In the summer of 2011, some Americans in China visited an Apple Store in the southwestern city of Kunming, only to discover that the store was actually fake—not in the sense that it was selling knock-off Apple products, but rather in the sense that the entire store was itself a precise replica of distinctive design and décor that one finds in Apple Stores around the world. Even the employees of the Kunming store were dressed and comported themselves just like bona fide Apple employees and, furthermore, they were apparently convinced that they really did work for Apple. As such, these fake Apple Stores are a perfect example of what is referred to in China as shanzhai culture, or the illicit copying of name-brand commodities.
These Kunming Apple Stores nicely capture several of the central concerns that drive Laikwan Pang's recent book, Creativity and Its Discontents. Inspired by the recent rash of intellectual property rights (IPR) offenses accompanying China's 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO)—and the (former) communist nation's consequent efforts to bring its creative industries into compliance with the international IPR standards stipulated by the WTO—Pang presents a nuanced and wide-ranging reflection on creativity. Given that IPR was not a high priority under either traditional Confucianism or Maoism (and, indeed, communist China outlawed private property altogether), it is therefore not surprising that the nation's contemporary attempts to adopt international IPR regulations have been rather rocky. For Pang, however, the resulting pattern of domestic IPR violations is significant not so much for what it says about China per se, but for how it underscores the ways in which creative industries are grounded on a constitutive tension between economic and cultural forces.
Creativity and Its Discontents is composed of two parts. In part 1, Pang examines the concept of creativity from both theoretical and historical perspectives, emphasizing the interrelation between processes of creation and copying, on one hand, and assumptions about modernity, the role of labor, and intellectual property rights, on the other. In particular, she stresses contemporary IPR's indebtedness to a Western Romantic tradition celebrating the figure of the author or artist as an individual creator, and argues that “creativity features two mutually conditioning dimensions: it is a result of social praxis that demands labor, and it is also a form of textuality that proliferates on its own” (p. 5). In part 2, Pang examines some of the ways in which several Chinese creative industries have run up against global IPR regimes, focusing on topics ranging from Hong Kong cinema to Beijing's city branding and Japanese anime. A recurrent theme in these chapters is that intellectual and artistic creativity is intimately bound up with patterns of copying and collaboration that are not effectively captured in existing IPR regulations.
Pang opens Creativity and Its Discontents by positing that “the creative economy cannot operate without IPR control” (p. 19), but then proceeds to advance a provocative critique “of the fundamental rationale of IPR, that ideas and knowledge should be considered property” (p. 224). In place of IPR, as presently understood, she argues instead for the importance of “dehumanizing creativity” and for “connect[ing] such creativity to the serendipity of history, the production of space, text and sign, and technology” (p. 228). Pang's argument is suggestive, though it is also useful to remember some of the concrete benefits of IPR, with all its flaws. For instance, while it presumably would have been possible for Pang to have written and published (a version of) Creativity and Its Discontents independently, in a completely open access format, it is nevertheless the case that she chose to publish her book with Duke University Press—an academic publisher that provides its authors with numerous benefits (such as an extensive peer review process, expert copyediting, the imprimatur of the Duke University Press “brand,” and so forth), but which also places certain restrictions on the circulation and reproduction of the texts it publishes. Like the final artwork Pang discusses in her book—Hong Kong artist Leung Mee Ping's recent installation piece Made in Hong Kong, consisting of an exhibition of paintings from the Dafen Village art factory specializing in skilled reproductions of famous artworks, which is to say, a creative work about a paradigmatically shanzhai institution premised on cultural copying—Creativity and Its Discontents similarly reflects back on the conditions of its own production, benefiting in concrete ways from current IPR regulations even as it simultaneously critiques the “fundamental rationale” of that same IPR regime.
