
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.
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 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.
Praise for Hollywood in China:
"[Hollywood in China] weaves together a range of sources to offer a complex tapestry of stories, while its historical overview of the Chinese film industry's relationship with Hollywood makes a valuable contribution to cinema studies."
--Los Angeles Review of Books "[Hollywood in China] reflects the changing fortunes of Hollywood in China and shows clearly that Chinese film culture can exist both with and without Hollywood."
--Film International
"Hollywood in China folds an unusually broad range of industry data into an overarching historical narrative: as a one-stop shop for facts and figures about the Chinese film market, and Hollywood's presence therein--about what happened, where and when--it is therefore invaluable."
--China Quarterly
"Hollywood in China is full of fascinating historical details."
--Mekong Review
"An able chronicle of the deep, tumultuous relationship between Hollywood and Chinese cinema."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Researchers of film history, Chinese media and popular-culture studies, and China-U.S. business relations will find this densely written book both useful for consultation and fascinating for its study of the historical influence of Hollywood on China and vice versa."
--Booklist
"Hard to imagine a more necessary book on the movie business than Ying Zhu's twinned account of the Chinese and American film industries. Hollywood in China is scholarly, lucid, and intriguing--as well as a fresh slant on Sino-U.S. relations."
--J. Hoberman, author of The Red Atlantis