Red Creative

Xin Gu, Justin O'Connor

Description

This book brings together multiple strands of debate around the cultural creative industries and contemporary capitalism, China’s position in global capitalism, the future of modernity and new ways of thinking about culture and cultural policy.  Clearly written and engaging, it is the first study to provide a critical lens on creative industries discourse and to bring it together with detailed historical and social analysis.

It analyses the ongoing development of China’s cultural industries, examining the institutions, regulations, interests and markets that underpin the Chinese cultural economy and the strategic position of Shanghai within that economy. Explores cultural policy reforms in post-colonial China and articulates Shanghai’s significance in paving China’s path to modernity and entry to global capitalism. In-depth and illuminating, this book situates China’s contemporary cultural economy in its larger global and historical context, revealing the limits of Western thought in understanding Chinese history, culture and society.

This book is aimed at a broad, educated audience who seek to engage more with what is happening in China, especially in the cultural field. It tries to take such an audience outside the standard frame of Western modernity, suggesting the possibility of different historical trajectories and possibilities. Because the book is theoretical and empirical in its approach, it will be of strong interest to both those interested in Chinese cultural policy and the creative industries approach generally. 

Cultural and creative industries is an increasingly important subject area in Higher Education, with undergraduate and postgraduate programs representing some of the fastest growing areas in arts, humanities and social science faculties. This audience is increasingly global, as this policy debate has now moved outside the Western countries whose economic competitiveness it was meant to promote. It is an agenda promoted by agencies such as UNESCO, UNCTAD, the World Bank, British Council and the Goethe Institute.

Primary readership will be academics with a particular interest in Chinese culture, cultural studies, media studies, public policy and management studies, cultural policy, East Asian studies and cultural policy researchers. It will also be relevant to all those interested in China and Chinese’s culture; and those interested in the history of Shanghai and the role it plays in contemporary Chinese culture and politics.  Given the current interest in China, it may also be of wider appeal too.

Acknowledgements

Introduction:             Unknown Knowns

Chapter 1:                The Creative Industries and the China Challenge

Chapter 2:                Culture, Modernity and the Nation-State

Chapter 3:                Shanghai: Cultural Industries and Modernity

Chapter 4:                Post-Reform China and Neo-liberalism

Chapter 5:                China as a Civilizational State

Chapter 6:                Shanghai: Creative City

Chapter 7:                Reforming the Culture System

Chapter 8:                Creative Subjects

Epilogue

Index

Sujets

• Cultural Policy
• Public Policy
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• Culture of China
• Cultural studies
• Orientalism
• History of Asia
• Asia
• Orientalisme
• China

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 08 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789382310
• Langue: English

Extrait

Red Creative
Red Creative
Culture and Modernity in China
Justin O’Connor and Xin Gu
First published in the UK in 2020 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: Newgen
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Production editor: Tim Mitchell
Typesetting: Newgen
Paperback ISBN 9781789382303
Hardback ISBN 9781789383218
ePDF ISBN 9781789382327
ePUB ISBN 9781789382310
Printed and bound by TJ International, UK.
To find out about all our publications, please visit www.intellectbooks.com There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
To our fathers, Dennis O’Connor and Gu Genfa 顾根法

