Chapter 4 examines the dialectical relationship between the rhetorical tactics of modern advertising and the performance strategies of the avant-garde. While scholars have established the influence of print advertising on Dada’s collage aesthetic, little attention has been paid to the industry’s influence on the theatrical provocations of the historical avant-garde. This chapter demonstrates how the performance repertoire of early twentieth-century advertising - in the joking assault of the street tout, the insinuated intimacy of the shill, the manufactured cultural authority of the puff, and the provocation of plants in the audience - offered a model of social engagement that avant-garde artists adopted in order to reveal the internal logic and rhetorical strategies of consumer capitalism. Entering into critical debates about the so-called neo-avant-garde, this chapter concludes by establishing a line of continuity between the historical and contemporary avant-gardes, demonstrating how avant-garde artists in post-socialist China likewise inhabit advertising’s performance repertoire when they emulate the abject logic of the shanzhai (“copycat”) to reveal how transnational capitalism is transforming social relations within the globalizing economy.

China’s approach to innovation is unique. To analyse the main features of economic innovation and entrepreneurship in contemporary China, it is first necessary to dispel some common misconceptions. In addressing that topic, this chapter focuses on explaining: (1) technological innovation and how it has been conventionally understood in the literature; (2) China’s distinctive approach to technological innovation; (3) in particular, the complex role of the government, and regulation, in innovation in China; and (4) how China’s distinctive approach to innovation may actually be better at promoting innovation in AI technologies, and other rapidly developing technologies, than other approaches.