Cultural Continuities and Skateboarding in Transition: In the Case of China’s Skateboarding Culture and Industry

Abstract

Previous research on skateboarding has been conducted largely under the lens of cultural studies. Recently, there has been growing recognition of skateboarding as an industry under capitalist structures. Nonetheless, the transition of skateboarding from a subculture to a global multi-billion dollar industry is still left untheorized. There are two primary aims of this study. First is to evaluate the implication of the theoretical transition in existing literature from the subcultural theories and the critical political economy approach in examining subcultures and cultural industries. The second is to contextualize key concepts such as authenticity and cultural intermediaries in the empirical understanding of the dynamics of distinction in the Chinese skateboarding community and industry. The evidence presented in the qualitative investigation of key members of the Chinese skateboarding community suggests that an ambivalent sociality has been neglected in previous discussions on authenticity and the precariousness of skateboarding careers. Borrowing perspectives from cultural sociology and organizational sociology, the finding on the prevalence of the Chinese concept guanxi suggests relevant implications for future research.

Introduction

The skateboarding culture, in general, has gone through different stages in its development, from its origins as a grassroots subculture in Southern California to a global phenomenon and a multi-billion dollar transnational industry (Borden, 2019; Thorpe, 2014; Thorpe & Wheaton, 2011). As skateboarding culture spreads around the globe, the Chinese consumer market, comparable to trends in almost all other transnational industries, has become a significant focus of the global commercial expansion of the skateboarding industry. London-based Palace (established in 2009 from a local London skate shop and now having expanded as one of the best-selling street fashion brands in the world) released signature shoes by Louis Vuitton (LV) in 2021 under the name of Jamaican-born pro-skater and team rider Lucien Clarke. Not long after, LV’s creative director Virgil Abloh, who had been publicly showing his enthusiasm towards skateboarding culture, reposted a video of Shanghai-based skater Stephen Khou wearing LV brand shoes while skating at a famous skate spot in Shanghai, with the Chinese rap song ‘Wodeci’ (My brothers) by the celebrated Chinese underground band Purple Souls as background music. The same week, the local Chinese skateboarding brand Avenue and Son, which Khou co-owned, launched its pop-up store at SKP-S, an art-oriented sub-store under SKP, the top department store in the world in terms of sales (Berbano, 2021). At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, a 16-year-old Chinese girl who did not even know what skateboarding was until 2018 ranked sixth at the skateboarding event, putting China in the pool to win medals at the next Olympic Games in Paris. Clearly, China is an important context for an understanding of the contemporary skateboarding industry. Setting the research within this context offers opportunities to test existing structures of theories inside the scholarly body of research on skateboarding with first-hand empirical data in a location where the booming skateboarding culture/industry is less investigated by academics.

Skateboarding, as an emerging research subject, has attracted increasing academic attention from various academic disciplines in light of its inclusion in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. One of the earliest and perhaps still predominant perspectives of research into skateboarding lies within the theoretical frameworks that position skateboarding as a youth subculture. This strand of research is dominated by the theoretical framework from cultural studies that investigates the dynamic forms of youth subcultural phenomena and practices within the skateboarding community (Beal, 1995, 1996). Subsequently, researchers reflected on the application of subcultural theory in skateboarding research and have proposed revisions of such academic writings on the everyday practices of skateboarding participants (Wheaton, 2007). On the other hand, a marginalized but essential theme in this field started to emerge, one that positions skateboarders not only as consumers of the culture but also producers who renegotiate and produce authentic meaning valuable to the subculture’s participants (Dupont, 2014, 2019; Lombard, 2010; Nichols, 2020). This shift of attention from consumption to production in the analysis of youth subcultural communities has been discussed in the established field of research on cultural industries (see McRobbie, 2002; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010; Banks, 2007, 2017). Identifying this transition of theoretical frameworks forms a starting point for new questions to be explored in this article, as well as future research that takes seriously the industry side of skateboarding, which is often neglected (Dinces, 2011; Nichols, 2020).

The aim of this article is to, first, make a theoretical contribution to the analysis of the transition in frameworks mentioned above. Second, in the later sections after the theoretical discussion, it will provide an empirical reflection on how this transition was embedded in the development of the Chinese skateboarding culture and industry. My intention in revisiting the theoretical trajectory is directed at understanding how a social interpretation of the concept of authenticity (Beal & Weidman, 2003; Dupont, 2019; Lombard, 2010; Wheaton, 2007; Wheaton & Beal, 2003) can supplement the theme of resistance in subcultural studies while including post-subcultural discussion of subcultural capital (Thornton, 1995) and cultural intermediaries (Bourdieu, 1984; Hesmondhalgh, 2006; Smith Maguire, 2014; Maguire & Matthews, 2010) from the critical political economy’s approach to cultural industries and ‘guanxi favouritism’ (Bian & Shuai, 2019; Yang, 1994) from organizational sociology. This will situate my discussion in the empirical observation of development of Chinese skateboarding careers. My analysis of the Chinese skateboarding culture/industry suggests a connection between the various theoretical frameworks and sociological concepts that can be further explored in the studies of contemporary subcultures and the subsequent cultural industries they can potentially develop into.

Method

Data used for this study were collected from 2018 to 2021 with supplemental materials from my PhD research collected between 2013 and 2017. Participant observation was conducted at a variety of skateboarding events and social gatherings, mainly in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Shenzhen. As a skateboarder who started skating at the age of 14 in Beijing in 2002, I had no problem obtaining initial contacts with my target research participants. A mixture of snowball sampling and ongoing sampling was used for both the participants who I had either direct or indirect connections with and those who I needed to be introduced to by other participants. Thirty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted, the length of which ranged from 30 minutes to 2 hours. My sample of participants covered different strata of the skateboarding hierarchy, ranging from all levels of skateboarders: team managers, skate shop owners and videographers/photographers. Something worth noting here is that there is a traditional hierarchy of skateboarders in the skateboarding industry. This ranges from casual skaters to different levels of sponsorships—shop-sponsored skaters (local skate shop equipment/clothes sponsorship), flow skaters (brand equipment/clothes sponsorship), amateur skaters (brand equipment/clothes sponsorship, sometimes with a lower salary than the professionals), to professional skaters (with a high salary and potentially signature products that the professional skater shares sales dividends of). Regarding the sponsors, I sampled both transnational sports corporations, and the local small and medium entrepreneurs (SMEs) to observe the different strategies and perspectives. I have even included some key members of the official institutions from the Chinese Sports Department to investigate how they have developed a cultural approach in managing skateboarding as a sport within the institutional framework. The main objectives of my interviews are to explore how skateboarders become participants of the local skateboarding culture; how they have developed a career inside the industry; how they achieve their subcultural status within the culture; and how their statuses have affected their practices, relationships, careers and identities in relation to the transformation in Chinese skateboarding culture that has taken place over the years. Informal interviews from when my participants and I had casual conversations in the field are also included.

