Bristol, Chicago: Intellect [distributed by University of Chicago Press], 2020. ix, 306 pp. US$32.50, paper. ISBN 978-1-78938-230-3.
Situated in the field of cultural economy (the political economy of culture, communications, and cultural studies), the book examines the historical and global trajectories of Western modernity by focusing on a particular encounter between China and the West: the arrival of the Western discourse of creativity (“creative industries” or “creative economy”) in China in 2005 (1). Through analyzing modernity, culture, and creativity as the three major themes, Red Creative aims to show “the possibility of different and distinct historical trajectories, specific articulations of modernity” (9). In doing so, the book critically engages works by historians, political scientists, and international relations specialists, those “who are routinely asked to comment on issues of China” (8).
The book addresses three major concerns: (1) “the distinct historical trajectory of China, its civilizational momentum and weight and its traumatic encounter with the Western colonizing modern”; (2) post-1978 China’s “renewed encounter with Western modernity” and “the multiple, contradictory emancipations this promised”; and (3) the transition from a “Fordist-Industrial” system to a “post-Fordism” in relation to engaging certain utopian aspects of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s (11). The authors analyze these concerns by focusing on Shanghai as the case study. They refer to Shanghai “from the 1911 Republican to the 1949 Communist Revolutions” as “Shanghai modern,” “an articulation of alternative modernities in which Chinese, and other forms of non-Western or minor Western knowledge, are in play” (12). Specifically, they examine how Shanghai’s encounter with these modernities took place in the cultural sphere (including intellectuals, popular-urban forms, and folk culture) and developed a cultural industry as an independent ally of the Chinese Communist Party’s revolutionary project. They also discuss how the post-1992 project of a cosmopolitan creative modernity in China has drawn on this “Shanghai modern” in a highly selective fashion to engineer a consumer culture.
The book’s eight chapters can be divided into three sections. The first three chapters outline the historical roots of cultural industries and creative industries discourses in the West (chapter 1), the historical trajectory of Chinese modernity in the “traumatic encounter with the West” (chapter 2), and the development of Shanghai modern in the foreign-controlled city between 1911 and 1949 (chapter 3). The authors’ general argument is that the trajectory of Chinese modernity “cannot be seen as a deficit in terms of a Western ‘original’” and instead, it “works at the level of culture, contrasting the accounts given by Habermas (public sphere), Bourdieu (artistic autonomy), and Foucault (liberal governmentality) with the specific reality of China” (13).
The subsequent two chapters examine the post-1978 reforms. While chapter 4 discusses neoliberalism and Chinese modernization from the late 1970s on, chapter 5 sketches countervailing tendencies to neoliberalism rooted in “China’s civilizational and socialist past” (14). These two chapters produce a good summary of the studies of neoliberalism in the international and Chinese contexts, especially in relation to the rise of cultural and creative industries. An important issue regarding neoliberalism the book has missed, however, is about the ways in which the “one country, two systems” framework developed during the process of addressing the Hong Kong question enables the state to deploy sovereignty (sovereign decisions on the exceptional basis) to address tensions and antagonisms discussed in the book—for example, those between capitalism and socialism, the economic and the cultural, Western and Chinese values, and modernity and traditions.
The last three chapters specifically discuss cultural and creative industries in Shanghai. The authors argue that understanding cultural and creative industries must consider the development of “new post-Fordist subjectivities” (chapter 6) and that analyzing China’s post-1978 cultural policy reforms must differentiate between the “cultural” and “creative industries” agendas (chapter 7). The former attempts to extend “a democratic culture in an age of mass reproduction,” while the latter reduces “culture to an economic input” in capitalizing culture’s “transformative imaginary” (14). The primary research in chapter 8 offers a compelling case of Shanghai as a creative city at the level of cultural production. It traces the development of the “epistemic community” behind the idea of “creative clusters” and the “creative milieu,” discusses spaces available for artists and cultural workers, and shows how they are incorporated into the city’s real estate projects.
It should be noted that the book’s framing of “red creative” relies on a comparative methodology. The authors’ general strategy is that they first provide a critical understanding of relevant issues in the contexts of Europe and the United States, and then explore their manifestations in the Chinese context. They reevaluate Western scholarships on modernity, urban development, and Chinese politics. Autonomy, a major issue in the book, connects both to the cultural realm (in which artists and intellectuals operate) and to the public sphere in European modernity. The authors argue that the European senses of autonomy, freedom, and alternative forms of imagination are problematic when they are presumed to be essential to the understanding of China. For the authors, Chinese intellectuals and artists do not generate a sense of cultural autonomy when they serve the people and engage the party-state. In discussing Chinese creative cities, for example, the authors use “bundles” both to differentiate them from the Western sense of “clusters” and to highlight their local and cultural specificities.
Generally, the book offers a critical diagnosis of the China question in the post-2008 global context. The authors write: “Since 2008, there have been increasing anxieties about China in the West, in part due to its continuing economic success and assertive foreign policy, but also because it is no longer easy to ignore the fact that it will not follow a path determined by the West” (163). This book is undoubtedly written in this context, a global condition that also shapes the politics of knowledge in Asian Studies.
Hai Ren
Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, & University of Arizona, Tucson