Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Movie Market

by Ying Zhu

Overview

The inside story of the U.S.-Chinese superpower conflict playing out behind the scenes of today’s movie industry, from the leading media scholar

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620972182
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	07/12/2022
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ying Zhu is the founder and chief editor of the peer-reviewed academic journal Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is the author of four books including Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market and Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television (both from The New Press) and co-editor of six books including Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds. Previously on the faculty at the City University of New York, she is now a professor in the Academy of Film at the Hong Kong Baptist Universityand an adjunct professor in the School of Arts at the Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Introduction. From Paris Theater to Huaihai Cinema: As the Cinematic Universe Turns 1

1 Global Expansion and Local Protection: American and Chinese Film Industries from Inception Through the Early 1930s 9

2 Into the 1930s and 1940s: Hollywood's Global Expansion and Chinese Cinema's Local Buildup 40

3 From Hollywood to Soviet Model: Building a Socialist Cinema 69

4 Internal Reference Films and the Never Vanishing Hollywood Presence in China 98

5 Wolves at the Doorstep: Hollywood Reenters China 128

6 How Lucrative Is the Chinese Market: Politics Intervened 156

7 What Do the Chinese Watch: Popular Chinese Films Throughout the 2010s 186

8 Journey Home or to the West: Chinese Cinema's Hollywood Dream and the Sino-Hollywood (De)Coupling 226

9 The Sino-Hollywood "Courtship": Film as Cultural Persuasion and Box-Office Revenue 258

Acknowledgments 283

Notes 287

Index 337

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Hollywood in China: 
“[Hollywood in China] weaves together a range of sources to offer a complex tapestry of stories, while its historical overview of the Chinese film industry’s relationship with Hollywood makes a valuable contribution to cinema studies.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“[Hollywood in China] reflects the changing fortunes of Hollywood in China and shows clearly that Chinese film culture can exist both with and without Hollywood.”
—Film International

"Hollywood in China folds an unusually broad range of industry data into an overarching historical narrative: as a one-stop shop for facts and figures about the Chinese film market, and Hollywood’s presence therein—about what happened, where and when—it is therefore invaluable."
—China Quarterly

“Hollywood in China is full of fascinating historical details.”
—Mekong Review

“An able chronicle of the deep, tumultuous relationship between Hollywood and Chinese cinema.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Researchers of film history, Chinese media and popular-culture studies, and China-U.S. business relations will find this densely written book both useful for consultation and fascinating for its study of the historical influence of Hollywood on China and vice versa.”
—Booklist

“Hard to imagine a more necessary book on the movie business than Ying Zhu’s twinned account of the Chinese and American film industries. Hollywood in China is scholarly, lucid, and intriguing—as well as a fresh slant on Sino-U.S. relations.”
—J. Hoberman, author of The Red Atlantis

“Ying Zhu’s new book on the Hollywood-China connection . . . reveals, in often fascinating detail, the unexpected parallels between the two industries at various stages of development, showing how such hot-button topics as competition, censorship, and Chinese sensitivities to their treatment in Hollywood films predate the Communist period, and have been there almost from the beginning.”
—Stanley Rosen, professor of political science and international relations, USC U.S.-China Institute

“Ying Zhu provides the historical depth and analytic acumen required to comprehend the thorny connection Hollywood maintains with China’s vast movie market and complex film production industry. Hollywood in China tells the epic story of this motion picture courtship from the Republican Era to China’s post-Mao opening to world commerce, and it shows how this movie marriage endures rumblings of divorce from the Cold War, trade war, and other threats of pandemic proportions.”
—Gina Marchetti, professor of comparative literature, University of Hong Kong, and author of Citing China

“In Hollywood in China, Ying Zhu continues her stunning in-depth analysis of the contemporary Chinese media industries. Her astute focus here is on China’s century-long interplay with Hollywood, as the Chinese film industry matches and ultimately surpasses Hollywood on the home front, and threatens to surpass it in the global movie marketplace as well.”
—Thomas G. Schatz, professor emeritus, University of Texas at Austin

 

From the Publisher

2022-03-29
A scholarly survey of the Chinese film industry as it has grown alongside Hollywood.

In her latest work of media studies, Ying, author of Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television, examines China’s increasingly potent film industry, from the West-inspired conception of Shanghai in the 1920s to today’s Hollywood-esque mega hits. Early on, Chinese authorities grasped the power of film to influence its citizens, especially in terms of stoking nationalism, just like early American studios employed film for propaganda purposes during World War I. Using specific films to illustrate her points, the author advances her journey chronologically, keeping the Sino-Hollywood relationship percolating along parallel narratives. She examines how Chinese innovators like Zhang Shichuan, considered a founding father of Chinese cinema, and the Shaw brothers, who founded Tianyi, mimicked the work of such American visionaries as Universal’s Carl Laemmle and Paramount’s Jesse L. Lasky and Adolf Zukor. Even more so than in the American industry, the Chinese market, affected by the vagaries of changing governments, has often used overbearing censoring practices, including the banning of evening movies, the restriction of women customers, and the blocking of racy content. The author documents many instances of protests over denigrating portraits of Chinese people in American films, and she shows how the post-1949 transition from Hollywood entertainment to Soviet revolutionary pictures, and the breakout of Korean War, essentially sealed American films out of China until the end of the Mao era. She also examines the resurgence of Chinese moviemaking in the 1990s and the explosion after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 as well as how, under the nation’s latest strongman leader, Xi Jinping, “cultural self-confidence” has become a keystone. This book is characterized by excellent research and sharp cultural insight, but it sometimes reads like a dissertation. For a less academic work focused on the current landscape, check out Erich Schwartzel’s Red Carpet.

An able chronicle of the deep, tumultuous relationship between Hollywood and Chinese cinema.

Kirkus Reviews