I have taken careful consideration of and reflection on my insider role in the Chinese skateboarding industry in various aspects. The first aspect is as a local skateboarder who started at the relatively early stage of the Chinese skateboarding culture in Beijing, where the participants in the culture first emerged. The second aspect of my background is as someone who has had experience in shooting videos and photos for skateboarding companies and magazines. Finally, I am a researcher who has shown insider ‘group commitment’ (Hodkinson, 2005, p. 135) to help the subculture gain legitimacy in mainstream culture and institutions. This insider role brought me significant conveniences in accessing the somewhat marginalized subculture, but also presented challenges. One of the advantages of the insider researcher role is being able to access ‘the perspective of the insider and to render it meaningful’ (O’Reilly, 2009). This is especially important in this case since skateboarders have presented contradictory values in different contexts. Their public appearances and behaviours can be easily interpreted as being rebellious, but their actions towards their local groups demonstrate very different values. The other benefits of the insider researcher role include easier access and rapport building, ‘linguistic competence’ for communicating with participants more naturally and effectively, and an interpretation of research materials with ‘superior insider knowledge gained through primary socialisation’ (Hodkinson, 2005; O’Reilly, 2009). However, dangers of insider research could also be present, such as the danger of underestimating the need for interpreting ‘unconscious grammar’ that participants and the researcher share and difficulty in ‘stepping back’ to a critical distance (Lumsden, 2009; O’Reilly, 2009).

Subcultural Theory and Skateboarding

One of the distinctive and widely received characteristics of skateboarding is the rebellious connotations that come with the ‘spectacular’ images and practices skateboarders represent. This characteristic of skateboarding has long been recognized and analysed by skateboarding researchers. Writing in the 1990s, Beal’s (1995, 1996) pioneer ethnographic studies documented skateboarding before its tremendous commercial and global expansion (Beal & Wilson, 2004), a time when skateboarding was still not in the spotlight of the transnational sports and media industries. Her focus lies on skateboarders as subcultural participants creating subversive meanings, both symbolically and physically, as alternatives to the mainstream ideas of physical activities. Other forms of resistance were documented by Howell (2005) and Borden (2001), which see skateboarding as producing alternative meanings of space. Clear indications of The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ (CCCS) theoretical framework application can be found in a wide range of skateboarding research (Lombard, 2010). However, though it has still a long-lasting influence on skateboarding research, the idea of symbolic resistance (Clarke et al., 1976; Hebdige, 1979) has been constantly questioned and refined. Beal and Weidman (2003, p. 351) stated at the beginning of the 2000s that ‘skateboarders are willing to forfeit… public acceptance because being perceived as authentic by other skaters is so important. In fact, authenticity is arguably the single most important factor determining admittance into the subculture’. The idea of authenticity has constituted a foundation for other strands of subcultural studies to provide useful insights into skateboarding as a subculture. Williams (2007, p. 587) argues that authenticity as a term, though is difficult to pinpoint to a static definition, links the subcultural literature from both the semiotic and social constructive approach to the analysis of subcultural identities. However, to form a comprehensive understanding of authenticity in the skateboarding culture, I argue that we need to go beyond the CCCS approach that took dominance over the past decades. Therefore, a careful re-examination of the subcultural theory is presented in the following sections. To do this, I will start by returning to the Chicago School of youth culture studies to find the foundation of the theoretical framework, which is still of value in the later subcultural debates.

Subcultural Formation of Chinese Skateboarding and the Chicago School

The Anglo-American debate concerning youth subcultures has taken different forms in the 20th century in investigations of the youth cultures that emerged after World War II. Early American academic attention to youth cultures involved theorists associated with the Chicago School (see Thrasher, 1929; Cohen, 1955; Becker, 1963). Many of the works related to the Chicago School, such as Thrasher’s (1929) ethnographic study of gangs in Chicago, represent street youth cultures mainly as ‘deviant groups’ that create ‘underworlds’ in cities’ poorly organized areas. Two main themes in Thrasher’s understanding of gang culture were carried forward into later studies: a micro-culture existing both underneath and separate from mainstream culture (‘sub’ as in subterranean) and one in opposition to it (subverting it). Cohen’s (1955) study of the ‘Delinquent Boys’ (first introduced the term ‘subculture’) is one of the later works that expanded Thrasher’s analysis by explaining the function of a subculture as a solution to social problems: ‘one solution is for individuals who share such problems to gravitate towards one another and jointly to establish new norms, new criteria of status which define as meritorious the characteristics they do possess, the kinds of conduct of which they are capable’ (Cohen, 1955, pp. 56–66).

The post-war economic recovery in Britain encouraged scholars to examine new patterns of subcultural activities. Mark Abrams’ study of The Teenage Consumer (1959) suggests that ‘affluent teenagers’ may provide a valuable point of entry into how subcultural studies can approach the new patterns of youthful activities and the emerging youth market organized around the distinctive tastes of working-class youth in industries such as fashion and music. Coleman (1961) also extended Thrasher’s (1929) theme of a ‘separate youth culture’ and argues that American high school students built up their own adolescent spaces that are ‘cut off’ from adult culture and hence constitute the basis for their rejection of the school system. This line of research lays the foundation for later subculture studies in understanding subcultural styles and expressions.

The Chicago School’s theories still have tremendous value as tools to explain the subcultural formation of the skateboarding culture. Both Borden (2001) and Howell (2005) demonstrated clearly in the 2000s that young, working-class skateboarders have revived ‘the left-over spaces of modernist planning’ (Borden, 2001, p. 188; Howell, 2005, p. 40). By creating subversive meanings of such spaces and establishing new norms and practices, working-class skateboarders not only found joy in the spaces that were available to them, but more importantly, formed a community where they felt belonging. Blackman (2014) argues that despite the criticisms of the Chicago School having a functionalist entry point into social delinquency and deviance, Cohen’s study shows its influence from Durkheim (1893/1964) and Freud (1913) in that it employs psychoanalysis of subcultural participants’ attempts to deal with their socio-economic struggles and seek a sense of belonging, which has been evident in the studies of skateboarding culture and its participants.

