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Week In China: Extending 'Soft Power'
BBC NEWS, CHINA
October 29, 2012: As China prepares for a new generation of leaders to take power, the BBC is spending a week on the road looking at both the challenges ahead for the world's most populous nation and the advances it has made.
On day two, the BBC's John Sudworth reports from Shanghai on China's ever-expanding film industry.
Day Two: Extending 'soft power'
Much has been written about China's rising economic and political power. But China is flexing its cultural muscles too, setting up language institutes in dozens of countries and ramping up the global reach of its state-run news service in a bid to compete with the BBC and CNN.
In its efforts to extend its so-called "soft power" there is one area, however, where it really should be doing better than it is, and that's cinema. The potential is certainly there.
Forget drafty village halls showing worthy propaganda films, China is now the world's fastest-growing cinema market. The ongoing construction boom saw more than 3,000 new screens open across the country last year. At around $2bn (£1.2bn), ticket sales may still be only a fifth of America's total box office revenue, but the point is that China's middle class has still got a lot of growing to do.
America's hasn't.
So Hollywood is going to great lengths to get a piece of some of that Chinese revenue, bending over backwards sometimes so as not to cause offence. Earlier this year when Men in Black 3 was released in China, a scene in which Chinese restaurant workers turn out to be evil alien baddies had been cut. And when the makers of another big-budget Hollywood movie, the soon to be released Red Dawn, realized a Chinese invasion of America might not look good in China, they reportedly re-mastered the footage to give North Korea a more prominent role in the plot.
And so far, perhaps as a result of such careful wooing, the Hollywood story in China is turning into a full-blown romance with a very happy ending.
US films have been gaining ground, even in a market where local productions are protected by a strict quota system that limits foreign film releases. Under pressure from the World Trade Organization, that limit has now been raised from 20 films a year to 34, and in the first six months of this year foreign films earned more than $800m in China. Government officials may well be left wondering if the quota for foreign films shouldn't be revised downwards again.
And if Chinese films are being beaten so roundly at the domestic box office, then the picture outside China makes for even more gloomy reading.
A recent report in the English-language China Daily reported that Chinese films took just $400,000 in America in 2011, and of the 791 films made in China that year only 52 were sold abroad, although even then, most of them were co-productions rather than pure Chinese-made films.
But some Chinese directors say the real reason home-grown cinema is struggling is nothing to do with Hollywood, but China itself. World-renowned director Lou Ye was once banned from making films for five years and recently took the bold stop of blogging about his own battle with the censors while trying to get his latest movie Mystery approved for release.
Once a week he posted the details of his negotiations with the Film Bureau. "A lot of Chinese movie producers and investors will not make movies about the reality of life to avoid the risk of censorship," he told the BBC. "You will notice there are very few films in the Chinese market about modern Chinese life," he said.
For whatever reason, Chinese audiences are voting with their feet and China is left wondering how to nurture an industry capable of matching America's soft power.
