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ARTICLE

INTERNATIONAL
journal of
CULTURAL studies

Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications

London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
www.sagepublications.com
Volume 9(3): 271–283
DOI: 10.1177/1367877906066874

A new modernity?
The arrival of ‘creative industries’ in China

● Justin O’Connor
University of Leeds, England

● Gu Xin
Manchester Metropolitan University, England

A B S T R A C T ● This article looks at the arrival of ‘creative industries’ within

mainstream policy discourse in China. It attempts to situate this ‘modernising’
discourse within the wider historical conflicts around modernity and
modernization in China, suggesting that the progressive function of the ‘creative
industries’ discourse frequently claimed by its supporters cannot be taken for
granted. The article ends by asking some pointed questions about the immediate
future of this agenda in China, with particular reference to the large eastern
cities. ●

KEYWORDS ● China ● creative cities ● cultural and creative industries

● modernity ● urban policy

Creativity and the cultural industries: a new modernization?

The emergence of China in the last five years as a major global player has
given rise to any number of scenarios regarding its geopolitical trajectory
and its threat to ‘the West’. In the UK, as elsewhere, the dangers and oppor-
tunities of this new Chinese presence flit across the media imaginary in close
succession; no less so in the field of the cultural and creative industries. On

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the one hand, China’s growing prosperity is seen to hold out opportunities
for us to do what we do best – selling high-end creative content and services.
Recent talk of Britain becoming the ‘creative workshop of the world’
invokes the country’s tradition of openness to global trade and its multi-
cultural toleration and hybridization, both of which seem to stand it in good
stead to take advantage of the new trading opportunities (as opposed to
protectionist France, goes the unspoken pendant).1 On the other hand,
disturbing stories of a growing computing and creative literacy in China
(and India), the outsourcing of animation and other creative services to a
cheaper (more efficient, not being hung up on associated artistic bohemian
values) workforce, the rapid replacement of foreign firms in advertising and
design by fast-learning locals, the growing profile of Korean and now
Chinese game companies, the powerful platform of an East Asian mega-
audience for TV and film impervious to any foreign imports but those of
Hollywood – all these have drawn more sobering conclusions. Even our
much-vaunted creative assets are time limited, unless either our creatives
and/or our government pull their collective socks up – and maybe not even
then!
In China itself there is a rapidly growing interest in, and facility with, the
discourses around cultural and creative industries, and the policy issues to
which these give rise. The Chinese government (along with the other Asian
Tigers) sees the cultural and creative industries as part of a long-term
economic vision. The eastern cities (Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing) especi-
ally have become interested, looking beyond their role as centres of cheap
manufacture towards higher-value services and the ‘knowledge economy’.
Other large cities are already following this interest. Not only does the
Chinese government see its huge internal market as a potential platform for
indigenous cultural and creative industries, the sector will also play a pivotal
role in the shift towards innovation, high-value services and a ‘creativity’
that looks set to become a key human resource issue – indeed a central
organising value – in the next phase of economic growth. As the Beijing
conference had it: ‘from made in China to created in China’.
At this event (and similar ones across East Asia) the word ‘creativity’
along with ‘creative industries’ was frequently used in the original English.
This is usually indicative of an uncertain linguistic import – in this case, as
Desmond Hui (this issue) notes, moving the discourse around ‘innovation’
from the more technological towards the ‘artistic and imaginative’. But the
directional flow of such neologisms underlines the fact that for two
centuries ‘modernization’ has always involved some relationship to ‘the
West’. It has been a relationship fraught with hard choices stemming from
how the ‘them’ and the ‘us’ were framed. Against a background of
constraint and necessity, questions as to what can be mobilized from one’s
own traditions, what and how much to borrow, and what social, cultural
and political changes might follow in their wake – all have been central to

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O’Connor and Gu ● A new modernity? 273

