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Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Movie Market - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

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

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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.

ISBN-13: 9781620972182

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: New Press - The

Publication Date: 07-12-2022

Pages: 384

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

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 Universityof 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