Justin O'Connor, and Xin Gu (2020). Red Creative. Culture and Modernity in China. Bristol: Intellect Books.

Red Creative" is a welcome, spirited and conceptually rich book that traces the adoption and development of creative industries in China.The book offers the reader a dense set of considerations at a moment when creativity discourses are ubiquitous but fewer people are thinking about what they portend.It demonstrates how differently the discourses of neoliberalism, civilization, culture and creative industries are translated and implemented in this country.It is often thought that the strength of cultural policy analysis rests on the extent to which it accords with key successes and pitfalls of the on-going capitalization on and commodification of culture.Since the massive shift from an industrial Fordist to a post-industrial post-Fordist economy is truly global, it includes the imaginaries and best practices of re-inventing and regenerating localities through cultural activity, including festivals and biennials as the promising remedy.The creative industries are praised for increasing productivity through spillovers and generating jobs.Creativity, more generally, has been widely considered as the major source of producing economic value.Yet when cultural policy analysis comprehends principled moral reasoning, misgivings and ambivalences are abounding.These include our doubts about whether it is permissible to reduce cultural values to financial and organizational KPI, whether the processes of adjusting culture to management are always beneficial and rational, and whether justified and popularized recipes for success are sufficient for increasing knowledge of both the general educated public and academics.These doubts increase in case of the non-Western countries which are variously prompted to embrace the creative economy discourse.A tension exists between the Western models of cultural and creative industries and the local contexts in which stakeholders operate.Traditionally, cultural policy analysts have relied on their Western expertise as the basic data for cultural policy inquiry.The problem with that strategy is that they often share the same educational