Play against the informality? Institutional reliance and strategic adaption in Chinese cultural governance

Abstract

ABSTRACT The current Chinese Book Quota System derives from a traditional socialist model that integrates cultural governance, ruling party ideology and infrastructure management. Such a wartime legacy no longer suits demand from modern consumers, and yet bureaucratic management sustains the inefficient institution, which has accidentally fostered a countervailing informal market and in turn stimulates cultural policy changes. This article uses informal book number transactions and the complementary institutional effect of such informality, namely restructuring the state-owned, regulating the non-state-owned and adaptive digital regulation, to demonstrate one Chinese governance outcome of formal-informal linkages. Book quota system is doomed to be obsolete, nonetheless, its development in the visible future depends on party-state weighing domestic ideological guidance and a more vociferous stance in the international battle of cultural symbols.