Xin Gu

• PhD
• Researcher at Monash University (Australia)

Computer technology has long been touted as a means of increasing the effectiveness of voluntary self-exclusion schemes – especially in terms of relieving gaming venue staff of the task of manually identifying and verifying the status of new customers. This paper reports on the government-led implementation of facial recognition technology as part...

This chapter provides an introductory overview of the recent emergence of facial recognition technologies (FRTs) into everyday societal contexts and settings. It provides valuable social, political, and economic context to the legal, ethical, and regulatory issues that surround this fast-growing area of technology development. In particular, the ch...

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided opportunities for facial recognition technology and other forms of biometric monitoring to expand into new markets. One anticipated result is the wholesale reconfiguration of shared and public space enabled by the automated identification and tracking of individuals in real time. Drawing on data from several indus...

The converging agendas in supporting cultural creativity and digital innovation became evident in the development of creative economy in China. Maker culture has become a key concern for public policy in China, driven by a demand for individualised creativity and the need to co-opt such creativity for nation building. Critics of maker culture have...

This article explores how the child is evoked in the discursive construction of facial recognition technology. Facial recognition technology is one of the most socially contentious emerging technologies of recent years, heavily criticised for enabling racialized and other forms of social harms. Drawing on data gathered through facial recognition tr...

As cultural and creative industries have been used by china to modernize the country, it is critical to talk about the emergence of new creative subjectivity. The lack of creative agency in China is a deficit position from which these industries began to gain attention within the policy circle. Much of the research and understandings on Chinese cre...

In this paper we analyse data gathered through facial recognition tradeshow ethnographies and interviews with members of the biometrics industry, as we consider recent shifts in industry discourse towards promoting the ‘ethical’ use of biometric technology. As the biometrics industry increasingly moves towards a ‘Video Surveillance as a Service’ (V...

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen the rapid but sometimes controversial take-up of ‘online examination proctoring’ systems by universities keen to maintain their assessment schedules during times of campus closure. Following the theoretical tradition of media ‘domestication’, this article examines the mainstream adoption of different online proctoring...

Transitioning from a state-owned economy to a market economy, Mongolia’s national cultural policy is dealing with many challenges whilst trying to align with UNESCO’s 2005 Convention. In this interview with Jigjidsuren, the lack of funding, political will and technical knowledge in the making of a national cultural policy by the Mongolia government...

This introduction sets out the key arguments, rationale and approaches undertaken in this book. It identifies the current state of thinking in the Creative Cities discourse and the knowledge gap in processing and registering experiences in Asian cities. It then outlines the four main entry points to the study on this topic: civic society’s resistan...

Larasati’s reflection is based on her work as chair of Bandung’s Creative Cities Forum (BCCF), an independent organisation in charge of promoting Bandung as member of UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network (UCCN). Her case study challenges assumptions of developing countries’ inability to engage civil society in the development of cultural policy and cre...

This chapter reviews academic literature and policies on ‘creative cities’ with a particular emphasis on the development of digital and media infrastructures in making such cities. It tries to understand what lies behind the evolution of the creative cities discourse in developing Asia. I argue that creative cities approach, focusing on global medi...

This article will discuss the impact of COVID-19 on Chinese cultural industries, in particular independent music based on live interviews with musicians, venue owners, labels and others in the Chinese music industry. On the one hand there are many state employees in the cultural industries, who are somewhat protected from immediate employment impac...

This chapter explores the social space available for creative subjects in China, based on interviews with artists and writers in Shanghai. We argue that the space for creative autonomy is configured differently in China to the way it is presented within Western creative labour studies. Autonomy in China rests on a sense of serving the public good r...

This article charts the development of the ‘creative cities’ discourse as one increasingly organised around 'aa transnational hegemonicic block’. It traces the tendency towards homogenisation during the adoption, translation and improvisation of creative cities' policies around the world, to that of an aspiration to be 'Modern'. Rejecting claims of...

