Red Creative: Culture and Modernity (2020) explores China’s response to the global rise of the creative industries discourse, particularly through the case of Shanghai. This book demonstrates that China’s adaptation of the creative industries agenda was deeply embedded in its Communist and Confucian past. Furthermore, it discusses China’s understanding of creative industries within the geopolitical context of the country’s confrontation with Western imperialism, its search for an alternative Chinese socialist modernity and more recently its renewed rivalry with the Western liberal democracies. Red Creative argues that the Creative Industries agenda and its economic imagination of ‘creativity’ facilitated the hollowing-out of the notion of ‘culture’. Similarly, China increasingly relies on social media, driven by AI surveillance, as a way of governing populations, no longer needing the intermediation of culture. Takes a historical and political perspective, this book raises fundamental questions about the effect of the ‘creative’ turn in the contemporary capitalism and the universal claims of Western modernity whilst presenting new ways of making sense of cultural policy in China.

Justin O’Connor is Professor of Cultural Economy, University of South Australia. He is also visiting Professor in the Department of Cultural Industries Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University. Between 2012-18 he was part of the UNESCO ‘Expert Facility’, supporting the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity.

Justin has produced Creative industry policy reports for the Australia Federal Government and the Tasmanian State Government, and for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DEFAT) on Creative Industries and Soft Power. He has advised cities in Europe, Russia, Korea and China. Under the UNESCO/EU Technical Assistance Programme he has worked with the Ministries of Culture in both Mauritius and Samoa to develop cultural industry strategies. Justin is the author of the 2016 Platform Paper After the Creative Industries: Why we need a Cultural Economy; co-editor (with Kate Oakley) of the 2015 Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries; and (with Rong Yueming) (2018) Cultural Industries in Shanghai: Policy and Planning inside a Global City (Intellect). He has recently published (with Xin Gu) Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (Intellect), and (with Xin Gu, Mike Kho Lim) Re-Imagining Creative Cities in 21st Century Asia (Palgrave).