Red Creative is both an account of how China in general and Shanghai in particular managed to build a ‘creative industry’ since the 1990s, as recommended by Western experts and popular authors, and how this isn’t the passport to emancipatory modernity that some seemed to think it was. What does that creative industry consist of today?

Our starting point in the book was the rapid diffusion of the idea of ‘creative industries’ through East Asia, and eventually China. We spend a lot of time showing this was not just about a ‘growth sector’ but came bundled with idea of an emancipatory ‘creative’ modernity. Though economically marginal, ‘creative industries’ exemplified the proposition the West was making to China, certainly up to 2008: become like us and modernity can be yours. Only by freeing up entrepreneurs, markets and the political sphere itself would you be able to grow your creative industries. It struck us as a line going all the way back to Hegel’s lectures (around the time of the Opium Wars), when he ejected Asia from the mainstream of history – and before that to the colonial discourse identifying Europe as the locus of historical creativity.

Though the Chinese government experimented with some of the policy models being offered by the likes of the British Council—mostly ‘creative clusters’, especially in Shanghai—it took its own path. The government were never going to give over the culture system to the private sector. They certainly introduced a highly commercial logic into all aspects of film, television, animation, publishing, music, games and so on, but they were concerned both to prevent large-scale foreign influence and to keep control of the cultural content.

What was interesting for us is that rather than follow the UK’s creative industries script, they applied the logic of the developmental state – in a similar way to South Korea. They actually took ‘industry’ seriously rather than as a rhetorical flourish. Massive capital investment, backed by hard research into supply chains and markets, purchase of key infrastructure, investment in technical skills, control of distribution and deliberate framing of markets and so on. They realised the domination of US and European cultural industries was less to do with ‘letting creativity run free’ and more related to first mover advantages in control over IP, distribution, technological infrastructures and protocols and so on. They applied an industrial strategy to culture in ways that exposed just how much of corporate juggernaut it had long been in the West, and just how inept the UK had become at pursuing anything resembling an industrial strategy.

The most recent policy on ‘cultural and creative industry’ is the 13th Five Year Cultural Development National Plan from 2017. The Shanghai Government translated national policy into its own guidelines. The emphasis on ‘cultural and creative industries’ as a standalone industry sector is muted. China discovered quickly what many in the UK had long argued – that most of the cultural sector does not have significant economic employment and GDP outcomes. Those that do—the screen industries, including games—now have dedicated development agencies able to command serious capital investment. For the rest, local governments have returned to the symbolic and cultural value of the sector. Shanghai promotes cultural industries as part of urban regeneration strategies and as central to its ‘global’ and ‘smart’ city status, a form of municipal soft power.

In some ways, we can see China’s cultural policy returning to the role it performed in the 1980s, as ‘propaganda’, but now using terms of creativity and innovation as foundations of modern citizenship. At local government level cultural industries have been reframed as ‘public culture’, not expected to provide commercial returns but rather social cohesion and engagement, cultural identity and as a form of mediation between party and public. Where the UK and Australia is cutting these local cultural budgets, China has massively expanded them.

One of the most interesting things in your book is on the role of Shanghai – both as the city where ‘creative’ western modernity is alleged to have arrived already in the 1920s and 1930s, only to be suppressed by a rural Communism, and as the place where this was expected to recur after Deng’s turn to capitalism. What you argue is that the famous interwar ‘Shanghai Modern’ culture was actually in many ways a socialist avant-garde, comparable to what was happening at the same time in the 1920s and 30s in Central Europe, rather than a movement demanding capitalist normality. Who and what was part of that avant-garde, and how did it fare when Shanghai was taken by the Communists in 1949?

The chapter on the ‘Shanghai Modern’ of the interwar years was very difficult to write. Neither of us are historians of art or literature, and we did not attempt a portrait of the era. Rather we were faced with a particular narrative of Shanghai—‘the modernity China could have had instead of Communism’—that was extremely powerful.

As a recent arrival, I felt the appeal of this very strongly, as ‘recovered’ memories of an exotic Shanghai past flickered alluringly as I wandered the streets of the city. Learning to distrust these, and the nostalgia industry to which they gave rise, was important, as was trying to grasp the historical and political context—then and now—which allowed them to flourish. It was amazing how otherwise quite critical visitors would buy into the Shanghai Modern myth, that it somehow represented a viable other modernity which now, with the return of China to the fold, could pick up where it left off.

Of course, we were all encouraged in this by the Shanghai government itself, which used the nostalgia for haipai (Shanghai’s distinctive ‘hybrid’ culture) as part of the city’s bid to be a global cosmopolitan city. The combination of Western and Chinese culture found in this semi-colonial city would be retrieved, once Deng announced his ‘reform and opening’, as a precursor to China’s distinct route to global modernity. We tried to tell other stories. Some of them echoed similar but better-known crises in the West, such as the rise of urban ‘mass culture’ and the challenge this brought to traditional intellectuals. So too, the cultural impact of the new reproduction technologies of film, music, publishing, design and advertising.

