Zoning China: Online Video, Popular Culture, and the State

Zoning China

Information Policy Series

Edited by Sandra Braman

The Information Policy Series publishes research on and analysis of significant problems in the field of information policy, including decisions and practices that enable or constrain information, communication, and culture irrespective of the legal silos in which they have traditionally been located as well as state-law-society interactions. Defining information policy as all laws, regulations, and decision-making principles that affect any form of information creation, processing, flows, and use, the series includes attention to the formal decisions, decision-making processes, and entities of government; the formal and informal decisions, decision-making processes, and entities of private and public sector agents capable of constitutive effects on the nature of society; and the cultural habits and predispositions of governmentality that support and sustain government and governance. The parametric functions of information policy at the boundaries of social, informational, and technological systems are of global importance because they provide the context for all communications, interactions, and social processes.

Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis, Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova

Traversing Digital Babel: Information, e-Government, and Exchange, Alon Peled

Chasing the Tape: Information Law and Policy in Capital Markets, Onnig H. Dombalagian

Regulating the Cloud: Policy for Computing Infrastructure, edited by Christopher S. Yoo and Jean-François Blanchette

Privacy on the Ground: Driving Corporate Behavior in the United States and Europe, Kenneth A. Bamberger and Deirdre K. Mulligan

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet, Benjamin Peters

Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and Its Threat to Democracy, Cherian George

Big Data Is Not a Monolith, edited by Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Hamid R. Ekbia, and Michael Mattioli

Decoding the Social World: Data Science and the Unintended Consequences of Communication, Sandra González-Bailón

Open Space: The Global Effort for Open Access to Environmental Satellite Data, Mariel John Borowitz

You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches, Josephine Wolff

The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust, Kevin Werbach

Digital Lifeline? ICTs for Refugees and Displaced Persons, edited by Carleen F. Maitland

Designing an Internet, David D. Clark

Reluctant Power: Networks, Corporations, and the Struggle for Global Governance in the Early 20th Century, Rita Zájacz

Human Rights in the Age of Platforms, edited by Rikke Frank Jørgensen

The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities, Russell Newman

Zoning China: Online Video, Popular Culture, and the State, Luzhou Li

Zoning China

Online Video, Popular Culture, and the State

Luzhou Li

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and ITC Stone Sans Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Li, Luzhou, author.

Title: Zoning China : online video, popular culture, and the state / Luzhou Li.

Description: Cambridge : The MIT Press, 2019. | Series: Information policy series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019005735 | ISBN 9780262043175 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Mass media--Social aspects--China. | Mass media policy--China. | Television broadcasting policy--China. | Internet videos--China. | Streaming video--China.

Classification: LCC HN740.Z9 M345 2019 | DDC 302.230951--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005735

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d_r0

For my mom, Xiaoling Pan

Contents

Series Editor’s Introduction

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Culture before the Millennium

3. Stay Left: Post-2000 Television Drama Production in China

4. Early Online Video: A Political Economic Perspective

5. Piracy, Internet Culture, and the Early Online Video Industry

6. Bidding on the Rights to Stream: The Industry, Copyright, and New Cultural Flows

7. Online Video as an Emerging Network of Cultural Production

8. Epilogue: The Operation of a Dual Cultural Sphere ... And?

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Series Editor’s Introduction

Sandra Braman

There are things we forget. That, despite the Communist label, Mao saw the value of capital for both productive and regulatory purposes. That cultural policy was one among the domains in which he put capitalist techniques to use. That after the brief but vibrant Hundred Flowers period, when Mao’s policy to let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend did encourage a flourishing of public expressions of diverse views in the mid-1950s, those whose ideas were a bit too diverse wound up experiencing reeducation camps, or worse. Some things we don’t stop to remember. That during thirty years of managing an ultimately successful underground political and military organization, a leader and a party that had to operate under a wide range of conditions that presented a variety of types of threats and challenges, could and did develop an approach to policy making that differed significantly from decision-making processes as they developed over the course of long empires with well-developed bureaucracies. The guerrilla policy style developed by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party during their decades of governing under revolutionary conditions was a free-wheeling policy style, one in which all techniques and partners are welcome, irrespective of purported ideological frameworks or previous commitments, and changing things up altogether is always an option.

