Elena Meyer-Clement: Party Hegemony and Entrepreneurial Power in China. Institutional Change in the Film and Music IndustriesWeijing Le

ASIEN – Nr. 141 (2016) pp. 104–105

New York: Routledge, 2016. 262 S., 145,00 USD

This is an extraordinary, exciting and excellent book originating from Elena Meyer-Clement’s PhD thesis at the University of Tübingen. It addresses one of the core concerns of developing economies in transition: the relations between regime stability and the institutional changes caused by marketization and commercialization. Plotting the research in China’s political and economic context, the author tells a compelling story of restructuring the film and music industries in compliance with the mainstream ideology as well as the commercial demands and market rules. Seeing the story through the theoretical lens of historical institutionalism and adaptive governance, the author seeks to explain how the Chinese Party-state adapts its governance strategies to counter the envisioned threats to its rule and the actual challenges in economic reality, and in particular, the trajectories of institutional changes and the control mechanisms that consolidate regime stability are deliberately traced and documented through extensive materials and rich interviews with major producers and officials in the film and music industries. The author shows that the Chinese leadership has successfully introduced new instruments for economic regulation and control in an incremental way and it has also revived the Maoist strategies cultural control and guidance over the mass. The incremental institutional adaptions have not only facilitated the stability in the course of transition, but also made use of the new cultural products generated in the commercialization and marketization process to reinforce the CCP hegemony.