Whilst the complex agon of the political and cultural avant-gardes of Europe and the Soviet Union are well known, similar challenges were being faced in China. Though of course, there they faced both the threat of imperialist dismemberment, a collapse in traditional culture and the urgency of building a national-popular bloc. We tried to open a space for other more marginal stories, about global subaltern histories and alternative modernities brewing in the intense interactions of early twentieth-century Asia.

My regret is not having read Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front until afterwards, because there were many parallels, strange as it may seem. In Shanghai, as in Depression America, intellectuals and artists were faced with a confronting political situation and came to engage with the new cultural industries – not as degraded mass culture but as a site of political struggle

We also tried to reframe the story of the cosmopolitan, Westernised culture of Shanghai, brushed aside in 1949 by the ignorant peasant masses and their communist masters. The cultural avantgarde in Shanghai never saw themselves as avatars of a cultural revolution equal to that of the political, as in early Soviet Union.  This relation between ‘intellectuals’ and the ethical polity goes back long into Chinese history. But they did assert a specific professional autonomy in making culture – popular political films and music, especially. Working in a Western enclave, they had to compete in the cultural marketplace, using the emergent commercial-technical infrastructure of the cultural industries. Mao, far away in rural Yan’an, was using hastily trained artists and actors to do basic political education work with peasants. After 1949, faced with a national strategy, it was to those trained in the cultural industries to which the new regime turned, as much as the cultural troupes of the rural areas, for the new communist cultural system.

There’s an aside when you outline the development of a creative industry along the lines of, for example, Manchester, Barcelona, Tokyo, San Francisco, etc., in contemporary China, where you make a divide between these forms of ‘creativity’ based on fine art, tech, and software, large-scale investment, property development, and so forth, and more grassroots forms based around counter-cultures such as music scenes (obviously very important to Justin’s native Manchester). How have these alternative scenes emerged, and are they thriving or struggling now?

I’m not sure we make a divide between highly commercial and grassroots or ‘counter-cultural’ scenes. What we argued is that the former grew out of—took advantage of—the latter. The idea of the ‘creative city’, now primary a driver of real estate, originally grew out of an upsurge of popular culture and social movements—we talk of Mark Fisher’s ‘popular modernism’—which it gradually annexed. This is more ambiguous than simply ‘commercialisation’, for we know the connections between 60s counterculture and 1980s libertarianism, even if we don’t want to suggest a singular teleological connection. The political defeats of the 1980s facilitated these more ‘libertarian’ aspects—the famous bourgeois-bohemians, conquering the cool—but we don’t have to go the full Adam Curtis!

Of course, by the time ‘creative city’ got to China, it was a complete package promoted by policy consultants and property developers. It had little to do with the scenes going on in China from the 1980s, though it did co-opt these where it could. These local scenes, especially visual arts, became very much interwoven with narratives of Western creative freedom, fighting the good fight against state repression. We tried to show it was a little more complicated than that.

In its usual formation, bohemian or avantgarde culture asserted its autonomy against the market, though the role of official state ‘consecration’ was important. In China the role of the state is far more important – it not only frames and controls much of the market, but there are strong traditions of artists and intellectuals ‘serving’ the public good. And of course the party-state reserves the right to establish what this good is, and how best culture must serve it.

The 1980s were the decade of the intellectuals—‘culture fever’—but post-1989, after Tiananmen, the cultural system was given over to the market, as commercialisation was let rip in China. It was in the 1990s that new forms of popular culture—good, bad, and ugly—emerged as a direct rebuff to the intellectuals who had felt, after 1978, that their time had come again. As a result of the opening up, local cultural fields became entangled with global ones – though in different ways. Popular music as an ‘industry’ remained grassroots and marginal though closely linked with other East Asian music scenes. Contemporary art exploded in a combination of local grassroots and global art world. Local artists were nothing until they made it in Europe or the US, which made for interesting dynamics. Rich, well-connected art tourists turning up to dirty warehouses in Shanghai or Beijing perplexed local authorities. At the same time, though making it in the West inevitably involved being cast as a freedom warrior, on return this global kudos could be parlayed into state sponsorship, if they did not push it too far. Ai Wei Wei pushed it, as did Oscar-winning Director Chloe Zhao recently.

It has to be remembered that the Chinese government also created a protected space in which some cultural industries could flourish – as with the tech companies that benefitted from the lock-out of Facebook and Twitter, etc. Certainly, many in the cultural sector have bought into the more nationalist rhetoric of Xi Jingping, cheering ‘world beating’ cultural products and companies. Just like in the US and UK, in fact. And a strong Chinese identity, one uncoupled from the anti-authoritarian image required in the West, can have appeal in an Asian world which does not buy into the Manichean world of US-China geopolitics. It is, after all, one of the world’s biggest markets.