In her fascinating and multifaceted analysis of the quite different histories of Chinese policies for television and for online video, Zoning China, Luzhou Li reminds us of these things, and more, because the guerrilla policy style is still in use and the past still matters. Li makes vividly clear that those interested in the much-cited twenty-first century concept of adaptive governance could learn a great deal from studying the guerrilla policy style. Certainly the ways modern-day China makes and implements policy are also worth studying for their increasingly global impact.

During the critical period in which online video developed as a set of practices and as an industry—the imprinting years of the Chinese internet—China’s approach to media and cultural policy making was a mix. For television, the traditional approach to regulation, with its strict content controls, continued to operate; however, online video content, apart from the pornographic or the politically extreme, was relatively unregulated. Luzhou Li characterizes this seemingly inconsistent approach to regulation as cultural zoning. Some topics could only be addressed or openly discussed in online video; Li’s informants told her of individuals who would walk out of television production sets and into online video production units in order to finish online what they had begun to talk about on television. There were other differences in China’s regulation of content between the two media, an important one being the distinctly different extent to which piracy of intellectual property was tolerated.

Zoning China has much to tell us about the often banal nitty-gritty of censorship operations—banal in the sense Hannah Arendt used to describe the nature of evil. For television, it involved working with a long-standing bureaucratic apparatus that articulated rules in great detail, constantly recited those rules, and required attendance at regular training sessions on what content would be considered unacceptable by censors. For online video, on the other hand, guerrilla policy techniques were used in a dispersed, fragmented manner, developed across multiple regulatory agencies, evolving quickly but at different rates and in different ways in a market that was becoming both increasingly profitable and increasingly competitive. At the same time, in an environment surely experienced as turbulent, the technologies and services involved were also constantly changing, with new players and new types of stakeholders constantly appearing. The result was, at minimum, toleration and, at maximum, stimulation of the production and distribution of a wide range of content.

Luzhou Li understands censorship as a knowledge industry: Knowledge, or the capability to know, is of foremost importance in exercising strategic censorship (chapter 4). Her account combines mainstream economic analysis with political analysis, pushing our understanding of what it means to be in an information economy forward. In another book in the Information Policy Series, Designing an Internet, David Clark argues that no network design feature for the internet will go anywhere if there is no industry to provide what is needed—there must be not only technological innovation, but also a market and willing producers for the feature to be adopted. Luzhou Li’s insight into censorship as a knowledge industry points in the same direction, toward the markets and the producers involved, as elements needing further analysis.

Li also tells us a great deal about intellectual property rights. Much of the most interesting content of China’s online video has been user-produced, involving processes such as fansubbing and spoofing that use pirated content from foreign producers as production materials. We learn that the use of pirated content in derivative works spurred the market for original works as well, also often pirated. The popular belief that China is simply, well, inattentive to intellectual property rights becomes, with Li’s authoritative and empirically grounded treatment, a much more complicated story. During the early years of the online video industry, the guerrilla policy approach of the Chinese government made it first acceptable to distribute both original and derivative pirated works, and then, in a convoluted and never quite official way, for foreign individuals and companies to invest in the Chinese media industries. Zoning China goes on to examine when, why, and how this situation was transformed into one where intellectual property rights were treated with greater respect and foreign investment much less welcome, although the situation remains fluid. We learn that the history of online video in China is also the early history of the internet in popular culture as generally experienced in that country. Or, as Li recounts: In China, the internet’s rapidly changing context has altered our sense of time and challenged our memory of contemporary cultural life (chapter 5).

Zoning China provides both conceptual tools for policy analysis and insights into what policy actually is, expanding the domain of policy making to include policy that is not there, and doing nothing. It describes policy frames that discard officially unwelcome content that is taking up bandwidth as industrial waste. In Li’s analysis of cultural piracy in China, the range of ways pirated material is used to create new content runs from pure creation to pure migration.

For the two very different worlds of television and online video in China, Luzhou Li systematically and rigorously thinks through their histories from the perspectives of mainstream economics, political economy, political factors, national and international policy making, organizational and interpersonal dynamics, cultural trends, and the very real lives of individuals trying to find their own ways through a media world constantly changing in every dimension.

