Keen to get a slice of China’s fast-growing movie market pie, Hollywood studios are bending over backward to accommodate official Chinese restrictions.
Hollywood actress Meryl Streep recently hitched a ride on a Chinese businessman’s private jet to Beijing. Once there, she met up with idiosyncratic writer-director Joel Coen and Raise the Red Lantern director Zhang Yimou to promote “China’s exploding film industry.”
Zhang, who served as the artistic director for both the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the lavish 60th anniversary celebrations of the Chinese Communist Party, also unveiled his remake of Coen’s influential first film – Blood Simple.
And this sounds simple enough.
But for some industry insiders, the trio personify a growing partnership between Beijing’s aspirations to export what it calls “soft power” – a sugarcoated version of China and its myriad social problems – to the West and Hollywood producers, who are bending over backwards to get a piece of the world’s fastest growing film market.
“It’s obvious why media is controlled in Communist societies. But what makes China unique is that for the first time, it has the money and market to shift control of media for a local audience to control of external representations of the country,” says Liu Lee-shin, a China film expert at Taipei’s National Taiwan University of Arts.
“Chinese-Hollywood co-productions are vehicles for Beijing to dictate the China narrative outside its borders.”
Liu says that Beijing has made no secret of its eagerness to build that narrative through movies, and points to a recent plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party endorsing guidelines to boost what it calls “cultural security,” by “propelling Chinese culture overseas.”
Critics claim that studios will be pressured to produce works that depict China in a sympathetic light, a fear prompted by China’s strict controls over film importation, distribution and production, along with the rebuffing of recent WTO rulings to allow foreign distribution and expand a 20-a-year cap on foreign movies.
“They made it very clear in their last congress meeting that the overriding theme would be projecting an image overseas that they want projected, while Hollywood’s No.1 concern has always been the bottom line,” says Michael Berry, a lecturer of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara.
“U.S. producers are taking an ultra-conservative route, and self-censorship is happening at a very early stage. In concept development there’s already an understanding of what will fly in China, and that gets concentrated by the time it gets to a screenplay.”
And what flies in China today isn’t very much.
Beijing’s thumbscrew restrictions include: No sex, religion, time travel, the occult, or “anything that could threaten public morality or portray criminal behavior.”
All film scripts have to be signed off by a government censor and anything that depicts Tibet, Tiananmen Square, the Dalai Lama, Falun Gong, Uyghur separatists or Taiwan favorably is typically banned.
For Hollywood, however, the proof is still in the numbers. Turnstile revenues in China skyrocketed by 64 percent to $1.5 billion, and have surged nearly tenfold since 2003.
While China has been heavily criticized for its foreign film cap, Western producers are bypassing those restrictions by aligning with local partners, most of which are state-run, and all of which have strong ties to the party and state.
Photo Credit: Wikicommons / Gisling
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Bay Jayson
They no longer create art in Hollywood. They have become the propagandists…and not for America but for the Communists. And they will still give their parties over here (Oscars) and pat each other on the back as great artists and doing a great service to all people….hah! And they won’t lose any sleep knowing they won’t show the atrocities going on in China…but they sure will make a movie bashing America. It’s amazing.
Bankroller
What do the Chi-Coms have against “time travel”?
Anonymous Coward
Time travel plots often invoke paradoxes which allow rewriting history, a concept which is totally incompatible with the Communist Party’s fixed edition of Chinese and world history.
Joe Johnson
It’s not just the money, its that Hollywood has been filled with Communist fanboys and Useful Idiots since the Bolshevik revolution….
galaxyJ
You are right, and the American Marxists continue to discredit McCarthy who was digging them out of their dens in both Hollywood and Washington, D.C.
sinbel
an absolutely and perfectly comment. Holywood should have been called “commiewood” right from the start. Whats the best way to win over the masses? You use film, theatre,music,poetry and fashion. Works every time.
The Sanity Inspector
I’ll remember this when Hollywood next fulminates against eeeevil corprayshuns–as if Hollywood were just one big arts & crafts fair!
Cluebat
The blackballing of conservative voices in Hollywood continues to this day.
Where is the outrage?
The House Commitee on Unamerican Activities (HUAC) was- as indicated- a creature created from the House of Representatives and completely unconnected to Senator McCarthy. Joe McCarthy was exposing communist allegiences within the State Department.
Those allegiences were present and are still present in the government and in Hollywood today. To deny this is dishonest.
Get your facts straight.
Terry
McCarthy was the victim of the so-called “witch hunt” episodes, not Hollywood.
As has been proven countless times, Hollywood and the State Department were and still are full of Communists. The only difference today is that they work with the Chinese Communists rather than the Soviet ones. It’s in their DNA. They’re natural allies.
So the false pretense that they’re being “forced” to side with the Coommunists in China is baloney.
vinny vidivici
On the flip side, Hollywood will continue to churn out flicks with the CIA, corporations and the U.S. Military as the heavies, the American people as provincial and bigoted, and American culture as shallow, crass and fraudulent.
Thanks for the stab in the back, Hollywood.
Walter Sobchak
Hollywood is dominated by the far left. They hate the United States, and side instinctively with its enemies. They are not being pressured into shilling for the Chinese, they are lusting after it.