Cloning around in Kunming

An article in the China Daily provides an objective view on cloning, what many international companies would call IP infringement, a local business exploiting IKEA's business model as well as its logo design elements; the characters for yijia are modified accordingly from 宜家 to 一家. How different is this Mainland variant, however, from Hong Kong's 奕嘉, a company with outlets in major Chinese cities?

Scholar leaders and leading scholars

July 26 2011:

Fuyang is a city of 710,000 about an hour’s drive west of Hangzhou. I attended the 1^st Fuyang Cultural and Creative Industries Forum on 27^th July as a VIP speaker along with a number of leading scholars and scholar leaders. The distinction between leading scholars and scholar leaders became evident when we gathered for the obligatory group photos after the opening ceremony. The scholar leaders included John Howkins CEO of BOP Consulting, regaled in China as ‘the father of the creative industries’ and Stephen Schmader, CEO of International Festival and Events Association (IFEA). These VIPs assumed front row seated positions alongside high ranking local officials. I took my place with the leading scholars, the standing committee of the second row (Professors Jin Yuanpu, Zhang Xiaoming, Hu Huilin, Xiong Chengyu).

The Fuyang event followed the pattern of the many similar events I have attended over the past several years as the momentum of cultural and creative industries has infused regional development. Fuyang is a medium-sized city in the prosperous Yangzi River Valley. The challenge for this ‘third-tier city’ became apparent as officials rolled out their grand plan, which was heavily dependent on a mysterious scroll and the story of a reclusive oil painter in the Yuan Dynasty. Huang Gongwang began painting late in life at the age of 70 but managed to produce a masterpiece before he passed off this mortal coil, a 12 metre scroll known as Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains. Much of the forum presentation revolved around how the painting would generate buzz about Fuyang, particularly the story of its mysterious separation into two halves, one part which remained in Fuyang and the other which turned up in the Palace Museum in Taipei together with a ship load of other precious cultural relics that left China with Chiang Kai-Chek. Anyway the separation of the painting and its reunification is emblematic of the ‘return’ of Taiwan to Chinese sovereignty, or at least planeloads of tourists that might come to Fuyang.

The city itself is relatively affluent: most of the residents already enjoy what the Chinese Communist Party likes to call a ‘moderately well off' society. The city centre has brand boutiques; it's clean and the people are busy even in the 38 degree heat. It’s also evident that the the local government have followed the guiding prescription from the 12th Five Year Plan to make Fuyang a creative place, without really knowing what this might entail. I guess this is what makes the Chinese approach to the creative economy so adaptive: it can include a number of things: here it is papermaking, boat building, tourism resorts, bean curd production, sports good manufacturing, film and animation production etc.  

Asian Creative Transformations Facebook site

I have set up a Facebook site for Asian Creative Transformations which is the university research cluster that I coordinate.

There is also a website: you can find it here

China's new creative clusters

Here is a sample chapter (the introduction) of my forthcoming book China's New Creative Clusters: Governance, Human Capital and Regional Investment (currently with publisher (Routledge), and expected out sometime late 2011)

When Innovation, Too, Is Made in China

A report from New York Times on China's aspirations to be an innovative nation, mostly in the domain of patents.