Abstract

It is well known that China imported the policy discourse of creative industries from the UK and has established Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) ¹ policies since the 2000s (Flew and Cunningham 2010). While the creative industries policy in the UK and the broader Western context is often regarded as a neoliberal cultural policy, there is a wider debate about whether China has also chosen the neoliberal route (Harvey 2005; Arrighi 2007; Nonini 2008). Neoliberalism may be one aspect of Chinese CCI policies, but authoritarian control, local autonomy, ² and an uneven development of CCI between various regions may also have characterized Chinese CCI policies, thus rendering them different from their British or Western counterparts. Several current studies criticize the impact of authoritarian control on cultural creation in China (Wang 2004; Ren and Sun 2011; Keane 2013). However, they have not considered the influence of local autonomy and regional inequality. This paper thus aims to advance the understanding of Chinese CCI policies through focusing on the municipal policies of different regions.