The current moment of Chinese television, which I term here ‘post-TVIII with Chinese characteristics’, is an ideological, cultural and financial paradox between party ideology and commercialisation, between digital technologies and institutional backdrops. This study investigates the shifting production cultures and convergence strategies among Chinese media institutions, and how these inform the daily production practices of Chinese television practitioners in the digital era. To understand the shifting production cultures and strategies, three media institutions that have originated from three different periods of Chinese television – China Central Television, Hunan Broadcasting System and Tencent Video – have been chosen as case studies. This paper adopts production studies as the main research method in order to fill the research gap on Chinese television micro-level production practices, combining ethnography with policy and textual analysis of screen forms and digital interfaces. In particular, to provide a ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1975) of working conditions and production practices operating within Chinese production cultures, I conducted 25 formal and informal interviews, two participant observations, archival collection of governmental documents, the annual official policy proclamations from the SAPPRFT and screen forms between May 2016 and December 2017. Informed by ethnographic data, this paper analyses the key discourses of Chinese television’s convergence-era production cultures which have been shaped not only by the duopolistic forces of a market economy and ideology, but also by China’s national and institutional innovation strategies.
I argue that each institution must navigate these tensions at the national, corporate and individual levels, and that they do so in ways that are intimately connected to the distinct historical periods in which they were born. The various courses navigated by Chinese media institutions reveal how the current Chinese television landscape is marked by a series of almost impossible binaries that operate at all levels, between innovation and stasis, fears and freedoms, financial rewards and political obligations, and between corporate strategies and daily practices. Within the navigation of these binaries I argue that whilst much of post-TVIII production strategies, practices and cultures are marked by the kinds of ideological controls and fears found by scholars such as Keane (2001, 2009, 2015), Curtin (2012, 2015) and Fung (2008, 2009), there is also space for individual workers to find creative freedoms and sites of resistance: but not always on terms that would be recognised by western scholars of production cultures and media work. This study suggests that innovation strategies and digital technologies have fostered conditions for new production cultures of creativity which produce what I term technologically empowered screen (TES) forms. I argue that these TES forms represent a technologically-deterministic production and regulatory culture that aligns creativity with the incessant march of technology, and this is unique to the Chinese capitalist socio-economic conditions that shape the production cultures of Chinese television. This paper reveals how Chinese practitioners have resided their creative freedoms within these TES forms which can at once demonstrate compliance with state ideology and corporate strategy but also leave room for resistance and resilience to one-party state ideology.