Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China

Shanghai actively uses culture to promote itself as a global city. This book explores how this has been conceived and pursued, and what questions it raises for notions of ‘culture’ and ‘economy’ as understood in the West. If theoretical work around the ‘cultural economy’ has problematized these two, this book locates these debates empirically in a non-western metropolis.

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As China’s leading economic metropolis and ‘most western city’ Shanghai in the last twenty years has used culture as a major spur to its ambitions to become a global city. This book is the first systematic investigation of how various ‘cultural economy’ strategies have been framed and pursued in a Chinese urban context. But Shanghai’s modernization, frequently couched in terms of ‘catching up with the West’ has – like that of China as a whole – developed a momentum and trajectory which has begun to challenge western-centric notions of development. If this has been partially recognised in terms of the axiomatic relations between capitalism and liberal democracy, it has been less so in terms of cultural economy policies whose pursuit has become an index of global modernity. This book engages in the debates on the ‘separation’ and ‘convergence’ of culture and economy in a context in which the framework of ‘Euro-modernity’ is being increasingly challenged.