Shanghai: images of modernity

This chapter examines Shanghai s use of culture to position itself as a global city and how a particular narrative has informed western commentators and Shanghai policy-makers alike. They also analyze the development of cultural infrastructure and the parallel separation of art and entertainment, with contemporary art as an unexpected challenge, but one the city successfully negotiated. They look at the marketization of culture, tracing the connections between market reforms in culture and those in the wider economy. They argue that the half-formed or distorted use of western concepts such as creative industries or creative clusters , rather than indicating a duplicity or an incomplete modernity, actually highlight some of the complicities of canonical cultural policy.