Chinese creative industries, soft power and censorship: The case of animation

Abstract The interrelatedness of Chinese economic and cultural reforms since the beginning of the new millennium, most particularly and importantly with regard to the acceptance and deployment of the concept of creative industries as an extension of China’s ‘soft power’, needs to be considered in light of two factors: firstly, and at a conceptual level, it derived from the development of the highly influential notion of the ‘creative industries’ in the UK; and secondly, it was linked to what we could term the ‘cultural politics’ of China’s relations with neighboring cultural powers such as Japan and South Korea (and to a certain extent and more broadly, with the United States). In 2005, the creative industries concept was embraced by Beijing, but with a caveat: it opted to use the hybrid term ‘cultural creative industries’ in the official document, due to the sensitivity of the term ‘creative’ (Keane 2007). One part of the field of cultural production that was strongly impacted by these developments was the animation sector. This article will provide an account of the various political, economic and cultural contexts that drove and informed these changes and how they have played out within the contemporary Chinese animation industry.