Convergent Chinese Television Industries

During my production experience as a factual producer and documentary filmmaker across the UK, Singapore and China, I was fascinated by the distinct production circumstances and cultures where producers must navigate the tensions and negotiate a creative space which is subject to commercial, political and institutional pressures in their daily production mentalities and practices. This introductory chapter will set out the research questions and illuminate how production studies enables a thick description of the production cultures and hidden discourses in the current moment of convergent Chinese television. After elaborating on the significance of this research project, this chapter will finally conclude by outlining the remaining chapters.

This chapter will examine the production ecology of Chinese television governed by complex tensions between digital technologies, economic circumstances, industry relationships, state ideology and shifting viewing experiences in the new millennium. In particular, it will show that these conflicting forces embody the tension of production experience between being asked by top-down strategies to innovate technologically and reach audiences in new ways at the same time as adhering to a stringent state ideology. These forces intertwine in the contemporary China’s production cultures, which further take shape through at the same time as they shape the daily practices of television workers. This chapter will firstly situate Chinese television institutions within a longer history of television’s development and periodisation upon the technological advancement in contemporary Chinese society. I will then examine the current production ecology of Chinese television in post-socialist China. The connection between technology and cultural practices in the techno-political regulatory landscape will be the thread of this book, in which producers’ creative freedoms are fuelled by newly emergent technologies as well as innovative business models, two developments which all the while are tempered by the need to comply with the Chinese state’s politico-ideological pronouncements.

This chapter moves on from the national context to the specific and changing production circumstances and convergence strategies underpinning Chinese television production across broadcast institutions and digital streaming services. For Jenkins (Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press, 2006, p. 2), media convergence constitutes a structured interactivity in ways that new technologies have been designed to be more responsive to consumer feedback. It denotes a scenario ‘in which multiple media systems coexist and where media content flows fluidly across them’, an ongoing process of intersections between different media systems, not a fixed relationship, whether it be developments in technological, industrial, cultural or social changes (Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press, 2006, p. 282). Following the macro-level investigation on the periodisation of Chinese television and the complex production ecology among broadcast and digital players in Chap. 2, I move on to examine how the different origins and histories of Chinese media institutions have affected their convergence production strategies and explore the institutional relationships between broadcast and digital sectors in this chapter. In doing so, I will show how media convergence, as a strategy, plays out differently at CCTV and HBS, and how they respond to innovation in the post-TVIII era differently according to their origins.

This chapter will demonstrate that state-led innovation initiates such as Internet+ set out an ambition that facilitates the rise of Chinese domestic streaming services such as Tencent Video. It will firstly theorise the current development of Chinese internet-distributed television. Secondly, this chapter will examine the convergent business model and original production strategies in the case of Tencent Video which implements its remit for technological innovation via its hybrid convergence model. Since the launch of 2012 Tencent Original Strategy (TOS), Tencent Video has shifted the business strategies from providing free undifferentiated content (‘publisher’) to producing user-oriented personalised original content (‘producer’) with the revenue model of advertising-funded freemium and subscription-supported premium. I establish how state-led innovation strategies have set out an ambition that strongly shapes a convergence-era institution like Tencent, which operates as a hybrid model through its data-driven strategies and original SVOD commissions.

Whilst Chap. 3 considered the top-down strategies of CCTV and HBS, this chapter focuses on the production cultures and convergent screen forms, borne out of a set of top-down and bottom-up upgrade cultures that represent the distinct characteristics of Chinese TVIII in the ongoing attempts to balance the pressures of commercialisation and political subservience. Drawing on interview accounts, digital screen forms and industry artefacts collected from CCTV, Mango TV and Tencent Video, this chapter and Chap. 6 will uncover the cultural effects of institutional strategies and examine how these strategies lead to shifting production cultures and inform the production of distinct screen cultures and programme forms within these production circumstances. This chapter will begin with investigating the shifting production cultures and newly emerging screen forms in the convergence production of Chinese television. In particular, I will illustrate the particular production cultures in Chinese broadcast television with case studies at CCTV (CNTV) and HBS (Mango TV) across broadcast and digital environments. By examining the distinctive production cultures and multiplatform forms at CCTV and Mango TV, this chapter seeks to capture and set out the hidden discourses that are borne out of the processes of production cultures at Chinese broadcast institutions. I continue to examine the extent to which these are informed by the institutions’ origins as an overarching concern.

This chapter will examine the changing production forms and screen aesthetics of Chinese SVOD commissions in the case of Tencent Video. In contrast to broadcast production cultures, SVOD original commissions have intervened the historical trajectory of storytelling norms across genres and formats. Tencent original commissions demonstrate a strong upgrade production culture with which Tencent producers continuously experiment, generating innovative ways of creative expression and user engagement.

Through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in the form of interviews and participant observation placements, this chapter produces a ‘thick description’ of the production cultures and reveals individual media workers’ fears and the hidden politics behind official slogans and trade publications in the convergence era. Firstly, this chapter will briefly look at the historical background to media censorship exerted by the evolving media regulatory bodies since the Reform and Opening-up in 1978. Secondly, it will explore the various types of fears—political obligations, commercial pressures and market competition—which prevail among individual Chinese producers as well as the responses these workers have devised to deal with those fears. These observations occurred not only overtly in the accounts of producers but also implicitly in the fieldwork. The chapter is particularly aimed at exploring the extent to which the producers acknowledge the ideological censorship and how they understand and respond to it, and how these pressures and responses result in distinct types of fears that are incorporated into their daily practices in specific production contexts. Political awareness among Chinese media workers, I argue, is a Foucauldian act of self-discipline that enacts state censorship via the fear of the censorship itself, borne of a need to protect oneself from being punished by an omniscient and omnipotent central authority.

This chapter investigates the rise of creative autonomy and creative freedoms Chinese producers have developed in the commercialised, multiplatform and convergent era, offering a detailed comparison of case of two factual programmes on both CCTV (Waiting for Me) and Tencent Video (We15). The rise of creative autonomy epitomises a distinctly new Chinese commercial media culture that emerges from post-TVIII, characterised by a new set of production cultures in a society and polity that increasingly only pays lip service to the values of socialism which underpin CPC hegemony. In the context of the commercialisation of Chinese television since the market economy reforms, the national regulatory climate began to evolve and take on new forms. The concept of ‘product manager’ has emerged as a new hybrid role that derives not only from the commercialisation of the television industry and the distributions of finished television programmes as ‘commercial products’, but also from the convergence of television and digital production.

Following the discussion on the rise of creative autonomy in the role of the product manager, this chapter will move on to illustrate how Chinese media workers employ various tactics to produce inspiring and critical content while pursuing creative autonomy that resists the prevalent culture of censorship at the margins. Instead of confronting the official censorships, Chinese producers have been able to obviate censorship by negotiating an alternative path and adopting an approach known as edge ball by ‘working through’ social issues through non-news genres in creative production. Edge ball, as in the production experience of We15, produces a high degree of creative freedoms for producers but also a degree of political freedom disguised within the constraints of what is ideologically permissible: playing at the edge of the boundaries.

The concluding chapter will pull together the key discourses and themes that I have elucidated in this book. It will lay out the theoretical threads that underpin the chapters, discuss how a production studies approach can contribute to understandings of contemporary Chinese television within the post-socialist society. This chapter will also suggest several further research directions and possibilities.