I had no idea to what extent the priorities of the Communist Party of China control the screens of movies all over the globe.

The Chinese domestic movie market is so large that American studios are completely beholden to the people who control what’s put in them, and every movie out elsewhere.

Hollywood studios thought that as long as they satisfied the Chinese censors the money would never end. Then came COVID and it ended temporarily. Then came Xi's strategies to end money laundering on a huge scale in China...and the whacking gobs of money available to buy Hollywood ended.

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Fascinating

I learned so much about American
and Chinese economic relations by reading this book. Truly eye opening. A good comparative politics and economics text. ( )

I was looking for something new to read so checked out Financial Times recommendations for 2022. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been on my mind since I read Prestowitz's "The World Turned Upside Down."

Schwartzel tells the story of the CCP's quest for global domination through its conquest of Hollywood. Before the pandemic, Hollywood was more beholden to the CCP than to any United States entity. Apparently this has been shifting some with the proliferation of streaming platforms and Netflix's dominance.

Film in China has followed a different trajectory than many places around the world. American films didn't start entering China until the early 1990s—80 years or so after they became dominant in many other parts of the world. And once film was allowed in, it was only allowed in at a trickle of a few films a year. During 1997, there were a few high profile cases where films that didn't align with the CCP's vision of the world resulted in various studies potentially being banned from the Chinese market. This trend continued and intensified in the following decades. Why did films get so terrible during the 2010s? They were crafted for the CCP, not for general audiences. While franchises like the Transformers made less and less with each sequel in the United States (because they're terrible), they made more and more with each release in China. During COVID, China briefly became the world's biggest box office, but that was during a period when Chinese theaters were open and US theaters were closed.

The Chinese film industry has traditionally been explicitly propaganda-oriented—to the degree that very little "art" was possible. This has shifted very slightly in recent years, as the CCP has come to realize that there is a je ne sais quoi about good culture, where micromanagement comes at the expense of audience identification. That said, this trend hasn't been significantly disrupted, in that pretty much all of the films produced in CCP territories that have won international film awards have been banned in their jurisdiction.

If you're interested in the intersection of media studies and censorship, you'll love this book! ( )