Pawns in the power struggle: Navigating creative labor precarity across MCNs, platforms, and state regulation in China

This study examines how digital creators navigate the precarious Chinese digital creative industries (DCCIs), shaped by multi-channel networks (MCNs), platform logic, and intensifying state intervention. Drawing on interviews with 34 creators, I identified three challenges facing Chinese creators: (1) dual exploitation by volatile platforms and capricious MCN management; (2) erosion of creative autonomy under MCN gatekeeping and state oversight; (3) involuntarily being enlisted as propaganda artisans. Creators, especially those affiliated with MCNs, are increasingly positioned as state labor with governed creativity: cultural workers whose output is shaped, constrained, and redirected by the layered imperatives of state mandates, platform governance, and intermediary control. This study contributes to de-Westernizing creative labor studies by showing how labor precarity in China's DCCIs emerges from the convergence of market forces and state governance, placing creators under compounded pressures of commercial performance and ideological conformity.