As the Global Cultural Trade Landscape Evolves, China Is Becoming a Powerful Engine
Currently, cultural consumption has become a new engine of economic growth. Behind it lies a "super-network chain" of international cultural trade that crosses national and continental boundaries to reach thousands of households. Within this framework, digitalization and intelligent technologies have emerged like a magnificent sunrise, redrawing the skyline of international cultural trade for humanity. New business forms and models of digital cultural trade have become the most dynamic "new tracks" across the entire cultural trade landscape.
In recent years, online game IPs developed in China have become "national games" beloved by many young players in Southeast Asia. Similarly, the immersive performance Sleep No More, developed from Shakespeare’s original work, has generated London, Boston, Broadway, and Shanghai versions through copyright trade and the collaborative creation of artists from multiple countries. As an important component of the international trade system, international cultural trade is playing an increasingly vital role in stimulating the global market and benefiting the livelihoods of people across all nations.
China is a builder, contributor, reformer, and beneficiary of global cultural trade. Distinct from the "free competition and efficiency first" model emphasized by the United States and others, and different from the "cultural exception and strengthened control" model advocated by France and others, China proceeds from the construction of a community with a shared future for humanity. It has formed a cultural trade position of "development first, inclusion, and universal benefit." This position highlights values that are people-centered and balance righteousness with profit [1]; it emphasizes enhancing the common well-being of humanity through cultural trade. It highlights a worldview that is compatible with countries at different levels of development and advocates for an open, integrated, and win-win cultural trade order. It highlights a dynamic view of power that uses innovation to promote the upgrading of cultural trade, allowing the vitality of various innovative subjects to be fully released. Finally, it highlights a practical view of coordinating the internal and external overall situations [2], combining domestic reform and opening up with the optimization of the international cultural trade order, gaining widespread recognition worldwide.
Cultural Trade: Global Markets and Smooth Cultural Supply Chains
International cultural trade is a vital component of international trade. It is the trade method for the import and export of cultural products and services between countries, and an important means for nations to expand their external cultural communication, promote cultural diversity, and gain international discourse power and influence. Cultural trade mainly includes trade in cultural products and trade in cultural services; the latter extends to areas such as intellectual property licensing, computer services, engineering, architectural and technical services, music services, and audiovisual outsourcing services. UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) expresses this as trade in creative products and creative services. Although statistical scopes differ slightly, the general classification principles are interconnected.
If commercial transactions of cultural products based on the division of labor—starting from 2800 BCE when people used precious metals to trade Sumerian art—constituted the embryonic form of cultural trade, then with the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Discovery, ocean trade once blocked by vast seas became smooth. A modern cultural supply chain covering the globe gradually formed. It links the cultural heritage of indigenous North Americans, super-platforms and digital creative products developed in Silicon Valley, Japan’s "Second Dimension" [3] hub Akihabara, and Shanghai International Artwork Trade Week into a "super-network chain" of unprecedented scale.
This "super-network chain" of international cultural trade is connected by cultural investors, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and various users—including individuals, enterprises, and public users—from all countries. It is composed of all participating "node enterprises" and factors such as investment, technology, content, and talent, exhibiting characteristics of integrity, dynamism, and intersectionality.
Due to the global flow of factors of the productive forces, cultural trade has not only attracted greater investment in creative design, technology, tools, and capital, but has also formed a series of governance mechanisms. These include free trade agreements and free trade zones, artwork trade indices, copyright transactions, derivative products, and guarantee systems. This has created a situation of "you in me and me in you" [4] across multiple nodes of the supply chain, including R&D, circulation, and consumption. Whether it is a film and television work or a streaming audiovisual website, its creativity, technology, investment, and talent can circulate globally to pursue optimal allocation.
Since entering the 21st century, despite encountering adverse factors such as geopolitical conflicts, slowing economic growth, and trade protectionism, expanding the interconnectivity of various countries and promoting the extensive circulation of the factors of cultural productive forces remains the general trend. An open global cultural trade system allows countries at different development levels to complement each other on the supply chain, creating opportunities for global investors, producers, and consumers to promote the growth of cultural production and consumption through cost reduction and efficiency enhancement in an optimized manner.