With its attention to the most fundamental of concepts and to the historical roots of contemporary problems and policy-making practices, Luzhou Li’s Zoning China: Online Video, Popular Culture, and the State is in valuable conversation with Russell Newman’s The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities and with Rita Zájacz’s Reluctant Power: Networks, Corporations, and the Struggle for Global Governance in the Early 20th Century, both also in this MIT Press Information Policy Series. All three works examine the negotiations, struggles, and conceptual and regulatory developments involved in determining just what a corporation is, although they do so from different theoretical perspectives, starting from different questions, and with different groundings, which sometimes overlap but sometimes do not. All three push the research agenda for those in information policy toward another stage and offer strong theoretical and empirical openings for doing so.

Professor C. C. Lee, a Chinese media scholar with whom I studied in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, used to start his class on communication theory by telling us that the first question always to be asked is: Are things changing, or are they staying the same? Things are indeed changing. Luzhou Li’s Zoning China is a superb analysis of what that means for television and online video in that country. Providing a comprehensible and accessible account of contemporary Chinese policy making across domains, Zoning China also gives us a real feel for the earlier years of China’s user-generated popular online internet culture and that culture’s growth as an industry. It should be required reading for those seeking to understand the Belt and Road policy as the Chinese state moves to enhance its global presence in internet technologies, network and service provision, and governance. Certainly, the guerrilla policy style, which Luzhou Li so thoroughly examines, is now among the concepts that must be used to understand any given set of policy tools, the formation of an information policy toolkit, and perhaps also the decision-making style of a particular leader.

Acknowledgments

This book crystalizes an unforgettable intellectual journey in my life over half a decade. There were good times when I made smooth progress and had a sense of great fulfillment and pleasure; there were also moments of frustration and loneliness that too often ensued. Many people have been with me on this journey, in good times and bad times alike. With Zoning China’s publication, I finally have the opportunity to express my gratitude, respect, and love to those who have contributed to this book and to my development as a scholar.

The book—which is a complete rewriting of my PhD dissertation—began at the Institute of Communications Research (ICR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. John Nerone was and is my adviser, mentor, and the person I turn to for all sorts of advice and wisdom. He taught me how to read and write with kindness and generosity and guided me through the long process of writing, reading over the entire manuscript many times. I could not have begun and completed this book without his mentorship over the years, and I owe him my deepest gratitude. I am also indebted to Kent Ono, another great teacher and mentor. He played a crucial role in my early years in graduate school, and his unfailing belief in me since then has helped me through the most challenging moments of my life as a young scholar. He is always there, cheering for me. At Illinois, I also had the good fortune of working with Dan Schiller, Amanda Ciafone, and Poshek Fu, from whom I have learned so much. Among others at Illinois, I would like to thank Anghy Valdivia, Cameron McCarthy, James Hay, Ivy Glennon, Sarah Projansky, and my fellows. I still miss the numerous conversations and hotpot gatherings I had with Wenrui Chen and our other friends where we discussed Chinese media, culture, and society during those long Illinois winters.

Beyond Illinois, this book would not have taken its current shape without the support and help of colleagues and friends in mainland China, Hong Kong, the United States, Singapore, and Australia. Some of them helped to clarify key concepts in the book, some provided invaluable feedback on parts of the manuscript, some introduced me to useful sources and works, and some provided timely support at moments of need. I thank all of you: Mark Andrejevic, Adrian Athique, Joseph Man Chan, Kai-wing Chow, Chua Beng Huat, Stuart Cunningham, Li Deng, Prasenjit Duara, Terry Flew, Anthony Fung, Gerard Goggin, Jonathan Gray, Yu Hong, Brett Hutchins, Wesley Jacks, Dal Yong Jin, Michael Keane, Chi-Kong Lai, Francis Lee, Hongmei Li, Ke Li, Chunfeng Lin, Ramon Lobato, Ye Lu, Tom O’Regan, Vibodh Parthasarathi, Aswin Punathambekar, Jack Qiu, Kevin Sanson, Qingqing Sha, Colin Sparks, Sue Sparks, Harsh Taneja, Graeme Turner, Wilfred Wang, Saskia Witteborn, Angela Xiao Wu, Guobin Yang, Juan Zhang, Lin Zhang, and Chunyang Zhu. In particular, I would like to thank Guobin Yang for his support of this book from its earliest days, Michael Keane for sharing his many insights on the topic, Tom O’Regan for his vision and confidence in my work, and my dear friend Angela Xiao Wu for over a decade of friendship and company. An earlier version of chapter 5 of this book appears in the journal Television & New Media, and I thank the editor Vicki Mayer for her enthusiasm for and promotion of the article.

