April 2012
How to Face China’s Rising Interest in Promoting Domestically-Produced Animation
Ken-ichi Yamada
The animation industry is rapidly growing in China. In 2011 China produced 435 animation programs (4,353 hours and 44 minutes in total) for TV; it already leads the world in terms of hours spent for production. This is a result of China’s efforts on promoting the anime business since 2004, but the process was accompanied by “protectionism” with various moves such as virtually eliminating Japanese animation from TV broadcasting. With Japan’s birthrate declining, securing a profit in the growing Chinese market is a vital issue for the Japanese anime industry. However, there seems to be many challenges, represented by how to break the barrier of Chinese government’s “protectionism.” In this article the author presents the findings from a recent field research in Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province, which is becoming a mecca for the Chinese animation industry, and discusses how anime businesses in Japan and China should forge relationship including co-production opportunities as it is expected to see fiercer competition in the future.
Japanese animation has stormed China, starting from Astro Boy (Mighty Atom) and Ikkyu-san in the 1980s, followed by Draemon, Chibi Maruko-chan, Sailor Moon, Detective Conan (Case Closed) and Crayon Shin-chan, in the 1990s, partly influenced by widespread pirated copies; titles are too numerous to mention. Beijing sensed “cultural aggression” and hammered out a policy to promote domestically-made animations in 2004 that had two goals: “socialist education for the youths” from a cultural point of view and “fosterage of new industries other than manufacturing” from an economic point of view. Quantitatively speaking, home-made animation grew dramatically partly due to “protectionism,” where foreign-made animations were shut out from prime-time TV broadcasts, but it is said there remains issues in terms of quality. To overcome the challenge, the Chinese government calls on overseas anime operators to cooperate in technical transfer through co-production or to broadcast or screen Chinese titles overseas. Japan has been promoting co-productions with Chinese animation companies, but many say these efforts are yet to bear a fruit, and Japanese animation companies are in general not very keen to enter the Chinese market on a full scale. Still, there are new movements such as TV Tokyo’s 2011 announcement of a co-production project with a Chinese animation company related to a Chinese local station in 2011 and distribution of a well-known animation, which is currently on air, over the Internet on the same day of the broadcast. However there are complicated problems, which auto or other such industries do not usually face, such as censorship by the Chinese authority that makes it difficult to select themes freely. It may take some time to grasp the direction of relationship between Japanese and Chinese operators.