The Maker Movement and Creative Industries in China

This thesis documents the emergence of maker culture and the maker movement in China – the context, the development processes and its evolution – to analyse China’s creative discourse. In particular, it examines how the Westernised, open-source, bottom-up and individualistic ‘maker culture’ has been adapted to China’s top-down, institutionalised and collective social and political contexts. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Shenzhen, China, this research approaches the question by focusing on debates over creativity and innovation in China at three levels: individual makers, organisational (makerspace), and urban policy (maker city).