We did suggest, though, that the potential for a space of creative autonomy, more ambiguous and less heroic in gesture than ‘anti-authoritarianism’, had emerged in the 1990s. With the retreat of the older intelligentsia and the proliferation of ‘market’ spaces—that is, relying on the mix of commercial and ‘gift’ economies of the older western grassroots cultures—there was a real chance to re-invent a popular Chinese modernity on its own terms.

This still persists, but it is marginalised by both massive commercial exploitation and increased state repression. We needn’t be either romantic or apocalyptic about this, Chinese people inhabit their own culture in quite familiar ways and find ways around things. Still, for me at least, there is a sense of stasis. In part this relates to Xi’s increased desire to control, but also the withdrawal of goodwill from the West – who no longer look for harbingers of a new Chinese modernity but rather freedom fighters and martyrs.

You try hard to avoid conventional ‘China-bashing’, and the book ends by arguing that any sort of autonomous cultural renewal in China is more likely to come within Chinese ‘socialism’, the ideas of which you argue are ‘still in play as a source for transformation’ rather than through pro-Western movements. Is there anyone currently working that you see working along these lines?

When we wrote the epilogue in 2019 Trump’s more hawkish approach to China was at its height, cheered on (as was Trump himself) by the ruling coalition government here in Australia. All nicely stoked by a belligerent security-defence-Murdoch media nexus. Red Creative tries to pour cold water on Western delusions about China becoming liberal democratic – and how creativity would push that along. Now the neo-con hawks were saying that too, positioning ‘global business’ as greedy, feckless, and unpatriotic. It meant that the space in which the future of China might be discussed in some meaningful relation to ours in the West was shut down. This is where the real danger lies.

There are key differences in this Cold War to the last. China’s economy is set to overhaul that of the US, and, unlike the USSR, it is intertwined with it. And there is no Left which back then, however ambiguously and conflicted, saw itself as connected to this Cold War enemy. There are a few ‘Tankies’ out there, but whilst the contemporary Left don’t want war, and urge co-operation around climate change rather than geopolitical confrontation, there’s little ideological, emotive, or imaginary connection to China.

One problem is that the rise of China, which internally is still seen in an anti-imperialist light—‘the West can no longer push us around’—came both after the defeat of the ‘third world’ by a West re-energised by neoliberalism and entailed a repudiation of Mao’s third-worldism. China’s significant other was the US – Shanghai wanted to be the new Manhattan. Even better than Manhattan. In seeking to redeem the promise of material abundance, given but never made good by Mao, Deng re-imagined communist modernisation through the lens of consumer capitalism.

What failed to make an impression on the party were the ideas that exploded globally in 1968 – ironic given the evocation of the cultural revolution in that era. These were present in the ‘new left’—its intellectual icon Wang Hui plays a big role in our book—that tried to use the legacy of Mao’s ‘mass line’ communism to assert the role of popular democracy in the modernisation of China. I think much of Chinese popular, grassroots culture shared in this, though the cultural and political strands of this new left were quite separate. I think the scenario is quite bleak for the political new left, as Xi’s re-assertion of the social dimension of communism is more concerned with control than democratic participation. And from an increasingly strident West, ‘democracy’ can only mean the overthrow of the Communist party and the weaponisation of whatever protests—and there are many—that come to hand.

The space of mutual dialogue is frozen both between and within these two confrontational blocs. Perhaps the Western Left should start to think about what such a space of dialogue might be. Don’t just focus on human rights (we don’t say ignore these) and dismiss it as ‘authoritarian state capitalism’, but look at what aspects of the Chinese system might point to a different kind of planetary future. That’s a tough call, as the Left is saddled with a deep fear of being duped by another ‘workers state’ – but I don’t think that’s the danger, more that they will fail to engage at all.

Perhaps this is where culture comes in, more distant and more oblique than the political new left. Though the West might see it as increasingly isolated, there are energies and invention in Chinese popular culture from which Westerners exclude themselves to their loss.

What I found really interesting recently was a group of popular media influencers (mostly Chinese diaspora) immersed in the everyday popular cultural scene within China. They’ve been able to engage with non-Chinese audiences with a more balanced, objective, and timely view on how the culture as modernisation project may take shape, co-existing with Chinese socialism values. The most well-known one is Kaiser Kuo, musician and journalist, host of Sinica Podcast. But there are many others now.

We ended the book with an image of missed opportunity – evoking Jia Zhangke’s 2000 film Platform about never catching trains (an echo of Billy Liar there somewhere). There will be other, different trains, and we must be ready for them.