Openness and connectivity have promoted the continuous growth of cultural productive forces. In recent years, cultural and creative industries have created nearly 50 million jobs globally, accounting for 6.2% of total employment. Global exports of creative products and creative services account for 3% and 21% of total global product and service exports, respectively. The former has grown more than 3.5 times over the past 20 years, while the latter has grown 2.8 times over the past 10 years. The expansion of the scale of international cultural trade has created the prerequisites for expanded production and opportunities for participation in the division of labor and cooperation for more countries to integrate into the global cultural supply chain. China has been the powerful engine with the fastest scale growth and the fastest climb up the value chain in global cultural trade over the past 20 years.
New Business Forms: Digital Cultural Trade and the Vitality of Innovation
As human society enters the era of Industrial Revolution 4.0 and Web 3.0, digitalization and intelligent technologies have emerged like a magnificent sunrise, redrawing the skyline of international cultural trade for humanity. New business forms and models of digital cultural trade have become the most dynamic "new tracks" in the entire cultural trade landscape. Traditional cultural trade categories, such as jewelry, artworks, publishing, and copyright, are also being profoundly influenced by digitalization.
Just as technological progress and industrial revolutions have occurred many times in history, once new factors of the productive forces form innovative combinations, they will sprout like bamboo shoots after a spring rain [5], giving rise to a large number of new business forms. New formats such as digital publishing, digital music, digital games, immersive experiences, digital audiovisuals, and digital art embody laws of the networked era such as Moore's Law, Gilder's Law, and Metcalfe's Law. They integrate the three major forms of human cultural production—on-site production, in-person production, and online production—into one. They transform cultural services that were previously impossible to store or compress, limited in scale, and inefficient—such as live performances, festivals, and audiovisual experiences—into new forms of circulation that are storable, compressible, high-fidelity, capable of long-distance transmission, and precise delivery. They establish entirely new supply-demand relationships through the interaction of virtuality and reality, organically blending the physical creation of the "carbon-based world" with the virtual creativity of the "silicon-based world," becoming the fastest-growing new track in international cultural trade.
Taking the music industry as an example, in 2024, the transaction volume of streaming music—a new business form spawned by the internet—surged to 20.4 billion USD, accounting for 69% of global music industry revenue. Meanwhile, the sales of recorded products such as physical records fell to 4.8 billion USD, accounting for only 16%.
In artwork trading, the combination of advancements in digital technology and new business models is gradually breaking through a series of traditional challenges in authentication, rights confirmation, bidding, delivery, storage, and cross-border circulation, promoting the continuous growth of online artwork trading worldwide. In 2023, global online sales of artworks reached 19% of the total artwork market.
From a deeper perspective, digitalization is reshaping the fundamental rules of global cultural trade, highlighting the "coopetition" law of factor combination and victory through innovation. The essential characteristic of globalization is the international flow of production factors. The rate of return on factors is the core of trade competitiveness, and international direct investment is the main carrier of factor flow. Since the end of the 20th century, the combination of high-level production factors from developed economies—such as technology, content, and brands—with low-level production factors from developing economies—such as land, natural resources, and primary labor—has formed the contemporary factor-cooperation pattern of international economy and trade. This is also reflected in cultural trade: the high-end factors of international cultural trade are excellent content, advanced technology, and high-quality capital, with content including IP copyrights, trademarks, software copyrights, and patents. Their optimal combination determines that the highest-yielding and fastest-circulating elements in international cultural trade are creative-intensive, technology-intensive, and capital-intensive medium-to-high-end cultural products and services. For countries and regions at different levels of development, they must actively cultivate and introduce high-end factors to move from the low end to the high end of the global cultural value chain, thereby playing a more important and active role in global cultural trade.
As the "Murray-Kemp Model" demonstrates, when two countries both vigorously develop the same type of products and services, differences in resource endowment and innovation capabilities will encourage them to exchange based on their respective differences and advantages. This strengthens innovative factor combinations and makes it possible to reach an optimal state of input and output. For example, Ireland—which ranks second in the export of creative services—has a land area of only 70,000 square kilometers and a population of only 5.38 million, yet its creative service exports in 2022 reached 231.3 billion USD, second only to the United States. Ireland does not possess advantages in natural resources such as minerals, forests, or arable land, but through forward-looking industrial layouts and policy guidance, it has dedicated itself to developing human creative resources, creating an advanced business ecosystem and astonishing cultural and creative export capabilities.