Skateboarding came to China in the late 1980s. Due to the language barrier, meaning in the culture was left to little more than a symbolic reading of skateboarding practices and style. At first, skateboarding was very much like the way Lu (2009, p. 150) described Chinese rock music subculture participants: as the ‘avant-garde rebellion’ and an alternative to mainstream sports among privileged youth as it was first developed elsewhere (Sproul, 2004). One respondent, who started skateboarding in the 1990s and just had his 44th birthday, calls the early adoption of skateboarding culture in China a ‘marriage without romance’, suggesting a difference in the global skateboarding culture and the Chinese skateboarding culture. The beginning of the latter took place at a time when China was opening up, both economically and culturally. Early generations of skateboarders in China turned their middle-class social and economic resources into a new form of symbolic capital that is considered both Western and modern in the Chinese society. A member of the first generation of Chinese skateboarders describes the feeling of displaying his symbolic capital in the late 1990s as follows.

It felt pretty much like the equivalent of driving a Lamborghini if you were carrying a skateboard, or even better, riding one. There was nothing as close to the idea of ‘cool’ than skateboarding at the time. We would instantly connect with each other with a skateboard.

Many early generations of Chinese skateboarders told me in their interviews that they felt a strong sense of rejection from their education institutions, not because of their class locations, but more because of their academic performances and tendencies to escape the conformist culture of the Chinese school systems. Skateboarding, like the rock music culture that came before it, was seen as a solution to their social problems encountered in their school system. The distinctive symbolic capital that came with participating in the Chinese skateboarding culture and the social aspect of the participation enabled by possession of such symbolic capital brought Chinese skateboarders together, opened up space and created a social group where they felt belonging. Most, if not all, of the participants expressed a strong sense of belonging to their local groups and the skate spot where they skated and found social solidarity with their skateboarder communities.

CCCS, Post-CCCS and the Growing Chinese Skateboarding Community

Drawing on the theoretical framework of Gramsci’s hegemony with a semiotic approach from Roland Barthes, the CCCS theorists shifted attention away from urban sociological studies to readings of the symbolic forms of subcultural expressions and styles, re-asserting the theme of class at the centre of a cultural reading of subcultures in post-war Britain. By forming or joining style-based subcultures, young people worked through their class experiences and negotiated a collective identity expressed through symbolic resistance to the dominant culture (Clark et al., 1976, p. 35). In contrast with the Chicago School’s youth cultural theories, here continuities were given more attention by the examination of the social locations and styles of subcultural expressions in relation to their parent cultures. Taking skinheads as an example, John Clark et al. argue that ‘the adoption by skinheads of boots and short jeans and shaved hair was “meaningful” in terms of the subculture entirely because these external manifestations reflected and articulated skinhead conceptions of masculinity, “hardness” and “working-classness” that were central to the general culture of manual labour’(1976, p. 44). Another landmark study is Hebdige’s (1974) research on the skinheads and mods. Hebdige argues that by assigning subversive meanings to working-class consumables, subcultural participants ‘triumphed with symbolic victories’ (Hebdige, 1974, p. 93). ‘Stylisation’ (Clarke et al., 1976, p. 42) was seen as a magical solution to resolve the contradictions they experienced in their subordinated social and economic conditions laid out by the dominant culture.

The CCCS approach has been subjected to a number of criticisms from both inside and outside the work related to CCCS. In their contribution to Resistance Through Rituals, Murdock and McCron (1976, pp. 172, 174) call for a more comprehensive analysis of subcultures, underlining the need to focus on how the shared social experiences of adolescents—in particular, class locations—are collectively expressed and negotiated ‘through the construction of a range of possible leisure styles’. They argue that taking already constituted subcultural groups and going backwards to their class locations is problematic and have suggested the opposite direction by starting with particular class locations and examining how they negotiate identities and respond to their specific class contradictions. Later criticisms come from post-subcultural scholars. Gelder (1997, p. 143) claims that post-subcultural studies, in comparison to the CCCS approach, ‘increasingly respond to post-modern forms of sociality’ and are less concerned with the ‘discrete extraordinariness of subcultures’, but rather ‘treat them (subcultures) as symptoms of the fractured and fragmented—but no less social—nature of contemporary life’. Emphasizing the fluid memberships of the postmodern subcultures, Maffesoli’s (1996) concept of ‘neo-tribe’ became one of the most popular alternative terms in a collective attempt to renegotiate terminology. Scholars such as Bennett (1999, p. 600), in support of the term ‘neo-tribe’, assert that subcultures can be ‘better understood as a series of temporal gatherings characterized by fluid boundaries and floating memberships’. Hodkinson (2002, p. 11) summarized this line of criticism as focused on a ‘theoretical emphasis on the solving of status problems in one case, and on symbolic structural resistance in the other’, since ‘both traditions present an overly simplistic opposition between subculture and dominant culture’. In comparison, Bourdieu’s (1984) work has enabled concepts such as ‘taste’, ‘distinction’ and ‘cultural capital’ to be incorporated into the subcultural examination of contemporary youth subcultures. Cultural capital in Bourdieu’s (1984) use of the term means the accumulation of knowledge, behaviours, skills and cultural goods that assist in negotiating one’s social status in various social and institutional settings. Muggleton (2000), for example, revisited the CCCS’s analysis of subcultural formations, arguing they are voluntary and dynamic associations bound by ‘socially acquired tastes and preferences’ (p. 92). Sarah Thornton’s analysis Club Cultures (1995), drawing on Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of cultural capital, examined the dynamic activities in which subcultural participants accumulate and mobilize ‘cultural capital’ to negotiate subcultural hierarchies inside subcultures.

Subsequent research into skateboarding culture shows a transition from the CCCS’ tradition with the post-subcultural (Wheaton, 2007, 2014) lens, examining how skateboarders ‘positively use specialist or “niche” media’ to ‘establish collective identity’ (Buckingham, 2009; see also Rinehart, 2005; Borden, 2001, 2019; Wheaton & Beal, 2003; Dupont, 2014). In this line of research, authenticity illustrates tensions between the outward resistance towards the commercial incorporation of skateboarding culture and the inward contradiction of how skaters embrace a certain kind of commercialization (Lombard, 2010). In the process, skateboarders actively negotiated authenticity and subcultural hierarchy (Thornton, 1995) inside the skateboarding culture. This transition of scholarly attention signalled a division in skateboarders’ role between subcultural participants and consumers of the subculture, captured by Dupont (2014) as the ‘core vs. consumer’ cultural dichotomy. Dupont (2014, 2019) argues that authenticity in the skateboarding culture functions as guideline for the negotiation of subcultural hierarchy. By practicing a set of values that is ideologically different and sometimes oppositional to the mainstream culture, individual skateboarders’ authenticity can therefore be granted by the ‘core’ groups of skateboarders (Dupont (2014, 2019).