The book is now on open access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-46291-8 This book responds to the lack of Asian representation in creative cities literature. It aims to use the creative cities paradigm as part of a wider process involving first, a rapid de-industrialisation in Asia that has left a void for new development models,...

This paper investigates Shanghai's music sub-cultural scene as part of the process of worlding. In Asian cities, until recently outside the mainstream of western commercial music, there is a highly complex and contingent process of catching up with the history of the field, and learning to feel comfortable in inhabiting this space. In Shanghai, thi...

Universities in Australia – as in many other Anglophone countries – have benefited from an influx of full fee paying international students. Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) as an increasingly desirable career for these students and associated with rising state investment has given Anglophone universities the privilege in this international...

Dedicated to the memory our late colleagues, Dr Anna Upchurch (1957–2016) and Dr Lorraine Lim (1980–2017), both of whom attended the symposium from which this Special Issue emerged (Prato, September 2016), and both of whom were to make valuable contributions.

In this chapter, we reflect on the complex relationship between art and design in the contemporary Chinese context. More specifically, we look at how this plays out within site-specific art. Informed by two case studies of site-specific projects – Chi K11 in Shanghai and SiFang Art Museum in Nanjing. We explore how some of the traditional oppositio...

Makerspaces—specifically those with a focus on digital fabrication and physical computing—are emerging as symbols of social and economic change in many cultures. Much of the empirical evidence that provides details of this phenomenon has been gathered in neo-liberal market economies in Europe and North America. Existing findings have helped situate...

This chapter offers a critical lens for understanding the vocational turn in visual arts pedagogy in China. It investigates the positions of 'creative agency' in the process playing against pressure from the over-heated Chinese contemporary art market as well as pressure from institutions contributing to China's desire of cultural soft power

Craft Economies provides a wide-ranging exploration of contemporary craft production, situating practices of amateur and professional making within a wider creative economy. Contributors address a diverse range of practices, sites and forms of making in a wide range of regional and national contexts, from floristry to ceramics and from crochet to c...

This is an introduction to the special issue on “Making Creative Spaces”. It gives an overview of the literature and key debates around urban space for the cultural/creative industries and suggests what the current problems are. It specifies the diversity of local solutions and details the challenges and responses occurring in parts of China and Au...

This paper examines the basis, development process and the meaning of these 'official' creative clusters within the wider urban context.In this paper, I will focus on one aspect - the relationship between these creative clusters and their urban forms. I choose three conceptual approaches used to explain such relationships in Western creative cluste...

This paper examines the development of creative industry clusters in Shanghai. It looks at the cautious adoption of the creative industries agenda by the Chinese government and how Shanghai was to adopt this more positively. The paper also looks at the complex provenance of the creative clusters concept and how Shanghai focused more on its urban re...

The last ten years have seen the emergence of Chinese creative industries and creative clusters and accompanying debates in both academic and policy circles. To understand the origin and trajectory of this new policy agenda, we need to understand how most of the assumptions of Western1 cultural policy and theory — which underpinned cultural and cre...

This paper deals with the development of 'art clusters' and their relocation in the city of Shanghai. It first looks at the revival of the city's old inner city industrial area (along banks of Suzhou River) through 'organic' or 'alternative' artist-led cultural production; second, it describes the impact on these activities of the industrial restru...

This article takes the establishment and demise of Manchester's Creative Industries Development Service (CIDS) as an exemplary case study for the ways in which creative industry policy has intersected with urban economic policy over the last decade. The authors argue that the creative industries required specific kinds of economic development agenc...

This article reviews some key critical writing about the commodification or exploitation of networked social relations in the creative industries. Through a comparative case study of networks in fashion and new media industries in the city of Manchester, UK, the article draws attention to the social, cultural and aesthetic aspects of the networks a...

This article looks at the arrival of ‘creative industries’ within mainstream policy discourse in China. It attempts to situate this ‘modernising’ discourse within the wider historical conflicts around modernity and modernization in China, suggesting that the progressive function of the ‘creative industries’ discourse frequently claimed by its suppo...