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This course aims to examine how tradition is being reinvented, represented, reproduced and received in the process of cultural production in contemporary China. The course focuses on examining how the emergence and development of the cultural and creative industries in China have been underpinned by the emphasis on the notion of ‘Chinese traditional culture’. The course will be divided into four parts. In the first part, it examines the discourse on Chinese traditional culture in relation to the geopolitics of China. In the second part, the course investigates the changing role of cultural tradition in relation to the emergence of the discourses on the cultural and creative industries and on soft power in China. In the third part, it focuses on explaining how different forms of traditional cultures such as tea, martial arts, Chinese opera, Chinese medicine and other crafts and arts have undergone rapid marketization and industrialization in the last two decades. In the final part, the course illustrates the process of how traditional cultures have been branded and marketed as cultural products in China by comparing different real-life case studies. The goal of the course is to enable students to understand the process of commercialization of tradition in contemporary China.