Scholarship on China's internet governance has focused largely on China's strict regulatory environment and pervasive content censorship.Footnote 1 Yet, despite these restrictions, various internet sectors in China have taken off spectacularly. Luzhou Li's Zoning China examines this puzzling and seemingly contradictory phenomenon, particularly in the realm of online video in China. Through an investigation of the infrastructural, regulatory, political-economic, and sociocultural histories of the television and the online video sectors from the late 1990s to 2014, Li argues that the two sectors have been regulated differently according to market principles. Li creatively terms this regulatory differentiation “cultural zoning” (p. 2), whereby the Chinese state strategically carves out multiple cultural zones for different media sectors. Cultural zoning, Li demonstrates, allows the state to leave highly marketized sectors such as online video more leniently managed than television, creating a dual cultural sphere that is both economically beneficial and politically manageable in China's tightly controlled media landscape.
Zoning China's chapters are organized chronologically based on China's cultural governance policy and recent developments in its television and online video sectors. Chapter 2 provides a detailed account of the Chinese Communist Party's cultural vision and policy from the 1930s to the 1990s, when the party-state shifted from emphasizing the ideological features of popular culture in the early days of its establishment to allowing the expansion of market relations in the television and audiovisual sectors after China's reform and opening-up policy. One might mistakenly view the market-oriented restructuring of Chinese television (i.e., the official cultural realm) and the lax regulations on audiovisual content (i.e., the unofficial culture sphere) in the 1980s and 1990s as undercutting the state's role in media management and ideology control. However, Li, by contrasting the state's swift and effective crackdowns on content posing clear political threats and its inaction against the widespread of piracy, reminds us that the state's lenience and the existence of a “cultural duality” (p. 43) was a willful and strategic policy choice that ultimately benefited the state politically and economically.
Chapter 3 details how, despite significant market-oriented reform, Chinese television drama production still operates under “a multifaceted regulatory regime” (p. 74), with strict content controls by state agencies. Li's analysis of primary and secondary data adds valuable nuances to the existing literature on China's information control system, which has often been portrayed as a monolithic regime targeting a specific type of content.Footnote 2 Rather, Li shows that the exercise of cultural zoning takes into consideration a wide range of factors, including media forms, types of technology, content genre, and audience size.
Chapters 4 and 5 analyze the political economic forces and sociocultural factors that drove the formation of China's online video industry in the early to mid-2000s. Li recounts vivid stories of how bottom-up user-generated content such as “spoofing” and “fansubbing” boosted and sustained the booming online video industry despite its piracy-infringing nature. Instead of resorting to a black-and-white critique of the Chinese state's inaction on intellectual property rights protection, Li paints a nuanced picture of the party-state's conscious choice to follow a wait-and-see policy, which enabled the fast development of online video in its early days.
As in many other areas, the Chinese state has proven to be resilient and adaptive to new changes and challenges in its governance. As online video became more influential among the masses, the state began to tighten its grip on both the infrastructure and the content of these companies. In chapters 6 and 7, Li shows that the online video industry utilized a relatively lax regulatory environment in its early days to build “a distinct, alternative, yet commercial online video culture” (p. 192) that was otherwise unavailable. In the meantime, the once anti-establishment online video companies and content generators have gradually conformed to both state ideologies and market logics (e.g., embracing the copyright regime in response to pressure from advertisers and copyright owners) as they have become more mainstream since the late 2000s, which cautions us against “romanticizing their radical potential” (p. 193).
Li's ambitious use of interviews, documentary research, critical discourse analysis, and participant observations neatly supports her argument for the existence of a cultural zoning policy strategically created by the Chinese state. Zoning China is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the history of Chinese cultural policy in the last two decades. Methodologically, Li's systematic incorporation of different data sources is an inspiration for researchers studying China's internet governance, especially during a time when access to both on-the-ground and online information has become increasingly difficult. Moreover, Li's focus on the fluid interaction among the state, private businesses, and individual users, as well as her novel interpretation of the logic behind state actions and inactions, make the book an insightful contribution to the field of cultural governance and the study of China in general.
