China’s soft power conundrum, film coproduction, and visions of shared prosperity

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at China’s soft power strategy in relation to the film industry, which since the early 2000s has opened to international co-productions and investment. Despite many coproduction projects being endorsed by government, results have not added significantly to China’s film-making reputation. The paper shows that coproductions have a diplomatic function, which implies a more conventional understanding of soft power. The paper also considers the tension between artistic freedom and censorship that impacts on all coproduction projects in China and which undermines the efficacy of China’s soft power strategy. The paper advances the proposition that coproduction with countries in Eurasia under the cultural template of the Belt and Road Initiative might present new opportunities to blend China’s stories into a narrative of shared prosperity. In doing this, the advance of China’s economic power is supported by cultural policies that evoke a historical past as much as a shared future.

KEYWORDS:

• Soft power
• film coproduction
• China
• Belt and Road
• great rejuvenation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. For instance, someone like the South Korean rapper Psy would be considered too problematic by the authorities in Beijing.

2. Data from EntGroup, Accessed online 20 January 2019 at http://www.entgroup.cn/Views/61992.shtml.

3. Hong Kong directors have at times been ambivalent about being cheerleaders for Chinese nationalism. The director of the award winning Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) was Ang Lee (Li An), a native of Taiwan whose film making style was honed in the US.

4. The base was caught up in a tax evasion scandal surrounding the actress Fan Bingbing in 2018. Fan purportedly used this base to launder her investments. Following the crackdown, many of the companies moved closed down.

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/movies/the-great-wall-what-critics-and-filmgoers-are-saying-in-china.html.

6. Pamela McClintock, ‘Matt Damon’s ‘The Great Wall’ to lose $75 million: future of US-Sino co-productions in doubt, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 February 2017, available at https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/what-great-walls-box-office-flop-will-cost-studios-981602.

7. http://www.chinafile.com/conversation/can-china-expand-its-beachhead-hollywood.

8. ‘Digital Intermediate’ is the stage in the filmmaking process when footage is transferred from celluloid to a digital file for editing, before being transferred back to film for screening.

9. http://moscowfilmfestival.ru/miff38/eng/news/?id=677.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project [DP 140101643]; This work was also supported by the National Social Science fund of China (17AZD035)

Notes on contributors

Weiying Peng

Weiying Peng graduated from her PhD in Media and Communication at Queensland University of Technology in 2016. At present, she is working at Hunan Normal University in China. Her research interests include media cultural phenomenon in China, new media and its social impact, China’s soft power and its employment.

Michael Keane

Michael Keane is Professor of Chinese Media and Cultural Studies at Curtin University. He is Program Leader of the Digital China Lab. Prof Keane’s key research interests are digital transformation in Asia; the One Belt One Road, East Asian cultural and media policy; and creative industries and cultural export strategies in China and Asia.