The centripetal and centrifugal forces at work: mobility of the creative workforce

The worldwide passion of creative city production has witnessed the ceaseless mobility of ideas, capital, products and population. The chapter surveys the literature on creativity and mobility, addressing scholarship on the mobile creative class, the geography of knowledge assemblages and, correspondingly, directions of mobile capital. This brings out the issue of entangledness of mobile humans and non-human things, which has yet to be fully articulated in the literature. Situated in this concern, we use the case of HK–mainland China co-production of motion pictures to unravel the mutually constitutive effect of centrifugal and centripetal forces. By probing into the socializing behaviour of the statist and non-statist actors that channel and condition the flows of creative workforce, capital and ideologies, we demonstrate that centrifugal force for circulation can serve the disciplinary purpose of subject-making, when mobility becomes the new mentality for subjects.