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Advancing Strategic Interests Abroad: A Case Study of Hollywood
As its market power mounts, China is increasingly able to leverage foreign corporations not just to influence their home governments, but also to advance China’s broader strategic interests around the world. The most visible manifestation of this strategy is the Party-state’s effort to influence Hollywood in a bid to advance China’s global soft power agenda.
American popular culture has enjoyed worldwide influence for decades and is a key element of the country’s soft power. However, by the end of the Hu Jintao era, China’s leaders had begun calling for their country, too, to become a soft power leader, a theme Xi Jinping has continued to stress. The subsequent surge in Chinese spending on entertainment, or its “cultural industries,” as it calls this sector, amid flat revenues in the United States, has made China’s market a compelling one for Hollywood, despite continued quotas limiting the number foreign films that can be shown in China. In 2017, the Chinese box office reached $7.9 billion on growth of 21 percent, whereas the US market grew just 2 percent to $11.1 billion.°° (Foreign films account for roughly half of China’s total, most of which is attributable to Hollywood.)
In the 2010s, in addition to investing in its domestic film industry and maintaining
a restrictive import regime, the Chinese government encouraged the country’s media companies to enter into alliances or attempt to acquire outright American entertainment companies. Collectively, these strategies have raised concerns about self-censorship, the co-opting of the American film industry to advance Chinese narratives, and ultimately, the risk that the industry will lose its independence.
Hollywood, represented by the Motion Picture Association of America, has long cultivated close ties to the American government, which it has used to open access to China. For example, media scholar Aynne Kokas notes that in 2012, Vice President Joe Biden met with then Chinese vice president Xi Jinping to discuss China’s quota on foreign films.*! During Xi’s visit, Biden also helped broker an agreement between DreamWorks and a group of Chinese investors. Ultimately, in response to these efforts and WTO action, China increased its annual quota of imported films from twenty to thirty-four.
Film studios can attempt to circumvent the import quota by coproducing films with Chinese partners. This can invite censorship directly into the production process, potentially affecting what global audiences see, as opposed to censorship that affects only what the Chinese market sees.*? Examples abound of studios that have cast Chinese actors, developed and/or cut scenes specific to the Chinese market, or preemptively eliminated potentially objectionable references to China from scripts even when source material has called for it.
Aware of the Chinese market’s growing centrality to the film industry, major studios are also reluctant to produce any film that would upset China, even if that specific film was
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