UC San Diego

Authoritarian regimes are known for their heavy scrutiny of music and art whose expressive content might challenge the state authority. Artistic creativity, therefore, is supposed to be suppressed in those places. The recent boom of the Chinese popular music industry, however, presents a perplexing puzzle. How is artistic creativity organized, regulated, and practiced in authoritarian regimes? Under what circumstances and to what extent can artistic creativity thrive in places where expressive content is supposed to be tightly controlled? How do economic incentives and political institutions shape artistic forms, and how do artists respond to economic and political pressure in their creation? In this dissertation, I answer these questions by studying how industrial development, economic incentives, political interventions, and creative personnel shape musical creativity in China through extensive platformization in the past two decades. Specifically, using computational methods to analyze an original dataset of over 190,000 songs collected from a music streaming platform, as well as collecting qualitative data from interviews and policy documents, I employ a mixed-method design to study how cultural regulations and monetization programs in authoritarian states shape the creative outcomes of popular music production and how musicians practice their creativity in response. Findings suggest that creativity is significantly influenced and channeled by these institutions: cultural regulations constrain the production and circulation of problematic styles, which are dispersed from high-profile works of the targeted community but preserved in adjacent communities; monetization programs attract new producers into the industry, while the incumbents are more prone to suppressing their creativity for potential economic returns; the musicians respond to the influence of these institutions by internalizing, naturalizing, and sometimes embracing them into their creative decisions and practices. The dissertation contributes primarily to the sociological study of creativity, highlighting the interplay between the state political economy and the creative outcomes and practices therein. It also proposes novel, computational methods to model and measure the tension between the nominal and expressive aspects of cultural identity, which can be further extended to the study of identities, categories, and organizations beyond the empirical case of popular music.