China's Creative Communities: Making Value and The Value(s) of Making China's Creative Communities: Making Value and The Value(s) of Making is a four-part cross-disciplinary scoping research project to bring together UK and China partners to network, research, workshop and publically disseminate ideas and innovations around the multi-faceted value of making in China. It aims to strengthen China's multiple maker communities in partnership with the UK, as part of broader support for China's creative industries and knowledge economy.  The project results from the British Council/AHRC's Living Research: Making in China initiative, in which a group of UK academics and makers were immersed in China's maker culture in October 2015. Initial findings and discussion identified key themes and approaches to develop to further contribute to Living Research's aims.  China's Creative Communities take place amidst a growing, but differentiated, emphasis on making in China and the UK. The UK's first makerspace opened in the 1990s, while China's first makerspace only opened in 2010. Now China has a rapidly expanding maker movement set to only grow following Premier Li Keqiang's first visit to a makerspace in Shenzhen in 2015 and the subsequent publication of the Report on the Work of the Government, which identified 'makers coming thick and fast' as part of its growing creative industries.  As in the UK, China's makerspaces vary widely, from self-funded hacker workshops to sites of middle-class leisure. Chinese policy and private investment focus on makerspaces as accelerators and incubators for product innovation. This is most evident in Shenzhen, China's electronics manufacturing capital, whose readily available manufacturers, materials and componentry has attracted a global community of makers looking to benefit from a production ecosystem largely absent in Europe and the USA. The technology-based innovation focus on makerspaces should be understood amidst economic uncertainty in China over its mass manufacturing future. A concomitant threat to China's status as the world's largest producer and economic emphasis on makerspaces tallies with Made in China 2025, the initiative to move its economy up the value chain to focus on design, quality, innovation and sustainability. These are areas of UK expertise potentially valuable in China: the UK has a strong, ever-more socially and sustainably responsible, design culture, and its maker movement is seen as potentially able to encourage a similar ethos.   Despite the excitement and potential for China's makerspaces, their future is uncertain, with some lacking strong community presence. Yet China also has a strong design and making culture, in other, less supported communities currently seen as external to its maker movement: urban villages; traditional crafts, and shanzhai. Matching China and UK researchers and makers to investigate makerspaces as part of this broader making ecology could offer ways to maximise the social, cultural and economic benefits, and extended values, of making in China.   Overall, this project aims to provide forums for making-based knowledge exchange in the UK and China through which the diverse values of making in China can be explored and enhanced. It will consolidate connections and build new networks between China and UK's making-related communities and extend the types of values and communities associated with making. We will also use this project to test methods and approaches and identify research questions that will create a foundation for future projects to benefit making communities in China and the UK. The Newton Fund builds research and innovation partnerships with developing countries across the world to promote the economic development and social welfare of the partner countries.