The Culture of Censorship: State Intervention and Complicit Creativity in Global Film Production.

This article examines how state censorship, particularly China's film censorship system, shapes global creative production by infiltrating the entire filmmaking process through multistage gatekeeping and intermediated censorship involving both state and nonstate actors. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with industry insiders in Beijing and Los Angeles, it reveals that censorship operates as an informal, relational process characterized by "complicit creativity," where filmmakers and executives negotiate and collaborate with censors through concession, reconfiguration, and collusion rather than outright resistance. The study proposes a micro-sociological model of censorship that highlights the symbiotic relationship between censors and creators, emphasizing the ongoing social dynamics and informal practices that sustain censorship's effectiveness in a globalized cultural economy. This framework offers analytic tools for understanding state intervention in cultural production beyond China, including in other authoritarian and democratic contexts.