Red Creative

Culture and Modernity in China

Justin O'Connor, Xin Gu

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789382303, 9781789383218
• eBook ISBN: 9781789382310
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Chine

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.

1

The Creative Industries and the China Challenge

The cultural industries

In the late 1970s, the ‘culture industry’, Adorno and Horkheimer’s polemical term for the mass commercial culture being produced in the United States after the war, began to shift to the more open, contested terrain of the ‘cultural industries’. This was not some ‘recognition’ of the economic importance of these industries, but rather an opening up of a new kind of cultural-political space with regard to the commercial production of culture, especially the expanding media sector. Perhaps the first systematic account of the cultural industries as a site of political struggle was Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s 1972 Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung (Public Sphere and Experience), where the rapid expansion of the cultural industries in the 1960s represented a challenge to the bourgeois public sphere, but also a chance to think about an expanded proletarian public sphere.¹ This new cultural-political space can be seen clearly in Augustin Girard’s influential 1980 paper for UNESCO, written as head of research at the French Ministry of Culture.² Girard points to the huge commercial cultural sector and as a matter of urgency calls on the cultural policy establishment to take note. It was the same call as that made within the Greater London Council’s (GLC) new left-wing Labour leadership, elected in May 1981, and by French President Mitterrand’s new Minister for Culture Jack Lang in the same year.³ Their contentions were that the vast majority of cultural consumption now took place outside the subsidized arts sector and the state media system; that the consumption of commercial culture was growing at extraordinary rates across all social levels; and that traditional, subsidized ‘live’ cultural forms were (following Baumol and Bowen) economically incapable of satisfying this demand.⁴ In this context, a refusal to engage with the commercial sector was elitist and irresponsible, and cultural policy must engage with this sector to be democratic and to challenge some of the more ‘negative tendencies’ within it.

In the United States, an academic ‘production of culture’ school had begun to investigate how ‘popular’ and ‘high culture’ was produced within complex socio-economic ‘art worlds’ in which the position of the ‘artist’ was a constructed and contingent one.⁵ Bourdieu’s work on cultural production and consumption had begun to open up similar ground in France.⁶ In the United Kingdom, Raymond Williams had also become interested in the material ‘industrial’ conditions of cultural production and their historical trajectories.⁷ Indeed, a new kind of art history rejected transcendental notions of artists and placed ideas of individual genius squarely back within her or his social and historical context.⁸ This recognition of the collective social basis of cultural production gave a new democratic valency to the concept of ‘industry’.

The early 1980s saw left-leaning cultural policy-makers embrace markets and technology, both of which had previously seemed to mark the boundary between art and commercial culture. There was a more positive view of the new technologies of production, reproduction and distribution, a growing sense of seizing hold of a democratic modernity – breaking with Heideggerian anti-technological ‘culture critique’ as well as the formalist aesthetics of post-war modernist orthodoxy. The 1980s saw a rediscovery of inter-war ‘left modernism’, which had been much more sanguine about the political potential of the forms and technologies of mass culture. This was encouraged by the new forms of popular culture that had burgeoned since the 1960s, in which the lines between popular culture and ‘high modernism’ were constantly breached.⁹

The embrace of industry and technology within cultural production was necessarily accompanied by a selective revalourization of the market. Contemporary culture was not just about ‘collective’ production and technological reproduction/distribution but also involved its organization outside the state system, via the market. Social democratic politics were now much more open to the idea of markets and much more wary of the state, something that would accelerate as the USSR and its satellites began to crumble. How else, except through the market, could the production of and demand for culture be regulated?¹⁰

This positive valency can be understood only in terms of a social democratic policy context, in which capitalist enterprises – in this case the cultural industries – were subject to democratic forms of oversight and regulation. These issues were outlined clearly in the mid-1980s by Bernard Miege and Nicholas Garnham, both academics who had been close to the policy worlds of Jack Lang and the GLC.¹¹ Taking issue with Adorno and Horkheimer’s account, they wanted to give a much more specific reading of the cultural industries, not so much as capitalist ideology but as capitalist industries engaged in the production of cultural commodities at a profit. The logic of cultural commodity production was very specific, giving rise to an industry built on volatile markets, highly fragmented creative labour and a commodity whose use value was never known in advance. This was a contradictory cultural space, in which autonomous cultural labour and multiplying user demands were mediated by a highly differentiated cultural industries that combined artisanal production at one end with globally financed corporations at the other.¹² Hence Girard’s ‘negative tendencies’: concentration, monopoly, cross-ownership, vertical integration, ever-increasing levels of capitalization and so on. (Girard had also pointed to ‘imbalances’ at the international level, anticipating later accounts of unequal globalization of cultural industries.)