In China, I am indebted to all those who accepted my requests for interviews and so generously shared their experiences with me, as well as those who provided crucial industry contacts. As a member of the generation that grew up accustomed to media piracy and as an early Chinese internet user, my encounters with my informants were not only interviews but also a recollection of a shared past through which I came to revisit the China of my youth, and that sympathy informed this book. Given the current sensitivities surrounding public discourse in China, I have chosen not to list my informants’ names.

My editor, Sandra Braman, deserves my heartfelt thanks for seeing the merits of the project that I did not see, for offering candid and insightful criticisms of my earlier drafts, for generously sharing her experience in reading and writing, and for broadening my intellectual horizons. I cannot thank her enough for her time and input in this project and for her mentorship in general. At the MIT Press, I would like to thank my acquisitions editor Gita Devi Manaktala; her patience, kindness, and faith in this project has meant a lot to me. I am also indebted to my production editor Elizabeth Agresta for keeping the book on schedule, to my copy editor Jeffrey Lockridge for his superb editing work, to Nhora Lucia Serrano for her assistance with manuscript preparation, and to the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive criticisms.

I have also been fortunate enough to have the love and support of my family in Wenzhou, China. My brother, Dongyang Li, is my best friend. Although we do not get to see each other often enough, our phone chats have been my morale booster over the years, whether he is in Los Angeles, Nuremberg, or Shanghai. My parents, Mianshui Li and Xiaoling Pan, have given me their utmost understanding and support in my pursuit of an academic career, personal fulfillment, and a way of being that is so very different from that of most of my hometown and, later, college peers in China. I know the culture that my parents come from, and I know how hard it has been for them to unconditionally support my academic pursuits over the years. My mother is one of the kindest and strongest people I have ever met. During the most difficult time in my life, it was her company and care that kept me going, and she did so while she herself was suffering from chronic allergies and insomnia. I cannot hope to repay that debt. This book is for my mom.

1 Introduction

In December 2014, officials from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT)—formerly the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT)¹—which regulates Chinese cultural life, announced at several online video industry conferences that content forbidden to be broadcast on traditional media would also be forbidden on new media. If we consider these announcements in the context of increasing oversight of public discourse since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, the unequivocal message was that online and offline censorship standards would be unified.² Although the official announcements were explicit about the coming restrictions, they also implied the previous existence of a double standard applied to old and new media, which SARFT officials had never actually acknowledged but were nevertheless finally attempting to end.

If we look back at its development in China, we can clearly see that in the two decades before 2014, online video was subject to different and more lenient regulation than television was. Specifically, whereas television was largely the province of the state, market relations dominated the development of online video, from its financial structure to its content development. This produced an online space for people to question state media and the state’s preferred ideological narratives about the nation, history, and society.

Liberal-leaning online video culture was certainly not the only cultural formation that developed alongside state media culture in China. If we look back to the 1980s and 1990s, the two decades immediately following China’s reform and opening up,³ there was always an unofficial, alternative mechanism of cultural provision falling outside the purview of the state, which China scholar Orville Schell calls the second channel, namely, piracy in all its permutations.⁴ Although some of its works were compatible with state ideology, the second channel also included many that departed from or even conflicted with the party line. The cultural formations that existed as an alternative to state media culture at different stages of the reform, collectively show that a dual cultural sphere has historically operated, generally with state permission, in China. If we look beyond media and culture, the dual track formation is much like the zoning practiced in the economic realm, through which the Chinese state has strategically configured its national territory into multiple zones of development according to market principles.⁵ Specifically, we can see this in the creation of special economic zones (SEZs) in coastal cities. As with SEZs, which operate under different constraints in the economic realm, in the cultural realm, the Chinese state has strategically applied market relations more to certain media sectors or forms than to others, which has led to a dual cultural sphere.

