ABSTRACT
Creative, knowledge, entrepreneurial and world cities are all manifestations of a desire to internationalise, to attract capital and tourism and to capitalise on the kudos associated with events such as Olympics and World Expos. However, despite the fashionable buzz now associated with urban re-branding, China can claim a long tradition of creative cities. As I discussed in Chapter 3, over the past 2,000 years Chinese capital cities have nurtured markets in which diverse cultural commodities were exchanged. In the Tang and Song dynasties China was in a real sense the ‘middle nation’, drawing travellers and merchants to its inland capitals. The Silk Road from Samarkand (today’s eastern Uzbekistan) to Chang’an (today’s Xian) had been operating for several centuries since the Han dynasty. New habits of conspicuous consumption emerged, artists became entrepreneurs, travelling troupes came and went, and new forms of culture were incubated. From the Tang onwards, the Chang’an, Luoyang, Kaifeng, Hangzhou, and Beijing were commercial and political centres. During the first few decades of the twentieth century large Chinese port cities became cultural capitals. In the 1930s and 1940s, Shanghai was widely acknowledged as the ‘Paris of the East’. It was brash, crowded, fashionable and decadent, a point not lost on the Communist revolutionaries under the leadership of Mao Zedong who condemned the bourgeois culture fermenting in the big coastal cities. By the 1950s, Hong Kong had taken much of the talent from Shanghai. It is to Hong Kong that I therefore turn as a way of illustrating how the discourse of creativity was reincarnated in China.
