Policy, locality and networks in a cultural and creative countryside: The case of Jingdezhen, China

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 coding. The volume considers the role of digital practices of making and the impact of the maker's movement as part of larger trends around customisation, on-demand production, and the possibilities of 3D printing and digital manufacturing.

Abstract: This chapter develops a qualitative study of a small creative cluster based in Sanbao International Ceramic Art Village, Jingdezhen, a city known as the capital of Chinese porcelain and ceramics for over two thousand years. This chapter draws upon multiple sources including semi-structured interviews with artists, workers, managers, and mentors in the craft, ceramics and painting sectors in Sanbao to analyze how locality, relationship and community networks work in maintaining and developing this rural cultural and creative cluster. In addition, the work of other researchers, policy documents and media releases are used to contribute to the analyses. Fieldwork and participatory observation within the village add some specificities and texture to the theoretical skeleton, revealing some details and complexity of the evolving discourse on cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in China. Further, it enriches and contributes to the existing research on creative industries, given the dominant urban bias towards creative clusters research in recent years.

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