The story told here is about zoning practices in the cultural realm or, as I term it, cultural zoning. In examining how a dual cultural sphere took shape in the context of the internet, I look at the dynamic of television versus online video. Though not always delineated by them, the zoning of culture often comes down to different media forms. The notion of differentially regulating different media forms, whether de jure or de facto, is certainly not unique to China. In the United States, for example, print, broadcasting, and telecommunications have been regulated differently for different purposes.⁶ In India, there has historically been a structural division between state communication (broadcasting, documentary) and popular media (print, cinema).⁷ However, although they appear to be similar, regulatory differentiation in each of these instances may have arisen out of different considerations and followed different paths. In my view, China’s differential treatment of television and online video is a market-oriented development strategy that is ultimately associated with the party-state’s perpetual pursuit of political legitimacy through gradual, measured development.⁸ This differential treatment of different sectors according to their strategic value, both objectively defined and subjectively perceived, is also found in other national sectors, and, like economic zoning, it is commonly practiced as well in East and Southeast Asian countries such as South Korea and Singapore.⁹

Zoning China focuses on the period from the late 1990s—when the Chinese internet including online video began to take shape—to 2014, when online video had developed into a full-fledged medium. Marking both the twentieth anniversary of the Chinese internet and a significant change in internet governance as the new leadership under Xi Jinping began to assert a much stronger dominance over public discourse, the year 2014 thus constitutes an important juncture in internet development in China over the last two decades. Cultural zoning arguably continues after 2014 because, in spite of the significant reduction in latitude online video once enjoyed, it remains more marketized than television. However, cultural zoning no longer operates on a scale comparable to that in the previous two decades.

The purpose of this book is twofold. First, it examines the differential treatment of television and online video in relation to the market—that is, the establishment of cultural zoning. Although the relaxed oversight of some sectors in Chinese media may seem like the loosening of the party-state’s grip on the cultural industries, the strategy of zoning actually foregrounds the strong role of the state. Since the 1970s, scholars have critiqued the liberal fiction of the natural market, noting the constitutive roles of the state (as an infrastructure provider and a coordinator among other roles) in the development of global capitalism.¹⁰ The continuing relevance of the state is particularly notable in countries like China. For instance, in zoning culture, the Chinese state limits the marketization of some sectors (e.g., television) while allowing others (e.g., online video) to have more market operations. I am not suggesting that these two interconnected zones (television and online video), whose unstable boundaries continually shift, are entirely discrete, but I believe that the zones are sufficiently discrete to posit a rough divide between them. I argue that, by zoning culture, the Chinese state has strategically configured the cultural realm into multiple zones in relation to the market, which allows it to enjoy the fruits of economic development while simultaneously retaining socialist legacies through its own state media. Like the SEZs, which are considered by anthropologist Aihwa Ong to be exceptional spaces within national territories,¹¹ online video appears to be a zone of exception to the socialist norms in state media and culture.

Second, Zoning China describes how, within a dual regulatory context, China’s online video industry developed in parallel to its television and gave rise to an online space for counterhegemonic possibilities. Developing from a number of business models including a YouTube-like sharing one in the early to mid-2000s,¹² major Chinese online video companies, including iQiyi, Tencent Video, and Youku, have since become original, creative forces of production and distribution, connecting domestic private production companies, transnational corporations (especially the Hollywood majors), and a vast network of creative labor from amateur video makers to professional content creators. Although the telecom infrastructure, foreign investment, intellectual property, and lax censorship are all important to its development, I argue that online video in China cannot adequately be understood without situating it within the unofficial, second history of popular culture in contemporary China, particularly the history of piracy. I map online video’s close but not entirely visible links to audiovisual piracy, ranging from videocassette copying in the early 1980s to peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing on the internet, and to a piracy-informed vernacular online culture embedded in practices such as video spoofing in the early to mid-2000s.¹³ It is partly because of its singular history rooted in piracy that I consider Chinese online video to be a largely independent medium despite its many overlaps with television.

