Abstract
Elaine Jing Zhao is a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales, whose research interest situates at the nexus of cultural production, industry transformations and governance challenges in digital media economy. By examining open source cultures, piracy, amateur media and on-demand labor, her book examines China’s vibrant informal media activities and their interactions with the formal media economies in the broader context of the growing digital platforms, the complexities and dynamics of state–market relationships, and multiple roles of users in the cultural arena (p. 13).
Elaine structures the book with five empirical chapters (Chapters 2–6) plus an introduction and conclusion. Chapter 2 centers on Xiaomi Technology Corporation, China’s well-known electronics company headquartered in Beijing. Zhao focuses on Xiaomi’s initial success in the smartphone market with its Android-based MIUI operating system (p. 23). Elaine tells a compelling story of how Xiaomi’s employees interact with user communities—a vivid example of the formal and informal interface—and contribute to the company’s technological innovation, knowledge production and product development. Quite beyond the utilitarian concern, the coupling of Xiaomi’s professional technicians and amateur developers has substantial cultural significance. Through branding ‘participatory culture’, Xiaomi packages ‘the innovation for everyone’ as a powerful selling point on the one hand, and deliberately obscures the shadow of shanzhai on the other hand. Xiaomi inherits, or appropriates, the ethos of shanzhai—openness and networked knowledge production—and yet circumvents the negative connotation of shanzhai—inferior quality and the shadow and informal status. Furthermore, by branding itself as a digital champion for ‘Made in China’, Xiaomi strategically stands in line with the state’s interest.
Drawing upon the case study of 91 Wireless, a well-known mobile app distribution service catering to users of Android, iOS and Symbian in China, Chapter 3 explains how its success is built upon navigation between the informal economy and the formal economy. The author analyses how hackers, parallel dealers, jailbreaking and rooting service providers, and app developers—as emblematic of informal sectors—make significant contributions to the company’s technical innovations, and how China Unicom and Baidu—as the token of the formal—have enabled the company to venture beyond the underground service market (p. 53). Elaine also emphasizes how the informal and formal dynamics have not only operated on the technical, institutional and economic level, but also on—another equally important—cultural level. To gain legitimacy in cultural and ideological domains, the company adopted varieties of rhetorical strategies to appeal to multiple audiences while eliding the fraught tensions (p. 55). As Zhao concludes, the legitimacy-building process is characterized by a contested field where multiple publics participate in the negotiation of meanings, values and ethics (p. 59).
In Chapter 4, Zhao turns to the rapidly evolving online video market. By tracing how piracy and User-Generated Content (UGC) have become formalized in multiple dimensions in the online video market, Elaine explains the dynamics between the state and the market, as well as the collapsing boundaries between amateurs and professionals. She first introduces the ‘cultural contradictions’ of piracy and UGC, which decentralized the state-controlled media landscape on the one hand, and proposed a series of questions regarding liability and copyright on the other hand (pp. 66–67). As a response, the state tried to formalize the market by resetting industry boundaries and strengthening copyright enforcement. Elaine argues that the state plays a dual role as ‘market participant and regulator’, which ‘reflected the evolving rationale of media governance in general and Internet governance in particular’ (p. 68). The author ends the chapter by explaining how digital platforms respond to the state’s strengthened copyright enforcement. Zhao defines the strategy as ‘copyright as capital’, which is manifested in the licensing of professional productions, construction of original programming and the formalization of amateur media (p. 80).
Chapter 5 homes in on Internet literature production, an important site in the creative and digital economy where the market has become formalized and yet labour practices remain largely informal (p. 86). This chapter is deeply rooted in the theoretical tradition of the creative industry and Marxian labour studies. She explains how the inception of Internet literature should be considered as a grass-roots alternative to the state-controlled publishing businesses in the context of the Chinese literary system. Then she describes how Internet literature is quickly formalized under the influence of multiple forces, including the rise of online literature platforms and corresponding business models, growing institutional recognition and increasing state oversight. All these processes have profound impacts on writers. As Elaine argues, Internet literature writers have to navigate formal–informal boundaries; by doing so, they are ‘caught in ambivalent identities between writers and writing hands, between professional and amateurs, between the glamorous creative class and humble laborers’ (p. 103).
The next chapter is devoted to ride-hailing platforms and governance challenges. The author investigates the lengthy and complicated legalization process of the ride-hailing sector and explains how the process was ‘interwoven with departmental interests and central-local dynamics’ (p. 108). Following this line, Zhao turns to the impacts of government regulation and explains how social inequalities have resurfaced in the platform economy, since migrant labourers constitute a majority of ride-hailing drivers. She argues that in the context of platform-mediated labour, migrant workers ‘faced strenuous and precarious labor conditions’ (p. 113). She also touches upon the issue of algorithmic governance and its social consequences. She suggests that ‘inequality and discrimination are reflected in order allocation and pricing mechanism, which is bound up with information asymmetry and artificial scarcity’ (p. 125).
This book is based on rich firsthand and secondhand materials. By weaving together a number of key actors in China’s informal and formal digital media economy, the book contributes to the field of Chinese Internet studies, digital labor studies, platform studies and, more broadly, communication and media studies. The author consistently and carefully links on-the-ground practices to macro-level political and socio-economic milieux where these practices take shape. By doing so, Zhao sheds light on the larger theoretical issues. Overall, the author should be applauded for writing such an excellent book.