this modernization process. The East Asian Tigers pursued modernization

via an authoritarian state-directed market coupled with a heavy emphasis
on the centrality of family values and the respect for social hierarchy that
these prefigured in the Confucian tradition. Modernization the East Asian
way seemed feasible without the social and cultural dislocations which
many saw happening in the West – though this tended to ignore the military
backing of the USA (especially in Korea and Taiwan) and the powerful
languages of both consumerism and democratic rights which have trans-
formed many of these states in the last 20 years.
The discourse of ‘creativity’ – increasingly promoted via government
policy and seemingly welcomed at the ‘grass roots’ – brings more pointed
questions. This new wave of modernization has a prominent role for indi-
vidual initiative and innovation; and if this new relationship between indi-
vidual and society might stop short of a full-blown ‘individualism’, the term
‘creativity’ certainly brings baggage that might push the envelope. The
emphasis on ‘individual creativity’ as a source of wealth is of course written
into the key policy statement of the new creative industries discourse, the
UK government Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s 1998
‘Mapping Document’ (DCMS, 1998). But ‘creativity’ has wider resonances
to which we can only point in this piece. The term feeds on a form of
‘artistic’ sensibility and practice – breaking the rules, ‘thinking outside the
box’, ‘coming from left field’, etc. – which links to the aesthetic of the ‘reval-
uation of all values’, ‘the shock of the new’ and the agonistic struggle with
the existing order which characterises the modernist and avant-garde
traditions.
This connection to modernism came first though a radical cultural shift
in the West from the 1960s onwards which brought many (modernist)
artistic and bohemian values centre-stage. One dimension of this shift in
values was the transformation of consumption practices from ‘mass’ to
‘individualized’ which fed into those developments identified as ‘post-
Fordism’ and ‘flexible specialization’, etc. Another involved a confluence of
‘knowledge society’ and innovation management theories. Looking back to
Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ they stressed the inherently dynamic and
volatile nature of capitalism (against the systems planning of mass produc-
tion) and argued that managers and companies needed to look to the prac-
tices of those at home in a world of constant flux and who had developed
the art of intuitive, iconoclastic and risk-laden innovation – the artists! The
early 1990s thus saw a transformation in the image of the cultural indus-
tries – whereas before they had been seen as a remnant of the old, an arti-
sanal survival still clinging to old ‘culturalist’ values and craft mentalities
(Garnham, 1990; Miege, 1979) they now emerged as templates of the new.
Constantly innovative, anticipating and responding to the market through
an intuitive immersion into the field, willing to break the rules, going
beyond the 9–5, thriving on risk and failure, mixing work and life, meaning

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and money – this was a cutting-edge sector to which the others could look
as a model (Lash and Urry, 1994; O’Connor and Wynne, 1996).
The specific structural dynamics of the cultural industries sector also
chimed with wider discourses of economic innovation and competitiveness.
Although the sector is dominated by some of the largest global conglomer-
ates, it is also characterized by clusters of small, dynamic, highly innovative
companies organised in dense networks with a high premium on human
input (Scott, 2001). Much work has been done in economic geography in
trying to understand how these networks operate and how they relate to
the hard and the soft infrastructure of place – ‘creative cities’ (Landry,
2000). Others have looked at new forms of work and inter-firm collabor-
ation which rely on a ‘new network sociality’, a relaxation of strong social
ties in favour of more fluid, open networks of informational ‘catch-up’
(Wittel, 2001). Florida’s call to promote the tolerance and diversity of the
urban downtown is predicated on loose social ties and the valuation of indi-
vidual expression above collective responsibility (Florida, 2002). If this
has posed some heart-searching questions about social ethics for Florida
(Florida, 2005) this is more so in East Asia where intelligent attempts to
develop a creative class agenda have run into this problem straight away
(Hong Kong SAR, 2005). Confucian hierarchical values do not sit well with
Bohos and BoBos (Brooks, 2000).
This latest wave of modernization thus again poses problems; no longer
a question of how to manage the rapid industrialization of a peasant society,
it is now about promoting human creativity. In particular, it involves
promoting a new economic sector that more than any other draws precisely
on the discourse of cultural modernization itself and demands a whole series
of economic, legal and social-urbanistic structures within which it can
thrive. It is this that makes the cultural industries a crucial case; and if it
presents problems in East Asia generally, it poses specific questions in
China.

Culture and modernization

We have suggested that the debates around the cultural and creative indus-
tries are linked with those around the wider modernization process associ-
ated with creativity, innovation, high-value services and the knowledge
economy. It is a ‘cutting edge’ sector that can act as exemplar, as catalyst
for this wider agenda – as well as being a growth sector in its own right.
As might be seen from our use of both ‘cultural’ and ‘creative industries’,
however, the terminology in these discourses is not technically neutral.
What has always been put into play here is the status of ‘culture’ – whether
it be Adorno’s cultural pessimism (Adorno, 1991), the social democratic
defence of an open media ‘public sphere’ (Garnham, 1990) or the jaunty

