A critique of China's cultural policy and the development of its cultural and creative industries: the case of Shanghai

Abstract

This paper analyses the development of China's creative and cultural industries using the city of Shanghai as a case study. The authors argue that while the difficulty of applying a uniform policy to the whole of China has created ambiguities which creative workers can exploit for their own ends, the opportunities that these afford are more economic in orientation as creativity still takes place within the parameters laid down by the Chinese government.

Keywords:

• cultural and creative industries
• cultural policy
• experiment under hierarchy
• cultural democracy
• Shanghai

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Andreas Fulda, Xu Jiajia and the reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions for revisions.

Notes

One of the reasons for the existence of the “double track” system is that the so-called public service units did not get funding from the government and had to become self-sustaining.

Five-Year Plans are economic development initiatives published every five years in China. They are shaped by the Chinese Communist Party and national people's congresses to provide guidance and principles for economic development from the centre. Regional, municipal and local governments must formulate specific policies within these frameworks.

A cultural institute (wenhua shiye) “includes compulsory education, institutions responsible for preservation of national cultural artefacts, libraries, museums, cultural work stations, sectors that require the majority and monopoly ownership of state capital” (Wang, 2003, p. 8). Cultural industry includes “performance, tourism, industrial and cultural exhibition, technical production and distribution of audiovisual products, sports and entertainment, higher education and professional education” (ibid).

One of the authors heard the same justification for the building of clusters in a conversation with officials from the Ningbo City government in March 2012.

Keane (2007, p. 106) identifies Shanghai's rivalry with Beijing as a spur to the former city's development of the creative industries. Wang (2001, p. 102) reports that in Beijing newspapers in the late 1990s it was common to read comparisons of the economic development strategies of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Chen Xu is a founding member of Xindanwei, a co-working enterprise in Shanghai.

Like her earlier comment about the preponderance of natives of Hong Kong in Shanghai CCI, Chen observes that Singaporeans are similarly represented (personal communication).

The 11 designated industries in Hong Kong's baseline document are similar: advertising; architecture; art, antiques and crafts; design; digital entertainment; film and video; music; performing arts; publishing; software and computing; television and radio (Centre for Cultural Policy Research, 2003).

This point was also made to one of the authors by Ningbo City officials in March 2012.

An example of this is the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang province, where in discussion with local government officials it became clear to one of the authors that they conflated CCI with industrial design, an industry in which the city specialises.