Creative Citizenship in Hong Kong and Taiwan

Scholarship on citizenship has produced rich empirical studies to explain how citizenship has been manifested in the political, social and cultural fields. Yet little has explored the potential foci of creativity in approaching citizenship. Particularly in Asia, the question of how a creative society can exist to shape the process of citizenship in a contested political environment and a market-based creative industrial context has received limited attention. In this article, by synthesizing insights gained through studies of the creative projects in Hong Kong and Taiwan, we discuss how different actors have shown ingenuity in devising strategies to interact with government and with society as well as to engage in the public cultural sphere. They also engage in the exchange and creation of meanings, and affective registers of the place they inhabit, contributing to the formation of a creative class called creative citizens. The study helps to formulate the relationship between creativity and citizenship, and reveals differences and similarities in the enactment of creative citizenship in the two places.