With its emergence as a global power, China aspires to transform from made in China to created in China. Mobilised as a crucial source for solid growth and soft power, creativity has become part of the new China Dream. Boredom, Shanzhai, and Digitisation in the Time of Creative China engages with the imperative of creativity by aligning it to three interrelated phenomena: boredom, shanzhai, and digitisation. How does creativity help mitigate boredom? Does boredom incubate creativity? How do shanzhai practices and the omnipresence of fake goods challenge notions of the original and the authentic? Which spaces for expressions and contestations has China's fast-developing digital world of Weixin, Taobao, Youku, and Internet Plus Policy opened up? Are new technologies serving old interests? Essays, dialogues, audio-visual documents, and field notes, from thinkers, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers, examine what is going on in China now, ultimately to tease out its implication to our understanding of creativity.

Shangai; Chinese cities; literary imaginings; cultural studies; urban sociology; urban psychologies; perceptions of urban space

China is urbanizing at an unprecedented speed. Filmmakers, artists, musicians, and writers all try to come to terms with the changes of their city. How is the Chinese city-as-spectacle, visualised and thus imagined and reimagined, if not contested, in art and popular culture? What are the possible escape routes from a completely commodified cityscape? How to realign artistic expressions of the spectacle with everyday practices? The imaginations of the Chinese city in art and popular culture that this book explores are not taken as merely mirroring or reflecting YrealityOE, on the contrary, they are part and parcel of the construction, destruction and deconstruction of that YrealityOE. As such, these imaginations are enmeshed in the social, material and political realities that produce Chinese cityscapes. Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture brings together essays by an interdisciplinary team of experts on Chinese cities, including world-renowned scholars like Ackbar Abbas and Chua Beng Huat, as well as leading cultural critics like Ou Ning. Aiming to steer away from an exclusive focus on Mainland China, the adjective Chinese has a cultural meaning and includes places like Singapore and Hong Kong.