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O’Connor and Gu ● A new modernity? 275

optimism of a ‘culturalization of the economy’ (Flew, 2005). The shift from

‘cultural’ to ‘creative’ operates across a complex and shifting tectonic of
cultural and economic policy and charts a particular stance with respect to
the changing relations and future trajectories of these two spheres.
The 1998 DCMS mapping document opened the door to a new policy
discourse in China. Although theorists associated with Queensland
University of Technology have argued that in practice the DCMS remains
tied to a more traditional cultural policy, the opening of a possible space to
talk about the economic dimension outside the traditional cultural policy
context was extremely influential. The question as to why the DCMS used
the term ‘creative’ rather than ‘cultural’ cannot be fully addressed here. In
part it was about moving away from the traditional policy domain of
culture toward the heavier-hitting and better-financed economic develop-
ment domains, traditionally under the Department of Trade and Industry.
In part it was about annexing the language and the (then) dynamism of the
‘new economy’, emphasizing individual creativity and the exploitation of
intellectual property. It also signalled freshness and youthfulness rather than
the staid, worthy and slightly elitist connotations of ‘culture’ in the British
context – ‘Cool Britannia’, etc.
In China the terminological shift, from wenhua chanye to chuangyi
chanye, is a subject of some real tensions within and between national and
city governments. As Desmond Hui tells us, ‘cultural industries’ was the
preferred term for the central government, although ‘creative industries’
was used in Hong Kong from 2003. However, ‘creative industries’ had a
growing currency in academic and policy circles by 2005, especially in the
cities of Shanghai and Beijing. The last-minute terminological fumbles
surrounding the Chaoyang District report are echoed by our own experi-
ences in Shanghai, where the competing ‘cultural’ and ‘creative’ agendas
tread across all sorts of complicated academic and political turf. It was hard
for both local and national governments to resist the pull of the creative
industry discourse, with its strong links to individual initiative and techno-
logical innovation. Hui shows very clearly how the tilting of the discourse
of ‘innovation in science and R&D’ towards the wider sense of ‘cultural
creativity’ was a tempting next step. The question then is what is at stake
here; why the hesitation in taking such a step?
Unlike Russia – which has not yet adopted the notion of cultural indus-
tries (O’Connor, 2004, 2005) – China has emerged as a winner in the new
globalisation – the global market is not a threat but an opportunity. As such,
the market for ‘cultural’ consumer goods – now a target growth area after
the basic consumer goods and the production of a leisure economy, leisure
consumers and the requisite retail and advertising infrastructure – is a
central platform of the next stage of economic and social development. And
as we saw above, the cultural and creative industries discourse arrives
precisely to help deliver the strategic policy lines to hit this new develop-
ment agenda. But this raises some real dilemmas, to which we will now turn.

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Writing in 2003 Jing Wang (Wang, 2004) doubted that ‘creative indus-
tries’ (chuangyi gongye) as a term would have much practical application.
On the one hand, its emphasis on creative SMEs was not applicable to the
current wave of big cultural company stock market flotations; and on the
other, the term failed to pick up on the three subtexts at play in the term
‘cultural industries’ (wenhua chanye) which were:
a state-owned sector undergoing the rugged process of partial commericali-
sation; the tenacious hold of state monopoly even while it is pushing the
agenda of commodifying public goods; and the thorny issue of mixed owner-
ship and the debate over the hidden process of privatisation. (Wang, 2004:
16)
How does the Chinese state deal with these difficult issues at the level of
policy discourse? While it might have seemed that the emphasis placed by
the ‘creative industries’ on the SME sector missed the pressure for large-
scale stock market flotation and the partial commodification of cultural
goods by the state, in retrospect it can be seen that in fact the term ‘creative’
allows precisely the right shift in the range of connotations available for the
production of cultural commodities. It allows a renegotiation of the
divisions of responsibility from a public sector dominated, ideologically and
politically charged ‘culture’ to a more private sector, market-led field of
leisure and entertainment consumption.
Culture in China had traditionally been under the strict purview of
imperial control. ‘Modernity’ as an autonomous cultural sphere could be
seen to have emerged in the post-imperial interwar years in the large cities
– especially Shanghai – but it was soon squeezed by both nationalists and
communists (Mitter, 2004; Spence, 1999). During the Deng era there was
a gradual but by no means straightforward separating out of entertainment
and leisure from culture – a complex process involving debates around
‘spiritual pollution’, Chinese post-modernism and post-Tiananmen
consumer culture (Wang, 1996; Wang, 2003). This separation was inscribed
within the cultural industries in terms of what ought to be state-owned and
what could involve the private sector, and thus what sorts of content were
‘safe’ and what ‘political’. This situation of content control, state- and self-
censorship is well known, and is discussed elsewhere in this issue. But to a
large extent this is ideological control without a positive ideology – the
exclusions from Google do not reflect in silhouette an overarching legiti-
mating system. Economic success fuels a rampant consumer culture which
in turn acts as key legitimating ideology. In consequence, the demands of
growth, innovation and ‘cultural’ consumerism constantly cut across those
of other political-ideological imperatives.
The recent hesitations around the official endorsement of the ‘creative
industries’ could be seen as a rearguard action around a more conservative
cultural policy: ‘It would appear from now on that the segregation of

