The Global Reach of a New Discourse

This article raises the question of ‘creativeindustries’ as a travelling discourse and examines its relevance to mainland China in the wake of its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). How do we construct a viable comparative framework that would enable us to track the place-specific economies of knowledge, creativity and content production? How do we account for a locale’s needs for specific discursive constructs? How can responsible cultural theorists talk about different national cultural policies relationally? This article brings to the fore an approach that prioritizes the infrastructural inquiries of the local agenda. Thus, it is shown that the same socialist state launched a campaign on creative industries in Hong Kong while stepping up its promotion of ‘cultural industries’ as a new policy category on the mainland. China’s stakes of entering the WTO are examined alongside the sites of crises embedded in the Chinese local norm.