Hollywood in China

Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market

Ying Zhu

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781620972199
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

China surpassed North America to become the world ’s largest movie market in 2020. Formerly the focus of exotic fascination in the golden age of Hollywood, today the Chinese are a make-or-break audience for Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. And movies are now an essential part of China’s global “soft power” strategy: a Chinese real estate tycoon, who until recently was the major shareholder of the AMC theater chain, built the world’s largest film production facility. Behind the curtains, as this brilliant new book reveals, movies have become one of the biggest areas of competition between the world’s two remaining superpowers.

Will Hollywood be eclipsed by its Chinese counterpart? No author is better positioned to untangle this riddle than Ying Zhu, a leading expert on Chinese film and media. In fascinating vignettes, Hollywood in China unravels the century-long relationship between Hollywood and China for the first time.

Blending cultural history, business, and international relations, Hollywood in China charts multiple power dynamics and teases out how competing political and economic interests as well as cultural values are manifested in the art and artifice of filmmaking on a global scale, and with global ramifications. The book is an inside look at the intense business and political maneuvering that is shaping the movies and the U.S.-China relationship itself—revealing a headlines-grabbing conflict that is playing out not only on the high seas, but on the silver screen.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: From Paris Theater to Huaihai Cinema: As the Cinematic Universe Turns
• 1. Global Expansion and Local Protection: American and Chinese Film Industries from Inception Through the Early 1930s
• 2. Into the 1930s and 1940s: Hollywood’s Global Expansion and Chinese Cinema’s Local Buildup
• 3. From Hollywood to Soviet Model: Building a Socialist Cinema
• 4. Internal Reference Films and the Never Vanishing Hollywood Presence in China
• 5. Wolves at the Doorstep: Hollywood Reenters China
• 6. How Lucrative Is the Chinese Market: Politics Intervened
• 7. What Do the Chinese Watch: Popular Chinese Films Throughout the 2010s
• 8. Journey Home or to the West: Chinese Cinema’s Hollywood Dream and the Sino-Hollywood (De)Coupling
• 9. The Sino-Hollywood “Courtship”: Film as Cultural Persuasion and Box-Office Revenue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Publishing in the Public Interest
• Copyright