces of agency for various actors we feature in this and subsequent chapters in the Chinese wanghong economy.

Termed "fragmented authoritarianism" by political scientists (Lieberthal and Lampton 1992; Mertha 2009; Yang 2013) , the actual process of policy-making and implementing in China involves constant bargaining and competition among government agencies with diverse and often contradictory interests. The wanghong industry has been regulated by multiple governmental bodies, including the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the Ministry of Culture (MoC), the State Administration of Press, Publishing, Radio, Television and Film (SAPPRFT), and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The State Administration for Industry and Commerce and the Ministry of Finance also play a role when policies are related to finance and the market. Fragmented authoritarianism self-evidently poses obstacles, restraints, and dangers, yet it also creates leeway to play "edge-ball"-borderline acceptable online expression, a feature of Chinese popular cultural practice for decades (Keane 1998) . As an official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology revealed, an effective governance of the livestreaming ecommerce platforms, for instance, requires "coordination of many government departments", yet the reality is "we are still using the old legislative institutions to deal with problems [such as counterfeit products and softporn shows]" .

Given China's uniquely challenging demographics, political administration cannot be fully centralized. According to the Chinese nomenklatura system, the central committee of the Communist Party of China (CCP) holds power in the appointment of senior cadres in leading positions of the party state's bureaucratic apparatus, including the CCP high command, Central Party bureaucracy, State advisory organs, National People's Congress, State Council, state-owned banks, state-owned media, and so forth. (Chan 2004 ). The nomenklatura system of personnel management reinforces the authority of the Party and central government and is designed to produce an effect of national unity (Chan 2004; Naughton and Yang 2004 ). Yet, regional governments have significant autonomy in governing at that level. This regionally decentralized authoritarian (RDA) regime-a term coined by Xu (2011)-is distinct from federalism in that Chinese officials are not accountable to their constituents but to higherranked leaders. But it is also distinct from the old Maoist command economy. Since Deng Xiaoping embarked on China's marketization reform, GDP growth has become the first reference for official promotions. To stand out in what is fierce regional economic competition, local officials have embraced what Heilmann and Perry (2011) conceptualize as a "guerrilla policy-making style".

Inherited from the CCP's wartime tactics, this "guerrilla approach" characterizes contemporary Chinese policy-making in the sense that the top leadership preserves the power to make decisions on national-wide strategies, while "operationalization and implementation require substantial latitude for local initiative and independence" (Heilmann and Perry 2011, p. 18). As a result, policy making and implementation are always subject to improvisation and adjustment, with pilot efforts and practical experience preferred to abstract theories or models (Heilmann and Perry 2011, p. 18) . During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the thriving wanghong economy aroused competition among dozens of Chinese cities to promulgate various preferential policies to attract "livestreaming hosts" and MCNs. First-tier cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou, as well as smaller cities like Yiwu, Qingdao, Quanzhou, Jinan and Heze, have offered support policies such as housing subsidies to top livestreamers. Hangzhou and Yiwu, for example, have offered alluring financial support to top-listed creators in terms of housing, tax, and their children's education. Among these local policies, online traffic and influence is often viewed as the most important criterion in nominating wanghong creators, while downplaying or overlooking the cultural quality, which has been constantly emphasized in national policy.

Chinese governance in practice functions as a network of different, often conflictual, forces emanating from state administrative bodies, local governments, and market entities. As we explore in later chapters, this creates both precarity and opportunity for wanghong platforms and creators. Chinese economic and tech policy, along with its unique social-cultural focus, has allowed wanghong platforms and creators to flourish but also heightened state surveillance. In practice, the wanghong industry features a far more competitive platform landscape than in SME with more advanced integration of technological and economic affordances, while the increasingly greater economic power of the industry does not grant them immunity from the threat of social instability that have contributed to greater cultural policy interventions to advance ideological control of the industry. These conditions are reflected in the following case study of China's livestreaming industry that reflects how commercializing livestreamers have become central focal points in contemporary Chinese governance.

The term "livestreaming" refers to broadcast video streaming services provided by web-based platforms and mobile applications that feature synchronous and cross-modal (video, text, and image) interactivity. Live streaming may be the core service of a platform, as with platforms like Twitch or Douyu, or may be an added service on top of other forms of content, like YouTube Live or Kaishuo live. Livestreamers are securing revenue from diverse content genres, or verticals, of onscreen performance that include game play, cooking, painting, karaoke, even what Daniel Recktenwald calls "social eating" (Recktenwald 2017 ; see also Recktenwald and Du 2016) .

