Connecting Chinese cities with the global performing arts market: the geographies of performing-arts consumption in China

ABSTRACT

Research on global cultural cities has been biased toward dominant global cities in advanced economies. In this paper, we present the first geographical analysis of performing-arts consumption in major Chinese cities through measuring the presence, origins and inter-city network of performing arts events. We demonstrate that the distribution of performing-arts consumption in China displays both dispersive and concentrative patterns, generating an urban network with a core-periphery, although polycentric, structure. The variant patterns of urban cultural consumption not only reflect cities’ contemporary linkages with the global economy, but also the long-term evolutionary outcomes of their cultural traditions. In addition, the external connections of China’s performing arts market reveal a rather complex structure of the current global cultural industries, which is shaped by national institutional arrangements and policy interventions. This study enriches our understanding of the complex interactions between cultural globalization, the national institutional context, and the development of local urban cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Performing arts
• cultural industry
• globalization
• global city
• china

Disclosure statement

We have no conflict of interest to declare.

Notes

1. Source: https://en.damai.cn (accessed on 9 December 2019)

2. Some performances involved artists from more than one country. In these cases, if this were fewer than six countries, we counted the performance in the different country groups. Otherwise, we treated the performance as a “multinational performance”.

3. Before 2013, all foreign performances had to be examined and approved by the Ministry of Culture of the Chinese central government.

4. It should be noted that, due to data limitation, we only calculated the number of performances in each city without considering the variance between these performances in the number of audiences or play times. The advantages of major cultural hubs should be more prominent if the quality of performances is measured.

5. One example is that a number of performances are organized under the theme of “Belt and Road”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. (Ref. 41601163, 41771137);