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O’Connor and Gu ● A new modernity? 277

culture and creativity in the policy arena of cultural industries in China

would soon be history’ (Hui). Is it possible then to see the new creative
industries discourse as a harbinger of a new modernity, a creative Trojan
horse bringing with it a wave of social, cultural and political modernization
wrapped up in an economic development imperative? Is this one of the
issues at stake in the behind-the-scenes conflict between cultural and
economic committees, national and local governments?
This is part of that wider question as to whether China can have creativ-
ity and innovation without the social, cultural and indeed political changes
that these notions seem to assume as givens. Can it have cultural modernity
without a contested social order, a cultural non-conformity, a loosening of
the social fabric? The problem is that, formulated as a predominantly econ-
omically modernising category, the creative industries discourse purports to
liberate itself from the constraining concerns of ‘cultural policy’ – but this
may well compromise its implied charge of socio-cultural modernization. In
short, in thus abandoning its links to cultural policy – which is part of its
appeal to the Chinese state – with what might it in fact become complicit?

Creative industries, modernity and modernization: a Chinese

model?

Many writers have pointed to the dangers of a simplistic western cultural

modernization argument, where the opening up of the market to foreign
cultural industries will somehow bring with it a wider relaxation of control.
The history of the Murdoch empire as well as the latest contortions of
Google indicate that the western cultural mega-companies have no diffi-
culties with the compromises required to do business in China. Why should
the new Chinese creative industries not make the same compromises?
Wang (2004) also makes the point that the creative entrepreneurs who
are charged with this modernization process are in fact very different from
the socially responsible bohemians of the western imaginary; ‘the rising
“creative class” in Beijing and Guangzhou have deep pockets, networking
capital with the state, and a lifestyle characteristic of the nouveau riche’
(2004: 17). Our experience also suggests that the 4x4 driving denizens of
Beijing’s Chaoyang district or Shanghai’s Suzhou Creek have little concern
with any wider social responsibilities. From this perspective the ‘cultural
modernization’ implied by the ‘creative industries’ may involve as much an
abandonment of the residual social responsibilities represented by ‘commu-
nism’ as it does the Trojan horse of liberalization. The proliferation of
‘cultural districts’ in the big Chinese cities brings with it the assumption that
such facilities will produce an ‘innovative milieu’ – yet the ‘creative class’
may turn out to be as socially and politically conformist as the ‘bourgeois
bohemians’ in the West. Except that in the Chinese context this would also

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have to mean culturally conformist! For in the context of the direct control
of content and the resistance to any notion of an autonomous cultural
sphere, the separating out of entertainment and leisure from the ‘cultural’
may well undermine real creative innovation.
In discourses around cultural industries this function of radical innova-
tion has always been associated with ‘the artist’. The ‘arts’ as such have
usually been counted within the overall employment statistics for the
cultural and creative industries. How they fit within the conceptual model-
ling of the sector is more complex. Throsby (2001), for example, places ‘the
arts’ at the core of the cultural industries sector; policy documents in the
UK frequently separate out a ‘cultural sector’ distinct from the more
commercially and digitally oriented ‘creative industries’. Others – building
on Becker’s notion of the ‘art world’ where the artists depend on wider
infrastructure of entrepreneurial, technical and social support structures
(Becker, 1982) – have stressed the creative role of intermediaries, impresar-
ios and managers in the vibrancy of a cultural cluster. And, of course, the
notion of the cultural industrial sector has always involved a complex value
chain within which ‘artists’ are a tiny minority in terms of employment.
Nevertheless, up until now, ‘artists’ have always been seen as a crucial part
of the ecosystem of the cultural and creative sectors – as the radical inno-
vators, the cutting edge of cultural ‘R&D’, a source of key creative skills
and keepers of that cultural imperative to challenge the existing order which
somehow seems to animate the sector as a whole. Certainly cultural
industry clusters exist outside of ‘artistic’ milieux; but even in Hollywood,
or the more dispersed world of the music industry, the input of ‘creatives’
is constantly linked to the sense of the avant-garde, the radical thinking, the
breaking of rules which the banality of entertainment (Adorno’s ‘Culture
Industry’) seems to outlaw. It needs that input. Can China develop an inno-
vative entertainment and leisure sector without the artistic milieu, without
that active modernist cultural sensibility?
This is not to say that ‘contemporary art’ has somehow been banished
from China – on the contrary it is one of its fastest-growing cultural exports
(UNESCO, 2005). The rush of the large cities to promote themselves as
modern and cosmopolitan is now inextricably linked to their ability to
present contemporary art – without a biennial you’re nothing! But some
real questions have to be asked about how this contemporary art is
mobilised as ‘radical’ but at the same time quarantined precisely as ‘inter-
national contemporary art’. This is beyond the scope of this article but we
need to look at ‘art scenes’ and how they position themselves between the
desires of an international art market and those of the national or city
governments courting it. The international art scene is about money and
career as well as radicalism (Smith, 2005); we would need to know how
this international circuit connects with and transforms local scenes, and
how in fact it links with a very small but growing local audience. There is