In the Chinese context, the symbolic resistance towards the outside world of mainstream or commercial values was given significantly less value within the skateboarding hierarchy than the various manifestations of insider knowledge or subcultural capitals (Thornton, 1995; Willing, 2019). The early generations of skateboarders in China had very limited access to skateboarding equipment, texts (skateboarding videos, magazines) and meaning (understandings of the tricks and the cultural meanings—histories, meanings of terminologies and brands, etc.). Still, the absence of a ‘authentic’ Western meaning of the skateboarding culture did not restrict a localized sense of authenticity from emerging. At the time, contrary to the working-class subcultures the CCCS observed in the UK, Western cultural consumables such as skateboarding style and practice were a privilege to the middle-class youth in China in the late 1980s and 1990s. The opening up that took place and accelerated with China’s involvement in WTO in the 1990s and 2000s stimulated a new wave of consumer population and markets in China. Sedo (2010; see also Grosso, 2019) documented the very early skateboarding industry in China. Karl Gao, friend of the owner of Powell Peralta Skateboards, started Powell Golden Dragon Corp in China, selling ‘dead stock’ single kicktail skateboards that had gone out of fashion in the 1990s in the US. Karl Gao also formed the first skateboarding print subcultural media in 1993, called the Ollie Newsletter (Aoli Tongxun), which connected the skateboarders around the country. In addition, Golden Dragon organized the first annual national skateboarding contests in the 1990s in Qinhuangdao, where the company was based, attracting skaters from around the country to participate. Steve Caballero and Danny Wainwright were the first ever professional skateboarders who travelled to China, invited by Golden Dragon in 1994 for their skateboarding contests, followed by Mike Vallely in 1997. In 2018, a Beijing skatepark company organized a 25th anniversary contest in memory of the Golden Dragon skate contest. By the end of the 1990s, the Powell Golden Dragon Corp gradually faded out of the Chinese skateboarding culture due to increasing exposure to Western media and the outcome of China’s thriving market reform. Even though Gao was never a skateboarder himself, the recognition he received within the Chinese skateboarding community was immense. The older skateboarders today still respect his business as being the earliest authentic company promoting the Chinese skateboarding subculture domestically. Having had the experience of participating in the contest or the knowledge of the history has become an important marker for one’s subcultural capital (Thornton, 1995) within the hierarchy of the Chinese skateboarding community. Here the idea of the ‘core’ (Dupont, 2014) means more in the productive (or reproductive) actions of skateboarding culture than the consumerist practices of the culture.

Critical Political Economy and Production in Skateboarding Industry

From Cultural Studies of Consumption to the Political Economy Analysis of Production

The missing link of production in Marxist terms in the post-subcultural lens of skateboarding has long been clarified but largely ignored by most skateboarding researchers. Jim McGuigan (1992, p. 118), at the beginning of the 1990s, criticized Willis’ alignment with ‘agency’ over ‘structure’, arguing that such emphasis on the ‘very specific practices and meanings’ ignores the economic precondition that provides such materials for their creative use. The post-subcultural studies have developed richer ethnographic accounts of participants’ subjective appropriation of subcultural styles and their routine practices but have continued to position subcultural participants primarily as consumers of style choices that can be accessed through the market (Hodkinson, 2004; McGuigan, 1992). McGuigan (2016, p. 49) identifies a general limitation in the ‘style-based’ focus in cultural studies as ‘a misguided tendency to neglect economic factors and to exaggerate the role of ideology in relation to consumption’, a view that reduces subcultures largely to market niches.

By positioning skateboarders’ ‘flexible opposition’ in the context of David Harvey’s (1989) concept of ‘symptoms of late capitalism’, Dinces (2011) calls for a reassertion of a Marxist framework in the examination of skateboarding culture. His focus lies on the new wave of entrepreneurialism that came into being in the late 1990s, when street skating was beginning to dominate the skateboarding culture and its later industry. This shift of attention in skateboarding reintroduced the discussion of ‘alienation’ into the research on skateboarding culture. Snyder’s (2012, 2017) rich ethnographic account of the skateboarding career provides vivid documentation of the production process in the skateboarding industry. While this was criticized for its ‘optimism’ (Nichols, 2020, p. 2) and a heavy focus on the male elites of the skateboarding industry (Beal, 2019), one of Snyder’s most noteworthy contributions about skateboarding research was overlooked. His ethnography work includes a complete spectrum of the skateboarding career opportunities, covering more than just professional skateboarders, but more importantly, the photographers’, videographers’ and event organizers’ career pathways. Meanwhile, his rich and vivid record of the production processes in the skateboarding industry would also be instrumental in later analysis of skateboarding as a cultural industry. The skateboarding industry fundamentally functions as a cultural industry that produces meanings for symbolic goods more than physical products. The analytical lens developed by academics in the established field of research into cultural industries (for example, see Murdock, 1989; McRobbie, 1998; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010; Banks, 2017) offers excellent value in the understanding of skateboarding as part of the global cultural economy. Nevertheless, few have made the theoretical connection between cultural studies’ reading of skateboarding and the political-economic reading of cultural industries. Bridging the two theoretical frameworks serves as a foundation for a context in which cultural labours in the skateboarding industry can be analysed not only for their performance and representation of skateboarding tricks/culture but also for how such representations were produced and distributed.

As Murdock noted, writing at the end of the 1980s:

The need for cultural studies to take the insights of critical political economy seriously is clearly signalled by the popularity of the notion of ‘cultural industries’, which is now to be found peppering the speeches and reports of politicians and policy-makers as well as academics. (Murdock, 1989, p. 68)

Writing in exile in California during World War II, Adorno and Horkheimer (1979), the leading figures in the Frankfurt School of Marxist scholars, coined the term ‘culture industry’ to describe the paradoxical relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘industry’ in the commodification of culture as well as the alienation in the work situations within the cultural production system. They emphasize the power of cultural producers over the consumption of culture, as they argue ‘there is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him’ (1979, p. 125). This general emphasis on the cultural power of the leading communications companies signalled an array of academic interest in the perspective of the critical political economy tradition in analyses within the cultural industries framework. Leading figures of this group include, for example, Herbert Schiller and Vincent Mosco in the United States and Graham Murdock, Peter Golding and Nicholas Garnham in Great Britain. Garnham argues that ‘this group took the term “industries” seriously and attempted to apply both a more detailed and nuanced Marxist economic analysis and more mainstream industrial and information economics to the analysis of the production, distribution and consumption of symbolic forms’ (2005, p. 18). Murdock (2003, p. 31) argues that moves in the cultural industries ‘toward outsourcing production, relying more on freelance labour, and assembling teams on a project-by-project basis, have combined to make careers in the cultural industries less secure and predictable’. Angela McRobbie’s (1998) research, for example, updates knowledge on the working lives and careers of cultural labourers who are self-employed in small and medium-sized enterprises in the fashion industry, while Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2010) expand the empirical lens to examine the lived experiences and emotions of cultural workers in ‘the television industry, the recording industry and the magazine industry’. This trend of research investigates many problematic yet ambivalent situations in the lives of workers within cultural/creative industries.

