Creative Industries in Beijing: Initial Thoughts

Ned Rossiter

During a teaching stint at Tsinghua University in May this year, and then following the trans-Siberian conference organised by Ephemera Journal in September, I started preliminary research on creative industries in Beijing. What follows is a brief report on my experiences, perceptions and meetings in Beijing. My interest is to discern the constellation of forces that might be taken into consideration in future analyses as the research project develops. I should also state that this brief overview of Beijing’s creative industries is part of a collaborative project that undertakes a comparative study of international creative industries. The research seeks to go beyond economistic interpretations of creative industries by focussing on inter-relations and geo-political tensions between trans-local and global cultural flows as they manifest around issues such as labour conditions, intellectual property rights (IPRs), social-technical networks and cultural practices.

From the start, there are many factors and variables that make it questionable to even invoke the term “creative industries” in the Chinese context. Such complications amount to a problematic in translation of the creative industries concept. For the most part, there is little variation at a policy level as governments internationally incorporate the basic ingredients of creative industries rhetoric (clusters, mapping documents, value-chains, creative cities, co-productions, urban renewal, knowledge economies, self-entrepreneurs, etc.) into their portfolio of initiatives that seek to extract economic value from the production of cultural content and provision of services. This would suggest that creative industries, as a policy concept, is divorced from the materialities that compose cultural economies as distinct formations in national and metropolitan settings.Yet even an overview as cursory as the one I set out here, it’s clear that there is vibrant activity and energy going on across a range of cultural sectors in Beijing. One of the most notable is 798 Space within the Dashanzi Art District situated in the outer limits of the city, not far from the airport expressway. Designed by Bauhaus architects from the GDR in the 1950s as an electronics factory for the military, 798 Space has emerged over the past few years as the scene of avant-garde, experimental work. Adjacent galleries, performance spaces, fashion and design outlets, bookshops, cafes, studios and artists’ residencies provide the requisite signals of a cultural complex that is often compared to the high moments of New York’s Soho.

While Dashanzi is very much a space under construction and inseparable from both its history as a military electronics factory and contemporary art cultures peculiar to Beijing, there is nonetheless a strong sense of familiarity---it’s hard not to associate Dashanzi with the phenomenon of high cultural tourism and cultural precincts common now in many global cities. Such a perception is reinforced in terms of the economic geography of the area: real estate speculation and expensive apartment development have played a shaping force in the past few years, with artist’s rents escalating and plans by government and the landowner Seven-Star Group to demolish the factory site and establish a high-tech development zone.

According to newspaper reports and the Wikipedia entry on Dashanzi, such a development would enable re-employment of some of the 10,000 laid-off workers that Seven-Star Group is responsible for. Should these plans go ahead, there may well be construction and basic servicing work available for some, but it is hard to see the possibility of long term employment for these workers---some of whom are still working in a few small factories that continue to operate on the site. The proposal for the high-tech zone is modelled on Beijing’s so-called Silicon Valley in Zhongguancun, which is located near the prestigious Tsinghua and Peking universities. Tsinghua University in particular has strong R&D links with this high-tech investment zone, and makes the privatisation and R&D efforts by Australia’s elite universities notably underwhelming at the level of infrastructure and pace of development. Whether or not such developments in Beijing and other Chinese mega-cities are able to become profit-generating innovation machines is another matter. Or perhaps it’s enough to be in the business of providing high-skill services across a range of geo-economic scales rather than expect content to be king. In any case, the business model for the majority of new media content production in Western economies remains haphazard at best.

Over the past five years, Zhongguancun has transformed from a modest residential area to a high-tech commercial zone (albeit one that also accommodates numerous stores selling pirate DVD’s and cheap electronic and computer products), driving out many of the previous residents due to the escalation of property values and demolition of their homes. If a similar development were to occur in Dashanzi district, the mixed composition of its current demographic would inevitably be affected, making the prospect of re-employing factory workers even more unrealistic---to think these workers might have the necessary skills for employment in a high-tech zone is another factor that makes re-employment on a substantial scale unlikely.

It would seem to me, however, that the future of Dashanzi as an art district is gaining greater purchase on decision makers. The site has been host to numerous events associated with the 2003 and 2005 Beijing Biennales and there is no sign that refurbishment of the old factory buildings has been put on hold, despite reports that the landowners have put a freeze on new rents and limited renewal of rents until the end of 2005. Amidst such uncertainties, one gets the strong impression that Dashanzi Art District will be around for a while yet. In the meantime, surrounding real estate continues to enjoy a speculative economy and high profile companies such as Sony, Christian Dior, Omega and Toyota launch events in the 798 Space---chosen as a venue for its industrial chic and upwardly mobile clientele, and, it could be added, its correspondence with a sort of standardised global cosmopolitanism.

An analysis that goes beyond the type of descriptions set out above would need to look into the inter-relations between Seven-Star Group, property developers surrounding the Dashanzi Art District, government cultural development officials, the political stakes of under- and re-employment of artists and factory workers, and the role of artist’s agencies or representatives in developing “promotional cultures” that articulate with international events such as 2008 Olympics. Such a study amounts to a political-economic anthropology of cultural guanxi (special relations or social connections/networks).