China's Actions: Propositions and Major Contributions of a Responsible Major Power
In the process of building a community with a shared future for humanity, China is a builder, contributor, reformer, and beneficiary of the international cultural trade order, contributing strong positive energy to the development of international cultural trade.
Current propositions regarding the international cultural trade order primarily include the following three: First, the "free competition and efficiency first" proposition advocated by the United States, which emphasizes free circulation, open markets, and encouraging innovation. Second, the "cultural exception and controlled protection" proposition represented by countries like France, which emphasizes that cultural products are an exception, calls for strengthened control over digital data circulation, and requires platform-based enterprises to act as neutral "gatekeepers." These two propositions are in constant dispute and find it difficult to gain universal recognition as they struggle to balance the interests of all parties. Third is the "development first, inclusion, and universal benefit" proposition advocated by China, which seeks a balance between development and security, innovation and inclusion, providing opportunities of a universal nature for countries at all levels of development.
The core of China’s proposition is to build a community with a shared future for humanity and construct a new type of international cultural trade order where we "help each other in the same boat" [6]. It adopts the perspective of dialectical materialism, which Marx used to examine "the sum total of social and economic relations," updating the originally Western-centric cultural trade order and governance system into an inclusive and universally beneficial international cultural order and governance system to adapt to the growth of global cultural productive forces and the requirements of human well-being.
China’s basic propositions and implementation priorities for optimizing the international cultural trade order can be summarized in four aspects: First, development, taking sustainable development as the core thesis and cultivating new drivers of cultural trade through innovative R&D and factor combinations. Second, inclusion, taking into account the demands of countries and regions at different development levels and placing international cultural trade within the framework of global common governance. Third, synergy, promoting the coordinated efforts of governments, enterprises, non-governmental organizations, and social groups to form a cooperation network of co-creation and sharing. Fourth, linkage, promoting internal and external linkage between domestic reform and opening up and the optimization of the global trade order, exploring a path of transformation through growth.
China not only has forward-looking propositions in the field of international cultural trade but also has strong actions based on vision and strength. In recent years, the focus of China's foreign cultural trade development has undergone positive changes, forming an "innovation-driven cooperation hub" model. China encourages innovation in technology, content, and management, cultivates new quality productive forces in culture, develops medium-to-high-end cultural products and services, and accelerates the layout of cultural trade in overseas markets, forming a new pattern of two-way circulation.
In particular, China provides large quantities of cultural consumer goods, intermediate goods, and capital goods to developed economies, while also providing large quantities of cultural products and services to emerging and developing economies. In terms of implementation measures, paths such as the "overseas remake of Chinese film and television IPs" created by Shanghai enterprises, and the Phoenix Publishing & Media Group of Jiangsu’s promotion of "culture going global" through copyright trade, physical exports, co-publishing, and global solicitation of manuscripts, have provided rich cooperation opportunities and consumption objects for many countries and regions.
From 2002 to 2022, China’s exports of creative services grew by 39.4 times, and exports of creative products grew by 7.8 times. In 2022, China’s exports of creative products reached a record 249.9 billion USD, firmly ranking first in the world; China’s exports of creative services reached 67 billion USD, jumping to fifth in the world, achieving a historic leap.
It should be noted that although the scale of China’s creative product and service exports has achieved leapfrog growth since joining the World Trade Organization, China’s creative service export volume in 2022 was still lower than that of the United States (244.3 billion USD), Ireland (231.3 billion USD), the United Kingdom (87 billion USD), and Germany (78.6 billion USD). It is evident that there is still significant room for China to improve in developing technology-intensive, capital-intensive, and creative-intensive cultural service trade.
Based on our own foundations, absorbing external influences, and facing the future [7]. China is willing to work with the international community, keeping the future of humanity and the well-being of the people in mind, to continue elevating toward the medium-to-high end of the global cultural and creative industry value chain. With the vision and strength to become a global cultural trade power, China will create more cultural well-being for the people of all nations.