Exporting Chinese Culture: Industry Financing Models in Film and Television

Abstract

This article examines the financing of creative industries in the People's Republic of China. Creative industries embrace both traditional and contemporary culture, but exportable industries are primarily content-driven. This focus on export content shifts the development argument away from the provision of infrastructure towards innovation in the global economy. The concern of this paper therefore is on the synergy between financial and creative inputs into production, distribution, and marketing of film and television. The paper also makes some concluding observations about the prospects for digital content industries, and points towards a bottom-up model of development applicable across a range of creative and content industries.