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a complex set of negotiations between the promotion of those sites that

attract foreign audiences, the growing number of wealthy Chinese art
collectors and the ambiguous status of semi-autonomous artist
work/display/social spaces which are sometimes tolerated, sometimes not.
It is in these last where one kind of innovative milieu can be seen, although
how they link to the commercial creative industries or to wider popular
culture is still unclear. The stories of Park 19 in Guangzhou, Morgenshan
Lu in Shanghai and Factory 798 in Beijing have not yet been told in detail.
The growing emphasis on ‘international contemporary art’ is part of a
time-honoured tradition of importing culture from the West. The history of
classical music in this respect is instructive; it still forms a central plank of
the ‘high cultural’ offer of Chinese cities – in terms of the programming of
the concert halls and the ‘civilising process’ of creating contemporary
cosmopolitan citizens (Abbas, 2000; O’Connor, 2005). The conflict
between imported modernity (even though it is Beethoven) and local
traditional culture has been there for more than a hundred years – this is a
fairly common ‘post-colonial’ situation but one that is extremely pointed in
a country not just ‘developing’ but set to dominate the coming century.
Missing from the changing perceptions of China in the West is any sense of
its cultural weight in the world. Whereas the USA and USSR looked to build
on, and go beyond, European culture as they positioned themselves as new
global powers, the cultural profile of China lacks real weight. While Chinese
popular culture conceived as ‘a whole way of life’ is as vibrant and powerful
as ever – reaching around the hemisphere from Siberia to Singapore (not to
mention the Diaspora) – any sense of the articulation of a new and distinct
cultural or political vision for the new millennium is startlingly absent.
Maybe this is the space in which China’s ‘innovation deficit’ should be
discussed. Rather than illegal copying, format stealing or even self-censor-
ship, maybe it is how to engage with the past, with traditional culture –
high and popular – that is the issue. Taiwan’s renegotiation of its relation-
ship to this cultural past, conditioned by a very different recent history,
could be instructive here; so too South Korea. Does these two countries’
recent assertion of self-confidence in contemporary culture relate to a demo-
cratic civic society in which such encounters with the past can take place?
The intellectual debate in China over modernization is as intense as ever –
yet where is the space for this to play out in the wider cultural arena? The
sidestepping of cultural policy questions by a creative industries discourse
may well lead to a powerful industrial sector in China, buoyed by its huge
internal market for entertainment and leisure goods. Maybe it can have this
sort of innovation without the wider cultural troubles. Maybe this is the
Chinese model?
But of course innovation is not restricted to artistic or academic intellec-
tual milieux. The dynamics of ‘popular culture’ are integral to those of the
cultural/creative industries and both demand levels of innovation and