Becoming Cultural Producers in the Skateboarding Industry

The economic reform and the opening-up policies advanced by Deng Xiaoping initiated China’s march into the globalization process. In the early 2000s, international trade flowed more freely under such policies. Double kicktail skateboards from American skateboarding brands such as World Industry, Darkside and Plan B became more accessible to Chinese skateboarders. Nevertheless, a whole set of skateboards would easily cost a Chinese family’s monthly income. As a result, a new wave of skateboarding subcultural entrepreneurs started to emerge. They started to capitalize on skateboarding styles, norms and practices by forming local skateboarding companies to compensate for the scarcity of access to affordable skateboarding equipment. Such subcultural entrepreneurship enabled the local skateboarders to reconstruct the meaning of their subcultural identities. At the same time, these companies also created career opportunities for local skateboarders to make a living from the subculture. One of the earliest and most respected local companies is Society Skateboards, created by a mixed-race skater from Beijing who studied Chinese as a second language in Beijing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He explicitly said he was heavily influenced by his father, a Marxist anthropologist scholar in California who is immensely interested in the communist revolution that happened in China. Therefore, not only did Society Skateboards use iconic Chinese communist images for their board graphics but the team and skaters around the company also explicitly expressed their communist values. The founder of the company said in our interview:

I wanted to start Society Skateboards because, at the time, it was very expensive to buy foreign skateboards. We wanted to produce and sell affordable skateboards to Chinese skaters. In the company we work as a big family. No one is the big boss; we live together, skate together, go to parties together. And we do our best to support our team riders so that they won’t give up skating for financial reasons. The company even rented an apartment in Beijing for many years so that our sponsored skateboarders would stay there to compensate for their living expenses.

Both the company and the team members were seen as the landmark for authenticity in the Chinese skateboarding culture. Such embodiment of subcultural capital can then be translated into other forms of capital, raising the chance of increasing or maintaining career prospects. Another skateboarder who was in the early Society Skateboards team told me:

For a very long time, being a member of the Society Skateboards team means that you are among the best skaters in China. Not only because of our skateboard skills but also because of the kind of culture we represent….When all the big corporations came into China, everybody wanted to get sponsored by them. Usually, it was very hard; you need to prove your worth to the company. But as a People’s Skateboards team member, we pick our sponsors. Everyone on the team has a powerful local style. If you are looking for someone who represents the local Chinese skateboarding culture, you come to us.

The end of the 2000s saw a sea change in the domination of the skateboarding industry by subcultural entrepreneurs to that by transnational sports corporations (Lombard, 2010; Thorpe, 2014; Thorpe & Wheaton, 2011). In 2008, the Beijing Olympic Games attracted both the transnational sports corporations and central authorities’ attention to the rising sports industry in China, pointing to a solidifying infrastructure for the later commercialization and institutionalization of skateboarding. The skateboarding industry faced unprecedented disruption of its early grassroots developments from a growing interest from economic and institutional parties. The ‘invasion’ of transnational corporations disrupted the domination of local skateboarding entrepreneurs in shaping subcultural meanings of skateboarding in China. As the consumer market of skateboarding expanded, the distribution of meaning in the Chinese skateboarding industry started to spread into the mainstream.

As newcomers of the market, the big corporations have also learned their lesson in their home market that a sense of authenticity needs to be granted by the skateboarding community if they want to capitalize on their culture. Wheaton and Beal’s (2003) and Lombard’s (2010) conclusions in their analyses of Nike’s attempts in the negotiation of authenticity in the skateboarding culture shows an example of the shift of Nike’s attitude towards skateboarding culture. After its failed early attempts to capitalize on skateboarding culture, Nike has come to the realization of the importance of commitment and the authentic representation of skateboarding culture. This realization and its later strategies in sponsorship of utilizing established skateboarding legends eventually facilitated the (at least partial) cultural acceptance of Nike’s commercialization of skateboarding culture. Bennett and Hodkinson (Bennett, 2013; Hodkinson, 2011, 2016; Hodkinson & Bennett, 2013), in their revision of subcultural studies and post-subcultural studies, addressed the significance of examining the life trajectories and career pathways in ageing subcultural participants. Hodkinson argues that this line of research, although in its ‘infancy’, has potential in providing ‘greater conceptual working through of how material, institutional, social and subjective factors work together in the ongoing development of cultural journeys and the continuing role of communities’ (2016, p. 641). A few studies conducted to examine the ageing participants in the skateboarding industry emerged in the 2010s. This still thin but important body of research includes Paul O’Connor’s (2018) study tracing the life trajectories and subculture identities of middle-aged skateboarders in Hong Kong and the thematic study of Willing et al. (2019) on the representations of older skateboarders in skate videos. Both studies indicate a positive cultural identity attributed to older skateboarding participants via media. O’Connor argues that ‘middle-aged skateboarders occupy notable positions within the skateboard industry and local skateboard scenes and communities’ (2017, p. 926) and that they have accumulated a high level of social and cultural capital over time. However, left unexamined are themes of the continuing role of communities (Hodkinson, 2016, p. 641) and how they utilize and transform their social and cultural capital into economic capital within the context of a booming skateboarding industry.

Dupont’s (2019) study on skateboarders’ negotiation of authenticity on Instagram extends his previous work on ‘performative labour’ (Dupont, 2014), building a strong case demonstrating the need to examine the transition of the ‘field’ where accumulation of subcultural capital takes place. Dupont notes the difference between subcultural media controlled by skateboarding participants and social media sites owned by multi-national media conglomerates. His research sheds light on the critical questions about the increasing need for self-promotion to gain access, progress and maintain skateboarding careers. Nonetheless, his research also shows that young skateboarders’ authenticity still needs to be approved by the older, established and influential skateboarders, most of whom appear to work within the skateboarding industry. Therefore, the criteria of access to a skateboarding career can be better understood by the expansion of research into the middle-aged skateboarders who function as ‘gatekeepers’ of the skateboarding industry. Dupont wrote at great length about the negotiation of subcultural capital but not as much on the sociality of the skateboarding community that has essential significance to skateboarders in their negotiation of authenticity. Nonetheless, Dupont’s (2019) work points to the gap in the practices of prosumption on social media platforms between the consumption aspects of the skateboarding subcultural practices and the production processes. Yet, the emerging concept of prosumption in the skateboarding industry lacked careful scrutiny until Nichols’ (2020) recent work on the role of social media in skateboarders’ careers. Prosumption is a concept raised from the efforts to describe new ways of exploitation in capitalism. Consumers are increasingly being put to work and exploited by capitalist entities not only as consumers of commodities but also the producers of content (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). Adopting a political-economic reading of the practices of promotion in the skateboarding industry, Nichols’ work provides a much more cautious reading on the precariousness of freelance skateboarders who produce media content to make a living. Such observation updates Snyder’s idea that skateboarding ‘can offer a life and a career almost entirely within the confines of the subculture’ (2017, p. 15) in the modern conditions of the skateboarding industry, taking into consideration transnational corporations’ interest in capitalizing on the growing popularity of skateboarding. However, I argue that the focus on freelancing and social media would not capture the increasingly nuanced production process of authenticity.

