Capacidad para aplicar el manejo integrado de las cuencas hidrográficas

Michael Curtin (2003) developed media capital, a dynamic concept that breaks through the national boundaries, provides approaches to discover multi-directional media flows, and to explain the spatial complexity of global media (202). Media products, represented by television programs, are transcending frontiers, and are transported via multi-directional media flows instead of a conventional one-way trip from US’s dominant programming to local areas. Cities are radiating such flows and having been centers of financing, producing and distributing of media products. They can be labeled as media capitals, taking Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Chicago for example. Media capitals don’t necessarily answer for the geography, interests or policies of the individual state, but they are usually attracting electronic landscapes of “geo- linguistic regions” on media migration, interaction and communication (Huang 181). Therefore, Curtin (2003) concludes a media capital as “a nexus or switching point, rather than a container”, with its status that can be “won and lost”, and believes that a city that grows to be a media capital is influenced by social and cultural forces, the patterns of economic exchange and institutional organizations (204-05).

Apart from elaborating the spatial dynamics of media capital, Curtin in another piece in 2012 further stated three operating principles in defining and forming a media capital, which are borrowed in this thesis to comparing Bollywood in India and the Beijing-centered cultural community in China. The three principles, “logic of accumulation”, “trajectories of creative

migration”, “contours of socio-cultural variation”, work together on the formation of media capital interactively (Curtin, 2012, 181).

The logic of accumulation exists in the media industry as long as enterprises “seek

efficiency through the concentration of productive resources and the expansion of markets so as to fully utilize their productive capacity and realize the greatest possible return” (ibid). For media capital, the logic of accumulation is adopted through the concentration of creative resources, the decrease of production costs, and the increase of multiple delivery channels, in the aim of enlarging profitable market within the geo-linguistic regions. Along with the economic globalization, runaway productions help global media power like Hollywood to seek low-cost production locations through redeploying and re-concentrating creative resources including facilities and ensuring Hollywood as the “authentic home” of media production, whereas leaving cities like Vancouver as “non-U.S. film production centers” serving for pro-globalization

(Johnson-Yale 113).

The trajectories of creative migration focus attracting creative talents from each media capital. According to Curtin (2012), creative labor should be regarded as “core resource”, prior to any business talk of audiovisual production (183). A new prototype created during

Hollywood’s global expansion contains localized programming and globalized production. Constant changes in content output required by the new prototypes of film and television program making require various levels of labors to meet both the demand for “stimulat(ing) novelty” and the need of working on daily basis, which is the reason that media enterprises tend to cluster in certain cities where provide not only efficient costs on personnel but also “mutual learning effects” from high-level media talents (Huang 180; Curtin, 2012, 183). Whether through informal learning (such as communications on shooing sites) or formal learning (such as film

festivals or trade associations), labor clustering can upgrade product quality and improve innovation, thus the mutual learning should be institutionalized to “foster the reproduction and enhancement of creative labor” in return (Curtin, 2010, 266). Media capitals also are cities that foster creative opportunities for aspiring media talents, build local training programs and labor union, and promote job mobility and intra-industry exchanges on techniques and skills. It is true that media capital is reliant on subcontractors or below-the-line workers for cost efficiency and clustering, however, its further development heavily depends on “the ongoing migration of talent in pursuit of professional opportunities” on a high-level basis (ibid). Therefore, the clustering of skilled media talents distinguishes media capital from runaway production cities where is mostly filled with subcontractors and low-cost labors.

The contours of socio-cultural variation are mainly referred to the cultural and social forces in the formation of individual media capital, demonstrating that “national and local institutions have been and remain significant actors in the global cultural economy” (Curtin, 2012, 184). The forces of socio-cultural variation in particular media capital impact on how media products are made and consumed in certain cultural regions. Apart from favored policies from central government, local media enterprises or transnational media conglomerates also exploit cultural and social peculiarities in media production, distribution and exhibition through collecting creative resources and attracting talents. Cultural proximity, “the tendency to prefer media products from one’s own culture or the most similar possible culture,” is consistent with the emergence of regional media production (Straubhaar 85). Therefore, the unique socio-cultural force “carve(s) out market niches that are beyond the reach of powerful but culturally distant competitors,” and the media practitioners take advantage of it to resonate with the cultural disposition within the geo-linguistic regions.

By exploiting Curtin’s concept on media capital, the following section intends to find out, by comparing Bollywood’s media capital Mumbai with Beijing-centered cultural community through three structural forces, which are the logic of accumulation, trajectories of creative migration, and contours of social-cultural variations, that the ambition of Chinese central

government is to build up a global media power instead of fostering a media capital. This chapter will further envision whether China will build up an all-around “Chinawood” or just a “Chinese Hollywood,” a runaway production for the global film industry, in the future.