Lack of Will or Lack of Capability?

The idea of cultural zoning most immediately suggests an active, deliberate choice of the state, although that choice could also be strictly pragmatic. Is the latitude granted to online video in China a result of the state’s lack of will—or its lack of capability? Is lax regulation a strategic choice or the result of unmanageable bureaucratic problems? The lack of capability thesis is powerful, especially given the complex organization of the Chinese state, which often constrains its ability in policy making and implementation.¹⁴ Although very little research has been done to explore the effects of bureaucratic politics on internet governance in China, scholars have delved into a number of tangentially relevant areas, notably the telecom industry and intellectual property rights (IPRs) enforcement.¹⁵ Zoning China acknowledges the difficulty of regulatory fragmentation as a factor when accounting for the latitude given to online video, which was most evident in the years before 2005. As I will show in chapter 4, much of the early regulatory history of online video content involved a protracted turf war between several related ministries, all claiming authority over online video.

Nevertheless, lack of capability is not and could not be the only explanation for the latitude granted to online video producers, especially in light of later regulatory developments. The SARFT was designated as the primary authority over regulation of online video content in 2007. Lack of capability may have continued as a factor (this time, mainly in relation to the sheer amount of online video content waiting to be regulated). But an analysis of policy alternatives and post-2014 developments shows that, though fully capable of developing creative methods and investing more resources to impose stricter control than earlier on, the SARFT chose not to—thus exhibiting a lack of will, which this book emphasizes. After all, as communication professor Sandra Braman notes, it is only through the exercise of will to utilize existing capacity that anything happens.¹⁶ Zoning China accepts that the Chinese state has proven to be both incapable and unwilling when it comes to managing online video in the ways it had managed television in the two decades before 2014. Recognizing that there can be no single causal explanation in a system as complex as China’s internet governance, this book uses the concept of zoning to frame its description of the system’s byzantine workings and nuances.

The latitude granted by the government to online video was induced by economic considerations. As my SARFT informant Lin explained: [If we] control everything tightly, there is no way for development.¹⁷ Thus, to encourage development, the government tolerated emerging online practices and content that diverged from those associated with the more strictly controlled television sector, as long as such practices did not fundamentally threaten the government’s political legitimacy. In fact, by mitigating social discontent, these relatively unfettered online practices and discourses may have served to stabilize rather than challenge the government. A growing number of scholars have investigated why authoritarian states have allowed free or partly free media.¹⁸ Political scientist Peter Lorentzen, for example, concludes that the Chinese state has strategically granted and adjusted the latitude given to investigative journalism, which allows it to check on local corruption and improve governance, while preventing the spread of discontent and reducing the risk of overthrow.¹⁹ In a study more relevant to matters discussed in this book, Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts show that, while taking care to prevent collective action, online censorship in China has allowed for a wide range of criticism of the Chinese state, its officials, and its policies. This easing up, the authors suggest, is an effective governing strategy to monitor public opinion, satisfy the masses, and ultimately strengthen social stability,²⁰ allowing the Chinese state, it would seem, to achieve the greatest benefits at the least cost. And the state can always revoke or reduce the latitude it has granted should that pose a threat. In this way, political scientist Andrew Mertha says, the state can have its cake and eat it too.²¹ This flexible approach to governing public opinion is reminiscent of how the mid-1950s Hundred Flowers movement (so named for its aim to let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend) encouraged intellectuals to criticize the party and thus set those critics up to be targeted and silenced in the anti-rightists campaign that followed.

Emphasizing this flexibility in cultural governance, my work adds another dimension to what scholars have observed in many other policy domains in China. In recent decades, contrary to critics who regarded it as weak and fragile, the Chinese state has weathered moments of crisis ranging from global economic meltdown to domestic unrest, reconsolidated itself, and seemed to be adept at managing challenges. Political science professor Andrew Nathan calls this flexibility authoritarian resilience.²² Along the same lines, other scholars have looked at various institutional adaptations and innovations in China’s political, economic, and social domains. In politics, for example, resilience is maintained in part through strategies