Cultural Continuity and Skateboarding in a ‘Mega Transition’

Cultural Intermediaries and the Guarantors of Authenticity

All the above existing investigation of the skateboarding industry points to a theme of an underlying importance in looking at older members of the skateboarding community. Most of my respondents from the early generations of Chinese skateboarders went on to become key players in the contemporary skateboarding industry in their late 30s, working as branding assistants in the marketing divisions in big corporations. Therefore, to comprehend contemporary Chinese skateboarding, it is essential to understand these older skateboarders. This older generation of skateboarders function as what Bourdieu categorized as the new ‘petite bourgeoisie’ or ‘cultural intermediaries’, taking up ‘all the occupations involving presentation and representation and in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services’ (1984, p. 359). Such institutions form the new cultural economy that has gained permanence in the later discussion of cultural/creative industries research, a further aspect of capitalism that acts to ‘incorporate subcultural styles’ (Hebdige, 1974) into the capitalist structure, a description advanced by Jim McGuigan as ‘cool capitalism’ involving ‘incorporation of signs and symbols of disaffection into capitalism itself’ (2016, p. 76, 2009).

The ‘cultural intermediaries’ concept (Hesmondhalgh, 2006; O’Connor & Gu, 2014; Maguire & Matthews, 2010, 2014) became one of the key elements in later cultural/creative industries research that tied together ‘the political economy theory with organisational studies’, at the same time, ‘largely compatible with hegemony theory’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2006, p. 228). This term marks the point where one separates the subcultural forms of cultural production from the corporate form of cultural production (Ryan, 1992). Hesmondhalgh (2006, p. 227) argues:

[The umbrella of ‘cultural intermediaries’ should] include primary creative personnel such as musicians, screenwriters and directors; technical craft workers such as sound engineers, camera operators, copy editors, and so on; owners and executives; marketing and publicity personnel; and, crucially, creative managers, who act as brokers or mediators between, on the one hand, the interests of owners and executives, and those of creative personnel. Examples of such creative managers include A&R staff in the recording industry, commissioning editors in the book industry, magazine editors and film producers.

The implications of the concept of cultural intermediaries unfold once again the question in the centre of much scholarly research into skateboarding—authenticity, or in Bourdieu’s (1984) terms, the symbolic capital. Even though Dinces (2011) does not use the term, his thematic analysis of the role of Stacy Peralta fits the notion of cultural intermediaries. Peralta not only embodied authenticity in his involvement in the Z-Boys crew; he then redefined it by putting Bones Brigade together, who became skateboarding legends. Moreover, he popularized his interpretation of skateboarding authenticity to mainstream audiences via his documentary films: ‘Peralta really did occupy the role of rebel skater, upstart businessman and professional director at the same time, emphasising certain aspects of his identity depending on the given situation’ (Dinces, 2011, p. 1522).

Dinces’ diagnosis of the problem, drawing on Harvey’s (1990) idea of ‘flexible accumulation’, is a symptom of neoliberalism’s uprising. Yet he focused too much on Peralta’s entrepreneurial transformation, and therefore ignored two other factors. First, there are skateboarders committed to communicating meaning to gain mainstream legitimacy. Second, there is meaning that skateboarding subculture carries other than resistance. Similarly, in Willing et al.’s (2019) thematic analysis of the Bones Brigade documentary film by Peralta (2012), Willing focused on the negotiation of the ‘alternative masculinity’ from the groups of the Bones Brigade, glancing over Mullen and Hawk’s statements that emphasize the importance of community and belonging to them and the values they hold dear such as self-accomplishment, commitment and contribution to the community. In the same documentary, there was an interesting discussion on Peralta’s father figure role in the Bones Brigade team and the dispute between Peralta and Powell on whether or not to support Bones Brigade members in their entrepreneurial departure from the brand as they grew into adulthood. As a result, Peralta and Powell parted ways, ending the domination of Powell–Peralta in the skateboarding industry by the end of the film. The latter supportive role of Peralta in the Bones Brigade team, I argue, was the reason he retained his authenticity, confirmed by the Bones Brigade members still, regardless of Peralta’s successful commercial exploitation of the skateboarding culture.

To fully capture the complexity of cultural production in the skateboarding industry, the investigation of what Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2010, p. 13) call an ‘ambivalence of the sociality of cultural production’ inside the skateboarding industry should be given more weight. Connecting the above themes emerging from current studies, the proposal will investigate the social structure embedded in the Chinese skateboarding culture that extends cultural continuity in the intensifying commercial incorporation of skateboarding. Therefore, in the following section, I aim to investigate further questions such as how skateboarders translate their subcultural capital of practice and knowledge into the field-specific symbolic capital of authenticity in pursuit of a skateboarding career. In the meantime, I will examine how cultural intermediaries in the skateboarding culture facilitate the subculture as a cultural industry.

Cultural Continuity and Guanxi in the Transition of the Skateboarding Industry

To establish an understanding of the mechanism of sociality in the production process within the Chinese skateboarding industry, this section provides a cultural-sociological explanation of the underlying social structures within the Chinese skateboarding community. Chinese skateboarding culture has gone through various stages of development from a grassroots subculture to a skateboarding industry over a relatively short period of time. During the fast-forwarded process of commercial development, cultural continuity is found evident in the resilience of social and cultural values that the early generations of skateboarders passed on through historical conjectures. This is similar to Banks’ (2007, p. 120) observation of contemporary cultural industries, where he argues that moral systems of trust, honesty, obligation and fairness have remained present in contemporary capitalism. Mauss in his famous essay (1967) explores the origins of what he sees as resilient morals of gift exchange, which focus on the aspect of reciprocity and the social relations created during the process, a view that challenges the dominant values in the exchange of commodities in contemporary capitalist societies. Bourdieu’s (1984) view of social capital, however, renders social connections as sets of assets that are destined to be institutionalized and function similarly to the mechanism of economic capital (Caille, 1994; see also Papilloud, 2017). Both theories have been applied in attempts to explain the Confucian concept of ‘guanxi’ and exhibit clear traces of both standpoints.