Outside China, live streaming platforms have struggled to succeed, apart from the often illicit (and under-researched) porn industry. As with all other forms of technology from early film nickelodeons to home video to online, the porn industry has often led in technological innovation. Referred to as Porn 2.0, live streaming has become "the engine of the porn industry" (Song 2016) . The industry has operated under Western, especially United States, liberal values of freedom of speech, although the application of these values to support porn is under increasing review, evidenced by the United Kingdom's Digital Economy Act of 2017, which attempted to severely limit online porn (Tidey 2019) .

Outside of that application, Twitch remains the one notable exception as a commercial live-streaming site in the West. Launched as justin.tv before YouTube and Twitter in 2005, the site was later purchased by Amazon for USD 1 billion in 2014 (Levy 2014) . With recent efforts to expand beyond game play not succeeding (Broussard 2018) , the platform remains tailored for game enthusiasts. To date, the platform has received little scrutiny from government. The platform has engaged in layers of self-regulation starting with an iterative array of terms of service to police sexual content and harassment (Alexandra 2018). Twitch creators are encouraged to practice self-regulation and "build a mod team"-a selfselected group of moderators who "ensure that chat is up to the standards of the Broadcaster by removing offensive posts and spam that detracts from conversations" (Twitch n.d.) .

Repeated efforts to launch platforms to compete with Twitch have failed (Flynn 2016; Fiegerman 2017) . Live streaming, offered as an additional feature on major SME platforms including YouTube and Facebook, has proven a signal failure and has triggered a global backlash against livestreaming technology. Repeated criminal acts and obscene human rights violations have been committed globally across these platforms from live murders, sexual assault, child abuse, torture, and more. The livestream of the New Zealand massacre in 2019 may have proven to be a threshold moment. Western democracies, like Australia, are passing laws to govern live streaming platforms, albeit with limited understanding of how these operate (Oberler 2019) . Even platform owners like Mark Zuckerberg have joined the chorus, demanding that governing bodies issue "new rules for the Internet" (Quodling 2019) as others insist the platforms be shut down completely (Grygiel 2019) .

All this would suggest "the world is turning against livestreaming" (Newton 2019), but China has a different story both in the growth and governance of livestreaming. As a significant segment within China's larger wanghong industry, which also includes recorded video, image, and text-based platforms, Chinese live streaming has been "booming" (Lavin 2018 ) for years. At its peak, there were over 200 Chinese livestreaming apps and, while ongoing consolidation has occurred, there remains far more successful live apps in China than the rest of the world (Hallanan 2018) . Estimates and predictions of the scale of Chinese live streaming has gone from USD 5 billion in 2016 (Moshinsky 2016) to USD 19 billion in 2022 (iResearch 2018). According to Deloitte, China is the largest live streaming market distinguished by the success of virtual goods, a form of virtual tipping or donations (Deloitte 2018) . Integration of livestreaming with China's ecommerce platforms such as Alibaba's Taobao have proven transformative of China's digital, retail, and advertising industries (Wang 2019) .

Large numbers of wanghong have crafted sustaining careers in this industry. These creators are also referred to as "zhubo" which translates as host or anchor. China's commercializing gameplay streamers have also prospered on Douyu, a Twitch-like platform. Unlike their Western counterparts, however, they have leveraged their success across an array of competing game platform including Huya, eGame, and PandaTV (although the latter was shuttered in 2018). Their success aligns with the rapid growth of China's videogame publishing and esports industries. These industries are dominated by Tencent Media, which is an investor in all of these game play platforms. This ecology of livestreaming platforms, players, game industries and investors has fueled the launch of successful Western IPOs for Huya in 2019 and Doyu in 2019 (Huang 2019) .

