State participation and artistic autonomy in creative city making

Recent work on the development of cities based on culturally creative economies, or creative cities has opened up productive lines of theorization and empirical research. However, with its focus on the composition of a creative cluster or the ingredients of a creative city, the existing literature fails to clarify adequately the whys and hows of state participation in urban contexts. This can lead to flawed interpretations of contemporary creative city dynamics in China. This paper suggests the state and its related political processes shape urban social relationships and have wider and deeper impacts on the outcomes of creative networking, artistic autonomy, and creative city scripts. With reference to the cases of visual art clusters in Beijing and Xiamen, this paper reveals the specific paths of creative city development based on a conceptual framework by which the interrelationships among the participation of the state, creative networking, and artistic autonomy can be discovered. This paper argues that, unlike the implicit or hidden state participation in Euro-American experiences, the participation of the state in China is obvious and dominant, thus molding specific stories of state-led artistic urbanization or manufacturization. Rather than being simply the displacement of artists, the on-the-ground creative city is interwoven with a selective structure designed by the state and shaped by artists’ position-taking strategies, which are embedded in, and interlaced with, historical–geographical contexts and contingencies.