Kipnis (1996, p. 288) argues that Mauss’ theory ‘is a compelling starting point for any analysis of gift giving and guanxi in rural China’, since ‘giving a gift or favour for the purpose of establishing or improving guanxi’ that ‘could unite material obligation and sentimental attachment (renqing)’. Yang (1994) uses ‘guanxixue’ (study of guanxi) to describe gift economy in her book Gift, Favors and Bouquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China. Extending Mauss’ (1967) theory to the Chinese context, Yang (2002, p. 475) argues that ‘whereas capital’s logic is one of endless accumulation, that of guanxi practice is a system of power based on expenditure and giving out’. In her examination of the function of guanxi in the new market economy is the observation that when guanxi ‘is deployed to gain money, it can only do so by resorting to practices which go against the very grain of the principles of rational capital accumulation, that is, by being generous in giving of one’s wealth and other resources’ (Yang, 2002, p. 475). In comparing the market rationalism and guanxi favouritism, Bian and Shuai (2019, p. 3) describes Guanxi as ‘a particular-tie combining familiarity (shu), intimacy (qin), and trustworthiness (xin), which can facilitate favour exchanges between two actors linked by the tie’ (see also Bian, 2006). Guanxi is derived from familial ties of sentiment and obligation within kinship networks (Fei, 1949/1992; Liang, 1949/1986; see also Bian & Shuai, 2019, p. 3), but it goes beyond kinship boundaries to dictate social interactions through the norms of face, favour and reciprocity (Fried, 1953; Hwang, 1987; King, 1985).

Demonstrated in the guanxi circle (Fei, 1992) of Chinese skateboarding culture, members who provide such access to the scarce resources within the constructs sometimes embody the meaning of authenticity with regards to their social positions in the guanxi circle in the skateboarding culture. In contrast to the ‘OG’ (original gangster) term that refers to the older members of the skateboarding culture, in China, these members were called Ge (big brothers). It is argued by Zhou (2018, p. 56) that social actors in the Chinese culture would incorporate traditional kinship social relations (in this case, brothers) into their other social relations such as those in colleges and workplaces. In the Chinese context, Ge comes with both connotations of sentiment and obligation (Bian & Shuai, 2019) that require a practice of favour exchanges between the Ge and the Di (little brothers). At a grassroots subculture level, this means the free distribution of information from the middle-class background members of the group to the either younger or/and working-class members.

Before we had the internet and when skateboarding videos were even available on the internet, our Ge in the local Beijing skateboarding community would share copies of American skateboarding video mediums (magazines, VHS tapes, VCSs, DVDs) among our group. This Ge in our local community was also the owner of the first skateshop in Beijing that sells imported skateboarding equipment. All of which made him the centre point of the local subculture. (Fieldnote, 2014)

The Resilience of Guanxi in the Market Economy and Chinese Skateboarding Career

The favour exchange practice was increasingly attributed as having more instrumental functions as two things were happening in parallel: the intensifying commercialization and the deepening of institutionalization of skateboarding (Lombard, 2010; Thorpe, 2014; Thorpe & Wheaton, 2011) globally and certainly in China. This was best demonstrated in the labour market of the skateboarding industry. In Nichols’ (2020) political-economic analysis of skateboarding labour in the age of the neoliberal economy, he rightly captures the erosion of identities of professional skateboarders. Whereas in Snyder’s observation, there are also traces that we can find of clear favour exchange practices as he points out that ‘in most cases the training for subcultural careers comes from a series of mentoring relationships’ (2017, p. 179). In Bian and Shuai’s (2019, p. 5) study of the resilience of guanxi in the increasingly rationalized market economy in China, they argue that there is an intertwined relationship between guanxi favouritism and market rationality. They distinguished three types of operation in Chinese private firms according to various degrees of market rationality—the ‘profit-maximisation firms’, ‘sales-maximisation firms’ and ‘survival-oriented firms’ (Bian & Shuai, 2019, p. 2). In the case of the Chinese skateboarding industry, all three types of firms can be found relevant to the analysis, from transnational corporations such as Vans to the local skateboarding companies and independent skateshops. The job-seeking and assigning processes in all of the above types of firms seem to follow what Bian and Shuai (2019, p. 5) categorize as the ‘guanxi favouritism-dictating scenario’, where the focal decision makers of such firms ‘select most competent partners from within their networks of entrusted others in order to generate the surest possible outcomes to satisfy each other’.

The Ge in the current world of Chinese skateboarding are the focal decision-makers who decide who gets to be included on the professional teams, who makes the videos, what forms of events get promoted and how they are executed. Over the past decade, the transnational corporation Vans had dominated the Chinese skateboarding industry for various reasons. Borden (2015) clarifies that support is one of the most valued strategies that made the Vans brand authentic in the skateboarding culture. Building the House of Vans skatepark was not only a branding stunt but also a supportive act that provides a space that skaters desire. Vans’ recent incorporation of skateboarding symbolic capital through sponsorship of older skateboarding legends such as Tony Hawk and Andrew Reynolds also demonstrated Vans’ commitment to ‘supporting’ the skateboarding community. It is also the strategy that Vans China has employed. During the decline or disappearance of sponsorships by other sports brands such as Nike and Adidas in China because of the unmet market expectations in comparison to other sports, Vans maintained its support in sponsoring the biggest skateboarding team in China. Such consistency in the sponsorship of local skateboarders earned Vans trust and a sense of authenticity in the Chinese skateboarding community. The act of offering support in effect resembles the obligations that Ge in the Chinese guanxi culture have represented; hence the effectiveness of such strategies depends on them being executed with someone in the social hierarchy of the skateboarding culture. Therefore, when the team manager of Vans China resigned and moved on to work for Vision, Vans very quickly lost its significance in the Chinese skateboarding industry. Vans’ Skateboarding Day event was normally the biggest annual event that every skateshop in China participated in. This support and attention from the skateboarding community shifted to the new event by Vision, as that particular team manager commands undisputed support from the local communities.

For the upcoming young skaters, or the Di, seeking a viable career in the skateboarding industry depends also on their social positions within the Chinese skateboarding culture. In contrast to Snyder’s (2017) observation of the traditional skateboarding industry where one sends a ‘sponsor me video’ to one’s sponsors, the Chinese skateboarding career normally starts in offline settings. Being able to skate and mingle with the team riders from the brands and to be acknowledged by the team managers is the key to enter a skateboarding career. What is considered a good relationship requires constant practice (Bian & Shuai, 2019, p. 14) of attending ‘frequent banquets’ and ‘gift exchanges at events of personal significance’ to important members of the skateboarding team, some of which the younger skaters enjoy, others less so. One respondent in this study, the owner of a well-respected Chinese skateboarding brand, told me in a casual chat during one of the ‘frequent banquets’ after a skateboarding event:

Being good at skating is only the foundation, certainly not the essential quality we are looking for. You need to be able to mingle with the team, being respectful to your peers. Modesty is also a must. No matter how good you are at skating, being cocky will not get you a sponsorship.