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authenticity that derive from active and often marginal consumer groups.
While the position of ‘artist’ might not always be available (or differently
available) in this context, the formation of innovative milieux of ‘unpopu-
lar cultures’ (Frith, 1996) has been crucial to the emergence of new objects,
new practices and new lifestyles. Indeed, these sorts of milieux are as
apposite to the cultural/creative industries as artistic milieux, although
much less discussed – it leads then to the wider issue of the urban inno-
vative milieux, spaces of active consumption and production.
What is the urban context for cultural/creative industries in China? The
immediate answer is that we don’t know. We can only offer some observa-
tions here. Jing Wang talks of the creative entrepreneurs having ‘network-
ing capital with the state’ and the first word learned by the business traveller
is guanxi. Given the centrality of networking theory to the urban geogra-
phy of the cultural industries, an analysis of how these networks are config-
ured is crucial to an understanding of the sector in China. Michael Keane
(2004) has pointed to a certain rigidity of networking between large and
small companies and the need to develop intermediaries; this can be set
alongside worries about the tendency to ‘control the big, let go the small’,
which suggests a very different dynamic to that of the Western creative
industries agenda. Experience in the former Soviet Union would suggest that
the relaxation of state control without the requisite strengthening of civil
society may simply redistribute networking capital in equally oligarchic
fashion. The constriction of civil society within Russia has been felt by the
creative industries, compounding their historical distrust of the state, and
has acted to create archipelagos of tightly bound exclusive networks with
highly regulated and restricted access to state-linked networks. Such gate
keeping gets stronger the closer one gets to the dangerous content indus-
tries of media and publishing. Such restricted networking is exacerbated
where the range of regulatory and ‘cultural’ contexts assumed in the West
do not exist – affordable avenues of legal redress, transparent financial and
taxation rules, access to realistic finance, fair rental agreements, regulated
access to state contracts and franchise, and some form of political trans-
parency. The absence of these can result in a reinforcement of divisions
between ‘artist’ and ‘entrepreneur’, and the wider isolation of cultural
dynamism from commercial cultural industries with little interest in real
innovation (O’Connor, 2004, 2005).
China’s ‘transition’ is more orderly and the requisite SME infrastructure
is a government priority. On the other hand, in Russia the weakness of the
state has allowed a level of free cultural association that is absent in China.
Asking the urbanistic questions is also to ask about public space in all its
complexity; where are those marginal public/private spaces where new
cultural ideas, patterns and objects emerge? It is this everyday level of ‘civil
society’ that counts – not international art spaces but record shops,
shopping malls, bookstalls, school clubs, art colleges and, of course, the

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internet. The emphasis on the ‘creative class’ blinds us to the centrality of

these questions of the urban creative milieu.
Among the cities Shanghai has by far the most ambitious creative indus-
tries programme, its ‘Creative Activity Week’ in December 2005 launch-
ing an ambitious plan for 20 or so ‘creative parks’ or clusters intended to
drive innovation and foreign investment in this ‘industry of the future’
(Shanghai Economic Commission, 2005). This programme is almost
entirely real estate driven and the spaces are only available to those with
money and guanxi. Shanghai, the most ‘western’ city in China on its own
admission, is thus set to take a lead in the creative industries. In the two
years I have been visiting such claims are followed by other comments: that
Shanghai is too commercial and all the artists live in Beijing; that it has no
past, no culture, and thus can only imitate the West. Shanghai has another
past but maybe not that one being mobilised by the city government;
maybe its future is being developed in the dense sprawl of the high rises,
in the shopping malls and universities. But at the moment we can ask
against all the received wisdom: might Shanghai be too commercial for the
creative industries?

Note

1 See the recent review by Sir George Cox on Design in Business: www.hm-
treasury.gov.uk/cox and the DCMS Culture Economy programme website:
www.cep.culture.gov.uk

References

Abbas, A. (2000) ‘Cosmopolitan Descriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong’,

Public Culture 12(3): 772–86.
Adorno, T.W. (1991) The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture.
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Becker, H. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Brooks, D. (2000) BOBOs in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They
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O’Connor and Gu ● A new modernity? 283

● JUSTIN O’CONNOR is Professor of Cultural Industries at the School

of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds. Between
1995 and 2006 he was Director of Manchester Institute for Popular
Culture (www.mipc.mmu.ac.uk) at Manchester Metropolitan University.
His main areas of interest are contemporary urban cultures, with a
special emphasis on cultural and creative industries, culture-led urban
regeneration and contemporary urban cultures. He has published
extensively and organises many conferences on these subjects. Address:
School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds,
Bretton Hall Campus, West Bretton, Wakefield WF4 4LG, England.
[email: [email protected]] ●

● GU XIN studied civil engineering at Shanghai Tongji University

before completing a Masters in European Urban Cultures at Manchester
Metropolitan University. She is currently completing a PhD at MMU on
networking and local economic strategies in the cultural industries.
Address: Manchester Institute for Popular Culture, Manchester
Metropolitan University, Geoffrey Manton Building 343, Manchester,
England. [email: [email protected]] ●

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