In early days, China's "stream queens" (Birtles 2016 ) engage in more gendered performativity, "singing and slurping soup" (Weller 2017 ) to appeal to men referred to as "little puppies" (Chen 2018) . These conditions have been likened to a "virtual girlfriend" industry (Kaiman and Meyers 2017) helping pretty girls "soothe lonely guys and create fortunes" (Yang 2017) . Dating back to 1978, China's one-child policy, designed to inhibit population growth, also contributed to an everincreasing gender gap, estimated to be near 70 million more men to women by 2020. These conditions have been further exacerbated by rural-urban migration brought about by Chinese economic policy reforms since the late 1970s. The rapid shift from an agrarian to a manufacturing, and then to a service-based economy has led to profound gender-and class-based disparities. Despite restrictions limiting internal migration, rural workers have fled to the cities, despite being forced to live on the outskirts of the city and without local (hokou) recognition. Throughout the country, there are millions of "lonely leftover men" (Sun 2017) with little opportunity for family or romance, even more pronounced in the countryside where there are fewer entertainment options. Even within the cities, socio-economic upheaval has, as a Chinese scholar and live streamer remarked, led to "30 million lonely souls floating above the sky of Beijing" .

More recently, however, livestreaming affordances have been further integrated into major e-commerce platforms like Taobao and Pinduoduo and short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou. Compared to the dedicated livestreaming platforms (for example, Douyu and Huya), the incorporation of livestreaming into these major platforms also signals the mainstreaming, and perhaps normalization, of the livestreaming industry and its culture. As a result, a stricter state regulation of content coincides with the official endorsement of its commercial and employment potential.

The "edge-ball" approach analyzed earlier now tends to be replaced by a "social-benefit" approach. This approach is evidenced by a more stringent content moderation policy that can minimize the potential cultural disruptions, and a more inclusive business network that can benefit the national economic restructuring and mass entrepreneurship and employment. Over the last few years, Chinese state agencies responsible for supervising online activity have shuttered multiple livestreaming platforms along with over 30,000 individual accounts. This crackdown aimed to weed out content that is "vulgar, obscene, violent, superstitious, concerns gambling, or harms the psychological health of underage people" (Lai 2017) . In 2018, two leading Chinese short video platforms were "invited for tea" by officials, a euphemism for being threatened with penalties for their "ignorance of the law and disseminating programs that are against social moral values" (Liu 2018) . These officials demanded that the platforms give a "comprehensive rectification", prompting them to shut down thousands of user accounts that posted "unhealthy content" and launch channels that promoted "positive and healthy values".

To establish a more inclusive business ecosystem, Chinese livestreaming and e-commerce platforms have been eagerly investing in the so-called "sinking market" (下沉市场 xiachen shichang), a term frequently used by Chinese media and business organizations in the past five years to refer to the small-town and rural markets. The two leading platforms Kuaishou (short video) and Pinduoduo (e-commerce) have invested strategically in social amelioration, targeting the sinking market through rural wanghong creators and cheap consumer products. At the same time, previously urban-based platforms such as Alibaba, Tencent and Jingdong have also lined up to adjust their strategies, addressing rural China. 2018 saw Jingdong, the second largest Chinese e-commerce platform, launching its Super New Star project, in which five new apps (including Fenxiang and Jingxi) were developed to target the Chinese rural market and compete against Pinduoduo (Futunn 2019, n.p.) . Alibaba built a new e-commerce platform CunTaobao, still embedded in its original Taobao ecosystem but clearly focused on the rural market. Again, these efforts in expanding leading Chinese ecommerce technology access among rural and marginal populations neatly fit into the state's call for mass entrepreneurship and "poverty-alleviation" through "Internet+". That internet and e-commerce should play an important role in assisting impoverished rural areas to establish online marketing channels for the local products and farmers, to finally advance the model of "internet + poverty alleviation" (The State Council 2018), has been prominent in policy since 2018.

The account of livestreaming given here epitomizes the dynamic management of contradictions in China's governance of the wanghong industry. The mixture of the dual logic of governing the cultural and creative industries for economic and social-cultural benefits as well as social-economic governance through Internet+ and the platform economy has resulted in a far more competitive livestreaming landscape, featuring more sophisticated and integrated commercial features together with increasingly sophisticated, omnipresent censorship and content regulations. Governance beyond state regulation and surveillance in this context not only refers to the governing practices of various platforms and commercial institutions, but also to the everyday labor practice of wanghong production and management. These elements of the wanghong ecosystem are the subjects of the next two chapters. The increasingly stringent policy on content moderation and the competitive market have added to the precariousness as well as increased opportunity for both platform companies and creators' everyday work. The logic of platform capitalism (Srnicek 2017) , in conjunction with Chinese state intervention, has both fostered and circumscribed the technological, economic, and social-cultural viability of wanghong industry.

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