Creative Industries, Creative Clusters and Cultural Policy in Shanghai

Abstract

The last ten years have seen the emergence of Chinese creative industries and creative clusters and accompanying debates in both academic and policy circles. To understand the origin and trajectory of this new policy agenda, we need to understand how most of the assumptions of Western¹ cultural policy and theory — which underpinned cultural and creative industries in that region — were rejected by Chinese communist ideology. Although MAO’s socialist members program has been slowly replaced by a more market-oriented democratic program, it is impossible for us to ignore that Chinese cultural policy is not simply based on the Western notion of culture as a ‘whole way of life’ outside of the state power (Williams 1958) or the state’s intention to promote wider participation in civic society as part of liberal governmentality (Bennett 2012). Nor can we reduce it to a ‘neo-liberalism’ that is seen to pervade the creative industries agenda, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries (Banks and O’Connor 2009). Indeed, Chinese cultural policy presents an alternative both to the art-centric model and the market-centric model, making it a unique case through which to view possible new directions for cultural policy outside the West.