Cinema’s new Cold War: is Hollywood at the mercy of China?

Tomorrow, the latest James Bond film, No Time To Die, finally makes its way into Chinese cinemas. Getting there has been an adventure in itself: a global pandemic, a blackout on foreign films during China’s National Day holiday season and – 007’s toughest test of all – state regulators deciding which international films get one of the 34 coveted annual places for imported productions.

The mission’s objective, however, makes it all worthwhile: access to the world’s largest box office, after China overtook the United States last year. The extraordinary size of the Chinese market – the product of increasing wealth and a cinema-building boom in recent years – was revealed earlier this month by The Battle at Lake Changjin. Set during the Korean War, and depicting Chinese troops going up against US-led United Nations forces, the film has now taken over $800 million (￡580 million).

Evidence for state-media claims that Lake Changjin is fostering sympathy abroad for China appears thin on the ground, given the objections, voiced everywhere from the United States to South Korea, about the film’s pantomime-baddie approach to characterisation and its questionable handling of history. But amidst heightened tensions and talk of a “new Cold War” , ought we to be comparing not only ship and missile numbers, but cinema screens too – China’s 75,000 to America’s 44,000?

Cinema’s role in the first Cold War offers clues as to where we might be headed. In the 1940s and 1950s, the priorities for US and Soviet cinema were two-fold: to avoid infiltration by dangerous foreign ideas, and to project an image of life at home sufficiently sunny that no-one watching – locally or abroad – could be in any doubt as to whose political system was the more conducive to human flourishing.

American filmmakers were never as tightly constrained as their Soviet counterparts. The FBI’s Los Angeles office took an active interest in the messages that Hollywood was sending out, fretting over It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) for its negative portrayal of the banking industry and its tendency to harp on the problems of the “common man”. But nothing in America approached Stalin’s personal vetting of film scripts, or the cranking out of socialist realism by a state film industry that only recovered after Stalin’s demise.

More important than political control in western Cold War filmmaking was money, and the power wielded by controversial lobby groups such as the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals – launched in 1944 by the likes of Walt Disney and Ayn Rand with the stated aim of combatting Communist and Fascist infiltration.

Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) became part of the picture across the 1960s, thanks in part to a well-publicised speech in which Mao appeared blasé about the prospect of nuclear war: it would, in essence, be a numbers game, with enough Chinese surviving to put together a post-apocalyptic socialist paradise.

The furore at the time in the Western media may have contributed to Roald Dahl’s decision, while writing the screenplay for the Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967), to exchange the original novel’s negative characterisation of the Japanese (replete with World War Two-era stereotypes) for a friendly, hi-tech Japan set in contrast to a dangerous People’s Republic of China (PRC) – backers, the film implied, of arch-villain Blofeld’s attempts to foment war between the US and the USSR.

China’s own state-controlled cinema was shaped for decades by Mao’s insistence that culture serve political ends. The result was a genre of “main melody” films – suffused with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and patriotism – that proved sufficiently unpopular with Chinese audiences that the country’s film industry faced ruin by the 1990s.

The door was duly opened to Hollywood, in hopes of sharing revenues and expertise. Censorship was introduced as a precaution, with Brad Pitt’s Seven Years in Tibet (1997) and Disney’s Dalai Lama biopic Kundun (1997) becoming two of the earliest high-profile offenders. Pitt was banned from China, notionally for life – though he would return in 2014 – while Disney went as far as hiring Henry Kissinger to help get them back into China’s good books. (A new censorship system is today in effect in Hong Kong, too, putting at risk the territory’s distinctive film culture.) Private film companies began to emerge in the 1990s, helping to turn the “patriotic film” genre from box-office kryptonite into a field of high-quality action-packed blockbusters such as Lake Changjin.

In what might at first seem like a departure from the Cold War script, the Chinese authorities appear to have little interest in supporting films that might generate warm feelings for China abroad. As Chris Berry, professor of Film Studies at King’s College London, tells me: “There is a lot of rhetoric about the desire to export, [but] these films are made for Chinese audiences inside the PRC. The Chinese government is under a lot of pressure, with Covid, the incredible restrictions they are imposing on people in the name of keeping Covid out, the inability to deliver electricity, and the prospect of the housing market collapsing.”

Much effort therefore goes into ensuring the success of the right kind of domestic film. Favoured productions receive the best release slots (timed to coincide with major holidays), the most advantageous scheduling at cinemas, advertising in state media, encouragement of organised viewing-parties, and the chance for aspiring young actors to become “red avatars” (shaping their careers and public profiles by choosing patriotic roles).

Meanwhile, companies or actors whose work or opinions upset the authorities can find themselves blacklisted. A case in point, says Robert Mitchell, director of Theatrical Insights at Gower Street Analytics, may be the new Marvel film Eternals: its director, Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao, became persona non grata in China when critical comments of hers, made eight years ago, were unearthed. A more general chilling factor is at work, as state control of social media tightens. “Netizens” once tempted to criticise clichés or historical inaccuracy in films are now on their guard – the film-review site DeepFocus had its account with the messaging app WeChat suspended after it offered unflattering comments about Lake Changjin.

And yet China’s leaders haven’t given up on influencing hearts and minds abroad – far from it. The twist this time is that, rather than working against Hollywood, they are working with it. Until recently, the way for Western filmmakers to make it past Chinese censors was judicious consideration of the CCP’s sensibilities during production, followed by furious lobbying once the film was finished. Since the 2010s, there has been a trend instead towards Sino-US co-productions.

In 2012, for example, DreamWorks established a joint venture called Oriental DreamWorks (now Pearl Studio), whose first animated feature film was Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016). Thanks to heavy Chinese involvement, it was counted as a “local” rather than an “imported” film, thus circumventing the quota and substantially increasing the film’s profitability. Other productions to have pioneered close links to China include Iron Man 3 (2013), which was shot partly in China and involved Chinese censors visiting the set and offering notes on the script. Imported films, too, are subject to censorship, as Bond himself knows only too well. A crucial scene in Skyfall (2012) was cut, because it showed a Chinese security guard being killed. Elsewhere in the film, a conversation touching on prostitution was edited in the Chinese subtitles.

If these are the early years of a new cinematic Cold War, what happens next may depend in part on how much Chinese and Western audiences are prepared to put up with. It would be a mistake to overdo the presence of patriotic films in China’s cinemas, or the likely patience of Chinese viewers should the genre threaten to saturate the market. Berry points out that until Lake Changjin came along, vying for the accolade of the country’s highest-grossing film was Hi, Mom (2021), a time-travelling mother-daughter comedy.

At the same time, attempts to tweak global films for Chinese audiences – the PRC version of Iron Man 3 featured an energy-drink advert, alongside small-talk between Chinese doctors treating Iron Man – have not been universally well-received in China. Ditto the tokenistic inclusion in Hollywood films of Chinese actors in minor roles, ridiculed by some in China as mere “flower vases”. For Western audiences, meanwhile, the sight of Hollywood stars avoiding controversial topics or even parroting CCP talking points for the sake of box-office returns – think of the Fast & Furious actor John Cena’s grovelling apology in Mandarin for referring to Taiwan as a “country” – may make it even harder for films to weather the streaming wars.

In this new cinematic Cold War, much as in the last, money may trump politics – with ticket-purchasing publics on both sides, rather than governments or censors alone, having their say in how the plot turns out.