Prof. Anthony Y.H. FUNG
Director and Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK
This paper presents a general mapping of the global creative industries. With a critique to a nation-driven cultural policy as a departure, particularly in Asia, I argue that, despite operating more or less on a free-market economy, the non-Asian cultural industries are equally protected by a neo-liberal global policy with the formation of collaborative consortium or communities that project and mold their creative industries in certain directions. In other words, either in the politically-constrained Asian context or a liberal-capitalist context, creative industries, nowadays, when extending globally, they are dictated by various politico-economic forces. The latter might in fact steer the creative industries away from its original aim—incubating creative talent and encouraging human creativity that creative labor want to achieve–and cultural industry becomes an instrument for internally nationalism and externally national branding. Despite this, we can see there are cases in which some creative industries can relatively work autonomous outside these kinds of hegemonic controls.