Thammasat University students interested in film, the visual arts, business, economics, China studies, sociology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 10 November Zoom book talk on Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market.
The event, on Thursday, 10 November 2022 at 4pm Bangkok time, is presented by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, the University of Hong Kong (HKU).
The TU Library collection includes many books on film in China and Hollywood.
The speaker will be Professor Ying Zhu, Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. The TU Library collection includes examples of Dr. Zhu’s research publications.
As her faculty webpage explains,
A leading scholar in Chinese and US film and media, Ying Zhu’s research areas encompass Chinese cinema and media, Sino-Hollywood relations, and TV dramas. She is the author to four books including Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market (2022) and Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television (2013), co-editor of six book volumes including Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds (2019), and eighty plus articles. Her first research monograph, Chinese Cinema During the Era of Reform: The Ingenuity of the System (2003) pioneered the industry analysis of Chinese film studios, with the Journal of Asian Studies calling it “a path-breaking book that initiated the institutional study of Chinese cinema.” Her second research monograph, Television in Post-Reform China: Serial Drama, Confucian Leadership and the Global Television Market together with three co-edited books—TV China (2009), TV Drama in China (2008), and Television Dramas: The US and Chinese Perspectives (2005) pioneered the subfield of Chinese TV drama studies in the West. Her writings have appeared in major academic journals such as Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and Journal of Communication.
The HKU event announcement notes:
“Hollywood in China” unravels the century-long relationship between Hollywood and China. Blending cultural history, business, and international relations, the book 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.
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,” 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 University and an adjunct professor in the School of Arts at the Columbia University.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=84572
For further information or with any questions, please write to
gchallen@hku.hk
A book review of Hollywood in China in the Mekong Review from August observed,
Hollywood in China attempts to explain the relationship between the US film industry’s financial and cultural players and the Chinese, who are by turns supine and defiant. The former continually acknowledge the Chinese market as huge and promising, sometimes slavishly placating, but never really understanding. It’s a familiar script: US panders; China swaggers; and the directors try to follow the money, frequently caving into Chinese demands by modifying the content of films.
But Hollywood and its ways do not actually propel the narrative current of Hollywood in China. The book’s analytic heart lies in China’s long history of government control over art. It asks, Why has China not produced films that get traction overseas? Why did Chinese films until recently have so little purchase among their intended mainland audiences? And why are the domestic films that now command box office support in China so, well, bad?
Zhu does not answer the questions other than to suggest that Western and Chinese cultures are too far apart to allow for a meeting of the minds in film. But that is equally true of Korea, Japan, Romania and many countries that produce robust and nuanced films that have gained traction among Western audiences. The answer threads through her entire narrative: censorship, official guidance, the provision or withholding of financing, admittance into the Chinese market, the fear by creators of penalties for offence: this suite of government controls chokes off creative expression and infantilises the audience. As such, the book offers a fascinating counter-narrative to industry accounts that look only at the business of Chinese film. Zhu, born in Shanghai, raised during the Cultural Revolution and now a professor who splits her time between Hong Kong and New York, is placed to provide readers with a nuanced aesthetic view of the industry… Zhu’s account becomes really interesting as she turns to the Chinese artistic expression that blossomed in the 1980s. As the market opened, financing became more available, and as Chinese film matured, themes have moved farther from any that resonate with a Western audience. She traces the evolution of Chinese auteur filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and Feng Xiaogang from bitterness about the regime to acceptance. She talks about Zhang’s focus on ‘efficient’ officials (that is bribe-taking) rather than the ‘clean’ ones, seen as dupes and tools. She notes the financial resourcefulness of elites who transform the lives of the poor. She talks about how characters who claim emotional response from Chinese audiences tend to be trapped in China’s capitalist rat race, seeking meaning in the old socialist memes. Meanwhile, Chinese films diverge more and more from the themes Westerners love, and Westerners appear sceptical that any Chinese art is authentic unless it concerns itself with the abuses of the Maoist regime.
The maturation of the Chinese market has brought with it genuine popularity for a number of domestic films, relegating US blockbusters to the back of the queue. Many lack traction among Western audiences: Dying to Survive, about illegally importing life-saving cancer medicine; I Am Not Madame Bovary, about a woman using the petition system, which is a relic of China’s dynastic governance; patriotic blockbusters like Aftershock, about the Tangshan earthquake of 1976 or The Founding of a Republic, made for the sixtieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. Do they lack traction because Western audiences understand too little about China? Or because Chinese audiences have been made to accept sappy inspirational tales? Does the success of domestic blockbuster films like Wandering Earth and Ne Zha presage a whole new market that Americans can’t really understand? Or are they China’s versions of Rambo?
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)