신질생산력(新質生産力)으로 호명되는 AI: 영화강국 기획과 중국 영화산업 담론의 재구성 = AI and New Quality Productive Forces : China’s Film Power Project and the Reconfiguration of Film Industry Discourse

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article examines how Chinese film industry discourse assigns AI and AI-generated content (AIGC) a role in China’s film power project and within the political-economic framework of new quality productive forces. China’s film industry has built the quantitative foundations of a major film country through a large domestic market, extensive exhibition infrastructure, and a high domestic box-office share. Yet scale does not automatically produce a stable production system, technological self-reliance, data capacity, cultural-resource management, or effective publicity and distribution. In this gap, AI/AIGC is treated not simply as an external technological shock but as a mediator that recasts long-standing demands for efficiency, standardization, technological self-reliance, and productivity, accumulated in discussions of film industrialization and digitalization, as tasks of industrial transformation. This article conceptualizes that process as the incorporation of AI into the logic of new quality productive forces. The formulation does not equate AI itself with new quality productive forces; rather, it refers to the way AI/AIGC rearticulates the conditions for becoming a film power as issues of production management, data operations, technological self-reliance and standardization, and cultural-resource management.
The analysis shows that AI/AIGC is not viewed merely as a tool for accelerating production. It is presented as an enabling condition for the parallel coordination of production stages, the datafication of production experience, the reconfiguration of creative judgment, and the expansion of platform ecosystems. In the discourse on new quality productive forces, AI/AIGC becomes part of a broader reallocation of production factors linking creative labor, production tools, cultural resources, audience data, and platforms. Materials from institutional film-industry media, including China Film News, frame the film-power project as practical tasks concerning audience demand, the operational capacity of state-owned film enterprises, technical standards, cultural data, and consumption ecosystems. In this process, film quality is no longer confined to aesthetic achievement; it is also understood as the capacity to organize audience demand, technical standards, cultural resources, and consumption ecosystems. Yet film is also an art form constituted through image and sound, narrative and performance, mise-en-scène and lighting, actors’ expressions and gestures, and viewers’ sensations and memories. By analyzing how AI/AIGC rearticulates the tasks of China’s film industry, this article clarifies both the explanatory power and the limits of a productive-forces-centered understanding of cinema.