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Unknown Knowns
1. The Creative Industries and the China Challenge
2. Culture, Modernity and the Nation State
3. Shanghai Modern: Cultural Industries and Modernity
4. Post-Reform China and Neo-liberalism
5. China as a Civilizational State
6. Shanghai: Creative City
7. Reforming the Culture System
8. Creative Subjects
Epilogue
Index
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all those who have seen parts of this book and have given us their comments. We are grateful to Kate Oakley, who read a version when its coherence was slightly more than slime mould, and to Seb Olma and David Hesmondhalgh, whose early enthusiastic comments have kept us going. Laikwan Pang’s generous comments on Shanghai Modern were very much appreciated too. Heartfelt thanks to Elena Trubina, who managed to read some of the most convoluted and turgid drafts, even commenting on them. We would also like to thank Julian Meyrick, for his keen editorial insights, and Declan Martin, who did the grunt work on the footnotes.
We are indebted to the Shanghai Jiaotong University, which has hosted our Shanghai City Lab for six years, and especially to Professor Shan Shilian and Associate Professor Wen Yuan. Not forgetting Professor Wang Jie, now at Zhejiang University, who made first contact. Thanks to Li Yan, at Sichuan Normal University, for many statistical insights, and to Ma Da at Creative 100, who allowed us an inside view. Conor Roche in Shanghai kept us up to date with insight and conversation.
Thanks to the Universities of Monash and South Australia, for giving us the space and time to develop and write this book, and to the Australian Research Council, for their patience in getting outputs from two grants: DP150101477: Working the Field: Creative Graduates in China and Australia , and LP0991136: Soft Infrastructure, New Media and Creative Clusters: Developing Capacity in China and Australia.
Introduction
Unknown Knowns
The creativity moment
This book emerged from an encounter between China and ‘the West’ around three interlinked concepts – culture, creativity and modernity. More specifically, the book’s point of departure was the arrival in China, in 2005, of a Western discourse of ‘creativity’, primarily framed as ‘creative industries’ or ‘creative economy’. This new term was coined by the UK New Labour government in 1998, towards the end of a decade in which the West had won the Cold War, and had extended the global market, along with its regulatory and ideological apparatuses, to all but a few obdurate backwaters. Though taking flight from a context specific to the United Kingdom, the ‘creative industries’ soon gained global traction (though with important exceptions). It identified a new economic sector, rooted in culture and utilizing the ‘human capital’ of talent and creativity – things all countries possessed as abundant natural resources. But the creative industries were part of a broader imaginary, of a different future in which social, cultural, economic and perhaps political change would be driven by creative and innovative individuals working outside the existing cultural and socio-economic hierarchies. The creative industries became intertwined in the popular imaginary with the new dot-com digital revolution, where ideas, technology and entrepreneurship had ‘disrupted’ the incumbency of the corporate dinosaurs. It seemed that ‘creativity’, confined to the world of art and culture during the Fordist age of planning, corporations and mass consumption, was now to be made available across the social landscape. After a period since the mid-1970s in which industrial modernity seemed to have migrated to the East, creativity opened up a new modernity in which the West would again take the lead and set the standards.
The creative imaginary was rooted in a powerful economic rationale. Building on the idea of the information and knowledge economy, which had been variously formulated in the 1960s and 1970s as the next stage of capitalism, creativity represented a widening of this economy to include the kinds of knowledge and skills which had traditionally been associated with ‘culture’ and ‘the arts’. Creative production and consumption, turbo-charged through new communications and information technologies, and through expanding spending power, education and leisure time, became a growth sector in its own right. It provided new skilled jobs and generated wealth distributed as wages, profits and taxes. Yet its economic benefits extended beyond this growth into multiple ‘spill overs’ across the economy. In the form of the ‘creative economy’, creativity would act as a new kind of innovation system with complex catalytic effects across all sectors. Indeed, highly visible spaces of creative intensity in cities – the various official and unofficial ‘creative quarters’, or even one or two trendy café zones – could act as synecdoche for the wider creativity of the city. In the imaginary that surrounds the creative economy, a new kind of society, a new kind of modernity can be glimpsed.
In this way, a new phase of economic growth was to call on forms of subjectivity which had previously been outside of, or even oppositional to, the economy. Aspects of subjectivity linked to the emotions, spirituality or the specific qualities of the senses that were traditionally associated with art and culture, were now to be called upon. Since the eighteenth century, these had been excluded from what we might call the techno-rational-administrative systems of modernity. This involved the separation of the ‘economic’ from ethical, customary and cultural systems of society within which it had been encased, a process noted by Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and Fernand Braudel amongst others. 1 Indeed, it was the ability to isolate the economy from these wider social systems, at the level of the polity as well as the individual subject, that had been the very mark of the modern person and modern administration. The system of industrial Fordism, and the sociopolitical settlement with which it was associated, further removed these emotional, spiritual and aesthetic elements to a place separate from its rational-bureaucratic structures. Now, it was claimed, a new round of economic development would put creativity at its core, folding these excluded forms of experience into its post-industrial imaginary.
The creativity discourse was an attempt to annex the energies and qualities of the cultural to a new round of capitalist expansion. Because it appealed to these once-oppositional forms of knowledge and subjectivity, the creativity discourse could present itself as radical and emancipatory, framing a moment of historical creativity in which the world was to be transformed in the image of the new creative subjects. This creative economy would also require a transformed polity. The forms of political and economic regulation of an older Fordist economy needed to go, as did the forms of public administration – especially around education and culture – that had underpinned them. These older forms of regulation and administration were characterized, in this view, by a state form based on top-down administration and cultural hierarchy. If once these were historically progressive, they were so no longer.
Central to this transformation would be markets and networks. The first would not now be restricted to transactional relations between corporations and consumers. Consumers now were much more discerning and, with the rise of the Internet, able to provide feedback and increasingly shape and ‘co-create’ – especially with cultural consumption – the kinds of products being made (prosumers). At the same time, the type of value at stake was no longer that of marginal utility; it was the relationship between consumer and firm that formed the basis of mutually created value. 2 These were the kinds of relationships traditionally associated with cultural consumption, especially that of fans, in which emotional and signifying investment in the product ran high. In order to respond to these new consumers, increasingly uncoupled from taste orders centred on class, nationality and gender, and outside formal cultural hierarchies, the producers would have to be nimble, deeply immersed in these networks of value and able to respond rapidly to their fluctuations. The barrier between firm and market became fluid and permeable, as small and micro-enterprises worked between the two, moving from project to project, reconfiguring each time. It was in clusters and creative milieus where these entrepreneurial subject-networks could best emerge and sustain themselves, in turn demanding the transformation of urban spaces into creative cit