Over the past 15-plus years, and especially since the launching of the 12th Five-Year Plan, public discourse in China has emphasized the values of innovation and creativity. As Laikwan Pang notes in her Creativity and Its Discontents, the appearance of the word “creativity” increased dramatically from 1994 to 2008 in the titles of academic articles published in China (p. 188). This emphasis is part of a larger attempt to develop a new economic growth strategy built upon higher value-added production and the creation of a knowledge-based economy. Chinese public policy has reflected these efforts with a variety of initiatives to stimulate innovation and promote “cultural and creative industries.” Among these is a new emphasis on creating, managing, utilizing and protecting intellectual property as part of a national “intellectual property strategy” first introduced in 2008. Chinese leaders hope that by the end of the current decade, the “made in China” label is to be superseded by invented, created or designed in China. Given this context, the appearance of these two books is therefore especially timely.

Creativity and Its Discontents is the more serious and academic of the two works. Unlike so much of the literature on intellectual property issues in China which, for the most part, falls within the legal scholarship tradition, Pang's approach is to bring the critical apparatus of cultural studies to bear on the subject. In doing so, she reminds us of the need for a healthy scepticism about the cultural foundations of intellectual property regimes and the conditions under which they do – and do not – support creative endeavours and innovation-based economic progress.

Slightly more than one third of Pang's book is an exploration into the meaning of “creativity” and the social contexts in which it is to be understood. This discussion, often original and insightful, but largely unrelated to China, explores the evolution of the concept as it developed over time in the West, as it applies to notions of creative labour, and as it is related to property rights. What emerges from this conceptual section of the book is a thesis which attempts to highlight the underlying tensions and ambiguities associated with creative industries; the ways in which creativity is tied to intellectual property regimes supportive of capitalism, the successes of that regime in fostering creative endeavours, the conditions under which intellectual property rights should be suspended and/or the legitimacy of those rights should be questioned, and the puzzling relationships of individual creativity and the social contexts in which it is embedded.

The second two thirds of the book, nominally, are devoted to a discussion of China, although the heavy reliance on critical theory evident in the first third again infuses much of the discussion. Pang's fascination with the complexities of creativity, and the relationships between creativity and the copying and counterfeiting that is so widespread in China, is developed with reference to a mix of cases, including cultural tourism, the digital technology of cinema, efforts to brand Beijing as a “creative city,” Chinese assimilation of the Japanese anime aesthetic, and selected cases of the production of paintings and sculpture.

While Pang's work is often quite suggestive in leading the reader to reconsider assumptions about creativity and intellectual property rights, in the final analysis the reader is left wondering about the future of creative industries in China. We are left with a record of the author's mastery of Western cultural theory, but with doubts about the adequacy of her conceptual tools for finding new directions. The choice of cases is somewhat limiting, and the relative influences of active government policies, market forces and changing cultural values as drivers of creative industries remain largely unspecified. In addition, little is said about engineering and industrial design as creative industries, and the intellectual property regimes intended to support these. The title of Lorraine Justice's China's Design Revolution holds the promise of insight into these neglected topics.

Unfortunately, though, we quickly learn that Justice disappoints. She approaches her topic rather like the writings of Westerners making their first trip to China in the 1970s, as if “on horseback.” In just 130 pages we are introduced to the traditional Chinese aesthetic, the design experience of the Maoist years, the new awakenings of the Deng Xiaoping era, the promise of today's “third-generation” of designers, and the discontents of today's “fourth-generation” youth. The book indicates that the author has visited China, that she may have had some conversations with Chinese design professionals, but also that she has not probed terribly deeply into the subject, nor checked the accuracy of her claims with any care. We are told on two occasions, for instance, that “China is made up of five provinces,” (pp. 87, 122) (perhaps “region” got lost in translation). Journalist Maureen Fan, we are told, is affiliated with “the Washington Post Foreign Service.” One might forgive such malapropisms if the book, written after all by a design professional, offered new insights into the interesting world of contemporary Chinese design. Instead, we are given rather sophomoric and disjointed observations about Chinese society and its changing values. That such a book, which adds so little to our knowledge, should appear under the imprint of the MIT Press is more than a little surprising.

At one point, Justice accepts uncritically the comment by one Chinese designer that China would be producing competitive large passenger aircraft today if its indigenous research and design activities had not been interrupted by a decision to make components for Boeing (p. 57). Would that Pang and Justice together had followed up on this remark and taken up the Yun 10 programme and Chinese efforts to reverse engineer the 707! A fuller account of the future of China's creative industries and the relationships among creativity, copying and indigenous design might result. But, as it is, the two books fall short – albeit, in different ways – of satisfying our curiosity about where China is going with its efforts to establish itself as a 21st-century creative society and innovative economy.