Creativity and Its Discontents

In Creativity and Its Discontents, film and cultural studies scholar Laikwan Pang offers a complex critical analysis of creativity, creative industries (film or art, for example), and the impact of Western copyright laws on creativity in China. Modern capitalism separates copying from creativity, though the two are intimately connected. The author sees the simultaneous encouragement of creative arts and of intellectual property law in China as resulting from China's intensified capitalist modernity, but also notes that the valorization of piracy as a resistant alternative rests on the same basic binary of copying and creativity.