It is a common practice that the social qualities of younger skateboarders are valued as the determining factor in the process of judging for talent. In their research on working conditions of labour in the creative industries, Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2013) found that developing a desired relationship between colleagues and superiors is proven to have important significance for cultural labours’ careers. They conclude that for cultural works in the creative industries, ‘developing contacts and building a reputation does not result simply from being a member of a project team but by being seen to do “good work” and, if not actually being liked by colleagues, at least being respected by them’ (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2013, p. 117). To make explicit the instrumental role of the continuities within the skateboarding community, more attention needs to be given to the role played by cultural intermediaries such as Ge or Di in various contexts of their enduring influence in the contemporary skateboarding industry.

Cultural Continuity and Institutional Incorporation of Chinese Skateboarding

There is also the aspect of the institutional incorporation that has been a dominant theme in the discussion of Chinese skateboarding from the beginning (Sedo, 2010) and continued to intensify as the inclusion of skateboarding in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games became a topic (Thorpe, 2014; Wheaton, 2013). The consensus is that the governance of Chinese sport has taken certain approaches resisted by the skateboarders (Sedo, 2010). Observation from my fieldwork in the 2014 Nanjing Youth Olympic Games shows a gradual transition from the old-fashioned Chinese authority governance towards a more integrative approach that is more acceptable by the local skateboarders. The guanxi circle this new leader established with the skateboarders helped tremendously with the operation of the skateboarding management from the official associations.

The new leader of the Extreme Sports Association made the effort to hang out with the skateboarders when the daily event is over. We have come to this restaurant together and she would drink with them, joke with them and ask for their feelings after a full-day’s performance during the Youth Olympic Games. There seems to be a feeling from the skateboarders that she is accepted not because of her official status, but more because that she acts like an older sister to the skateboarders that takes care of them. Even the most rebellious skater in the team would self-restraint part of his deviant behaviours to make her job easier. (Fieldnote, 2014)

One later development that occurred when the inclusion of skateboarding into the 2020 Tokyo Olympics was announced was the reaction from the Chinese Sports Department to assemble a Chinese national team. The Chinese Sports Department has taken two directions in their nationalist mission. One is the traditional Chinese sports method of creating a national athletic team, selecting children with promising athletic abilities from other training teams such as martial arts and acrobatics. The other way is to incorporate the current skateboarding talents, what they call the Shehuihuashou (skaters from the market). The first traditional way has proven successful for sports such as snowboarding (Thorpe, 2014). However, the second approach is more like a bold adventure for the Chinese sports officials. They use the two methods to build up provincial teams first, then select promising athletes from national contests to be put on the national team. A couple of provincial teams have done a better job than others both in terms of athletic performance and cultural acceptance from the Chinese skateboarding community. One crucial reason why they succeed is that they select established Chinese skateboarders from an older generation to co-organize the team with assistance from a traditional sports coach.

This is just one normal Monday for the provincial team training, but everyone took it more seriously than I had imagined. The team manager was a co-owner of a national skateboarding distribution company. I noticed that almost half of the provincial team riders were sponsored skaters from his company before he was employed to be the provincial team manager. One of the younger skaters told me financial stability seemed impossible just from their commercial sponsors. Now, since he is in the provincial team, the city government pays for his insurance and provides stable social benefits. If he does well in the next national competition, promise of a considerable cash bonus that equals decades of salaries for an ordinary office job is to be met. (Fieldnote, 2018)

Therefore, the provincial team symbolized a sense of authenticity that their managers embodied, providing support to the local skateboarders and thereby receiving acceptance to a greater extent. Thus, my analysis leads to a response to Lombard’s (2010) analysis of the flexible resistance seen from skateboarders towards commercialization and institutionalization, that the symbolic representation of the authentic skateboarding image occupies a lower level of priority in comparison to the social and cultural values of skateboarders. Neither commercial nor institutional incorporation of skateboarding faces much local resistance because both movements provide career opportunities and financial support to the core skateboarding participants under which a coherent social structure is embedded.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the empirical research in this article tracks the changing social, economic and cultural conditions for the development of Chinese skateboarding culture and its subsequent industry. This study has identified a neglected aspect of cultural labour in most previous research on skateboarding culture. The findings illustrated the importance of understanding the careers of skateboarders by examining the experiences of skateboarders from different positions in the skateboarding hierarchy. The observation from this study shows the possession of subcultural capital is essential to access, maintain and grant career opportunities. Nonetheless, in the age when skateboarding has developed into a highly commercialized industry, Chinese skateboarders still subscribe to a cultural-specific principle of guanxi-favouritism (Bian & Shuai, 2019) that shows an intertwined relationship with market rationality. In the guanxi circle, there is clear emphasis on a moral obligation for the skateboarder at the higher positions of the skateboarding hierarchy to give back to the culture, a code of conduct that challenges the utilitarian readings of social relationships as accumulative capitals.

The finding suggests an underlying importance of older skateboarders, or cultural intermediaries, in a late capitalist stage of the skateboarding industry. From Peralta in Bones Brigade being a ‘father figure’ taking care of team members to the Chinese Ge (older skateboarders), skateboarders in the cultural intermediary positions according to Maguire & Matthews (2012, p. 552) have strived to:

[Construct value, by framing how others—end consumers, as well as other market actors including other cultural intermediaries—engage with goods, affecting and effecting others’ orientations towards those goods as legitimate with “goods” understood to include material products as well as services, ideas and behaviours.

Thus, the concept is evidenced to be a powerful explanation in bridging the gap between consumption and production in the skateboarding industry. The negotiation of authenticity has taken nuanced forms at different stages of development in China’s history of skateboarding culture and industry. However, the key marker for authenticity has been shown to be of great socio-cultural significance contextualizing skateboarding careers. Borrowing Banks’ (2007, p. 184) view on analysis of cultural labours, we need to combine the analysis of the creativity (of skateboarding practices) with the commercial and the social, as such a perspective allows us to view skateboarders not only as seeking to live an aestheticized (or rebellious) life but also actively seeking to intervene in social relations. Banks extends this by suggesting ‘feelings of community, achievement, solidarity, self-respect or other forms of well-being that we might want to associate with good work of any kind’ (Banks, 2017, p. 62).

Last but not least, the theoretical contribution of this article lies within the gap between the CCCS and post-CCCS approaches in consumption and the critical political economy approach in production, providing a feasible theoretical framework for later research to explore subcultures that face the potential of incorporation by commercial and government organizations. This framework also suggests a cultural and organizational sociology’s understanding of the organization of subcultural industries. This article encourages future research to examine the transition of consumerist subcultures into cultural industries, as it hints at greater questions of economic and social inequalities.