Creative Industries in Beijing: Initial Thoughts

[this brief report has been written for Leonardo magazine and the ISEA'06 Latin
American-Pacific/Asia New Media Initiative, http:// isea2006.sjsu.edu/prnms.html]

'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 scalar tensions between
geo- politics and trans-local, global cultural flows as they manifest around
issues such as labour conditions, IPRs, social-technical networks and cultural
practices.

 46rom 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