Further complications arise for comparative analyses due to the dominant association of creative industries with countries undergoing the passage of neoliberal capitalism over the past 15-30 years. The national experience of neoliberalism is not limited to the usual suspects of Western liberal democracies, however. As the role of NGOs in structural adjustment programs in African countries has demonstrated, neoliberalism---like capitalism---is not singular in any universal sense, but rather universal in its singular manifestations. Similar efforts of extra-national control by foreign capital coupled with political pressure to instigate a “leapfrogging of modernity” can be seen more recently in Iraq. In theory, such mechanisms of leapfrogging aspire to a direct shift of developing economies into a neoliberal paradigm of privatisation and outsourcing that bypasses the meddling influence of civil society and the state, to say nothing of the political traction wielded by the formation of citizen-subjects. Even the form of de facto structural adjustment that accompanies aid relief efforts for Tsunami affected countries could be added to a taxonomy of neoliberalism and the variegated modulations of global capital.

What, then, does all this mean for the creative industries model when it is located in countries pursuing authoritarian, state controlled or socialist forms of capitalism? First, it shows that while there is a distinctive homogeneity in the way creative industries travels internationally as a policy discourse, the material, economic and cultural diversity of neoliberal capitalism---its amenability and adaptive capacities to national and city-state modulations---enables creative industry style developments to translate in ways that seem improbable if analysis focuses exclusively at the level of policy reproduction. Second, it reinforces the need to understand the variable and uneven dynamics of global capitalism, whose indices would include the movement of cultural commodities, labour and ideas. Here it is necessary to analyse the constitutive power of intra-regional, international macro structural and trans-local micro-political forces.

One instantiation of such macro-micro inter-relations can be seen in China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 and its subsequent need to comply in a more formal manner with intellectual property regimes. Such a move signals an incorporation of innovative economies into the predominantly manufacturing based economy generally assumed of China. This is where non-governmental organisations such as the Created in China Industrial Alliance (CCIA) take on important roles as cultural intermediaries. Toward the end of a wide-ranging and fascinating interview with Su Tong, Executive Director of Secretariat of CCIA, we hit on a core definition of the organisation: CCIA can best be understood as concept translators. This struck me as a decisive way of comprehending the complex environment and sophisticated set of principles that enables CCIA to operate across a spectrum of scales, from high level government endorsed projects involving the promotion of Chinese culture during the Olympics to publishing adaptations of fashion and computing magazines held under license by foreign companies.

There has been a growing view in creative industries critique emanating from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Europe, and the UK that a privileging of creative production in terms of its potential economic value obtained through IPR’s overlooks more fundamental factors such as class tensions and the precarious condition of labour and life for those involved in the creative industries. By contrast, CCIA considers IP compliance as key to securing a sustainable future in a global market for creative industries in China, and does not consider creative industries as exclusive to metropolitan centres and elite cultural sector interests. By way of example, Su Tong highlighted the importance of regional craftspeople skilled in traditional ceramics whose unique designs are illustrative of IP generation special to regional cultural traditions that are developing entry points into international markets. Su Tong acknowledged the contradiction between IP compliance as a condition set out by government and supranational trade agreements on the one hand, and the necessity for cultural production to retain a capacity to be shared and open in order to make possible the creation of new forms and ideas. Certainly such a tension is not special to China, but can nonetheless be understood as symptomatic of the current state of play vis-à-vis China’s situation within international policy and economic fora, to say nothing of the difficult terrain for organisations like CCIA that need to be delicate in the manner in which they negotiate such complexities in order retain the relative autonomy and multi-scale engagements with cultural, business and government actors.

The brevity of this report can only provide the barest of detail on the creative industries in Beijing in recent times, and its level of analysis is akin to the gesture of a cultural tourist passing through. Even so, I hope to have conveyed some insight into a few of the prevailing trends and issues defining the cultural sector in Beijing. The scope of research required to develop this project further is contingent on developing collaborative relations with a range of actors across the cultural, political and academic sectors.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Michael Keane for kindly sharing his research material on China’s creative industries, and for opening up the possibility to meet with Su Tong and CCIA. And thanks to Du Ping for her excellent translation skills during that meeting.

Related Reading

Berghuis, Thomas J., “Considering Huanjing: Positioning Experimental Art in China,” positions: east asia cultures critique, Vol. 12, No. 3, 711-731 (2004).

Created in China Industrial Alliance, http://www.ccia.net.cn/

Keane, Michael, “Brave New World: Understanding China’s Creative Vision,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 10, No. 3, 265-279 (2004).

Keane, Michael, “Once were Peripheral: Creating Media Capacity in East Asia,” Media, Culture & Society (forthcoming).

Neilson, Brett and Rossiter, Ned (eds), “Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New Media Labour,” [Special Issue] Fibreculture Journal, No. 5 (2005), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/index.html.

Space 798, http://www.798space.com/

Wang, Hui, “The Year 1989 and the Historical Roots of Neoliberalism in China,” positions: east asia cultures critique, Vol. 12. No. 1, 7-69 (2004).

Wang, Jing, “Culture as Leisure and Culture as Capital,” positions: east asia cultures critique, Vol. 9, No. 1, 69-104 (2001).

Wang, Jing, “The Global Reach of a New Discourse: How Far can ‘Creative Industries’ Travel?,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1, 9-19 (2004).

Wikipedia entry on Dashanzi Art District, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashanzi_Art_District

Zhiyuan, Cui, “Liberal Socialism and the Future of China: A Petty Bourgeoisie Manifesto,” in Tian Yu Cao (ed.) The Chinese Model of Modern Development (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 157-174.