Those writing in the ‘political economy’ tradition – Garnham, Miege but also communications scholars such as Vincent Mosco – were very conscious of the crucial role of media and culture in the self-understanding (or systemic masking of this understanding) of contemporary societies.¹³ The ‘public sphere’ in modern industrial societies was intensely mediated, and thus comprehending how the commodified production system impacted the nature of the cultural content was absolutely crucial – not only from a cultural but also a political perspective. Less concerned with expanded participation in cultural production (Garnham and Miege were wary of this, as for them it simply expanded the ‘reserve army’ of cultural labour) they were intensely focused on democratic participation in its regulation and management.¹⁴ By using the term ‘political economy’ they rejected neo-classical economics’ ahistorical homo economicus and saw the production and consumption of (cultural) commodities as a system built on a whole range of historically specific social and political foundations. Cultural production in a modern mixed economy and social democracy was thus fully open to the interventions of the state in pursuit of public policy goals, such as an open and accessible public media sphere. This stood in contrast to the ‘de-regulation’ current that began in earnest in the 1980s, pitting ‘state control’ against ‘free markets’ as the central choice in media and – gradually – in other forms of cultural policy.¹⁵

The cultural industries agenda intersected with work in economic and industrial geography across the 1990s, its ‘cultural turn’ forging close links with related agenda of the ‘creative city’. These disciplines also challenged neo-classical economics in a way that had direct implications for urban and regional planning and economic development policy. Emerging in part out of Karl Polanyi’s economic anthropology, writers such as Mark Granovetter identified how economic transactions were embedded in a whole range of social networks, ones that could materially affect the structure and dynamics of that economy.¹⁶ Industrial geographers could not ignore the embeddedness of industrial activity in particular spaces and places. Cities and regions, indeed whole economic sectors, were ‘path dependent’ – that is, part of a complex, specific historical trajectory that could be altered but not evaded. It was out of this context that many of the first accounts of place-based cultural production systems emerged.¹⁷

This approach stressed ‘agglomeration economies’ – reminiscent of Alfred Marshall’s ‘industrial districts’ with their distinct ‘atmosphere’ – and were later codified and globalized in the form of ‘clusters’ through the work of Michael Porter.¹⁸ These social conditions enable cultural production by bringing together complementary firms and people to provide opportunities for information and resource exchange, collaboration, skills development and exposure to alternative ideas and practices, which propel both product innovations and the use of novel production processes and materials.¹⁹ This work directly informed research and policy thinking in the field of cultural, and later creative, industries. In their analysis of agglomeration, of traded and untraded interdependencies, of tacit skills and embodied knowledge, of the importance of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), of socially embedded networks and norms, they provided important language for those concerned with the cultural economy. They also opened up links to other kinds of industrial districts based similarly on dense, socially embedded SME networks.²⁰ However, what was emerging here was not just a way of describing how cultural production worked and its reliance on urban agglomeration but also an account of how these ways of working were indicative of a much wider set of transformations.

Having described these new approaches, we need to situate them in the wider context of the rapid deindustrialization of many cities and regions of Europe and North America in the 1970s and 1980s. Up to this time, the cultural industries had been a concern of national and international agencies, linked to issues of social democracy, nation-building and the public sphere. However, starting with the GLC between 1979 and 1986, and continuing across UK cities and other ‘deindustrializing’ areas of Europe and North America, the cultural industries came to be seen as potential replacements, in part at least, for lost manufacturing industries at the local level. Less dependent on classic locational advantages such as proximity to raw materials or transport routes, reliant on human rather than expensive fixed capital, the cultural industries – along with other ‘service’ sectors – presented an attractive option to local authorities.

The arguments for the growing economic dimension of cultural production – pioneered by the GLC’s economic development committee (including Nicholas Garnham), as well as Jack Lang’s almost concurrent Culture Ministry under France’s Mitterrand government – were frequently used by the cultural sector in making a case for higher, or justifying existing, levels of public funding.²¹ But there was more to it than that. The c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 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