Greedy America: Hollywood Is Paying an ‘Abominable’ Price for China Access

A kid’s movie has turned into a geopolitical nightmare for DreamWorks.
BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN 

A scene from "Abominable" taken in a theater and shared by Vietnamese media. 

Hollywood’s China reckoning has come. 

But unlike the NBA’s recent China debacle, this time it’s not the United States but China’s nearest neighbors who’ve had enough.
Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia have all expressed outrage at a map of China that flickers across the screen in a new film released in late September. 

The animated film, Abominable, is a joint production of DreamWorks and Pearl Studios, which is based in Shanghai. 

The map includes China’s infamous “nine-dash line”—the vague, ambiguously marked demarcation line for its territorial claim over most of the Vietnam East Sea.
The dispute points to a new problem for Hollywood as studios move closer to Beijing’s positions. Silence on China is nothing new—but positively pushing the Chinese government’s view of the world is.
Hollywood’s traditional self-censorship on China has market roots. 

China’s burgeoning market of movie-goers is expected to soon surpass the United States as the largest in the world. 

China’s censors have wielded this power adroitly, mandating that production companies abide by the party’s bottom lines in order to earn one of the 34 coveted spots allotted to foreign films for distribution in China each year. 

That has resulted in a deafening silence from Hollywood on the realities of Chinese Communist Party rule.
In the 1990s, several Hollywood films depicted oppression in Tibet, such as Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner, and the Tibetan cause was popular among celebrities, most notably Richard Gere. 

But there hasn’t been a major film sympathetic towards Tibet since Disney’s 1997 film Kundun, for which Disney CEO Michael Eisner flew to Beijing to apologize to the Chinese leadership. 

Gere claims he has been frozen out of major films for his Tibet activism. 

The 2013 zombie movie World War Z altered the location of the origin of the zombie outbreak from China to North Korea. 

The 2016 film Doctor Strange changed the “Ancient One,” a Tibetan character in the original comic book series, to a white character played by Tilda Swinton. 

In the past decade, no major film has portrayed China as a military foe of the United States.
Omitting offending plot lines and characters was once enough to satisfy Chinese censors. 

But pressure has grown to include proactively positive depictions, particularly of Chinese science and military capabilities.
O. In the 2014 film Transformers: Age of Extinction, the Chinese military swoops in to save the day. One film critic described Age of Extinction as “a very patriotic film. It’s just Chinese patriotism on the screen, not American.” 

The payoff was enormous; Age of Extinction became the highest-grossing film of all time in China, raking in more than $300 million. (It no longer holds that record.) 

China saved the day again in The Martian, the 2015 science fiction film starring Matt Damon. 

NASA launches a special rocket carrying food for an astronaut stranded alone on Mars, but it explodes and NASA is out of options—until China’s space agency jumps into the plot out of nowhere, announcing it also has a special rocket it is willing to lend the Americans. (In fairness, the subplot was present in the original novel, not just introduced by the studio.) 

The Martian brought in $95 million at the Chinese box office.
The growing phenomenon of U.S.-China joint movie productions has also resulted in a proliferation of mediocre films that cast China in a conspicuously positive light. 

The 2018 B-grade shark flick The Meg, co-starring Chinese actor Li Bingbing, was one such coproduction. 

It features an American billionaire who finances a futuristic ocean research station located, in a narrative non sequitur, off the coast of China, run by brilliant and heroic Chinese protagonists.
Abominable appears to be another. 

It features a young Chinese girl who discovers a yeti on her roof. 

She decides to help the yeti find his way back home to the snowy mountains in the west, and they set off on a trek across China. 

It has gotten middling reviews: One critic wrote that the film is “so distinctive pictorially, and so manifestly good-hearted, that it’s easy to forgive if not quite forget the ragged quality of its storyline.”
But the Chinese government’s heavy-handed film regulation department seems to have gone a bridge too far. 

One scene in the movie includes a map of China on the young female protagonist’s wall. 

Nine slim dashes trace a U-shape around the Vietnam East Sea, a resource-rich body of water with numerous land features also claimed by the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Brunei.
China is the only country that recognizes this fallacious map. 

The nine-dash line has no basis in international law, which does not recognize any country’s sovereignty over open waters. 

In 2016, an international tribunal in the Hague also rejected China’s assertions of sovereignty over the Vietnam East Sea. 

Beijing has never clarified the line’s legal definition or even its precise location, likely because to do so would open its vague claims up to further legal challenge.
These issues will come into sharper focus as Beijing begins to demand positive submission, not just omission. 

China’s domestic film market has already shifted from censorship to forced inclusion of propaganda. 

Last year, as part of a sweeping reorganization that saw many Chinese Communist Party bureaus absorb the purview of government departments, the party’s propaganda office took over regulation of the film industry. 

The result has been even more heavy-handed censorship and more overtly patriotic content in films. Over the summer, six anticipated blockbusters were axed entirely, and China’s box office slumped.

Legitimate Self-Defence: Fuck China

"South Park" declares 'Fuck the Chinese government' in 300th episode after China banned the show

• "South Park" fired back at the Chinese government during Wednesday's 300th episode after the country banned the show from its internet.
• In the episode, Randy Marsh declares "Fuck the Chinese government."
• "South Park" discussion forums were shut down, and videos of the show were removed from the Chinese internet after last week's episode mocked the country's censorship.
• The creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, issued a mock apology to China on Monday, saying "We too love money more than freedom and democracy."

By Travis Clark

Randy Marsh declares "Fuck the Chinese government."

"South Park" fired back at China during Wednesday's 300th episode after the country banned the long-running Comedy Central animated series.
In the episode, titled "SHOTS!!!," Towelie forces Randy Marsh to declare "Fuck the Chinese government." 

Marsh is reluctant at first since he's been selling marijuana in the country.
Last week's episode, called "Band in China," mocked Chinese censorship and Hollywood's reliance on the country's box office to boost potential blockbusters. 

It referenced China's crackdown on Winnie the Pooh, which has become a symbol of resistance against China's ruling Communist Party and its dictator Xi Jinping.
China retaliated by shutting down "South Park" discussion forums and removing clips and episodes of the show from its internet, as first reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
"South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker issued a mock apology to China on Monday, saying "Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn't look just like Winnie the Pooh at all."

The statement mocked the NBA's apology to China after the Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted on Friday (and then deleted) an image with the slogan "Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong" in solidarity with the Hong Kong protesters.
"Band in China" was projected onto screens throughout Hong Kong's Sham Shui Po district on Tuesday, according THR.

The NBA has far too much company in bowing to the moral monsters of Beijing

New York Post

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver

If a single General Manager voicing support for Hong Kong protesters is really a “third-rail issue” for Beijing, as Nets owner Joe Tsai insists, then the National Basketball Association had better prepare to lose its lucrative China business soon enough. 

Eventually, the tyrannical regime will demand too much.
The NBA would be better off imitating “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. 

Beijing literally purged the show from China’s internet after a single episode that satirized the way Chinese censorship now rules Hollywood.
Their response: “Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy.”
To be fair, the NBA stands to lose a lot of dough by crossing China’s rulers. 

But keeping that cash apparently requires every player, coach and official to stay silent not just on Hong Kong, but also Tibet, the million Muslims in “re-education” camps, organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, the oppression of Christian churches and countless other abuses.
It’s impossible to keep these moral monsters happy in the long run. 

But the NBA is trying. 

In this, it’s following Hollywood — which has actually allowed the Communist Chinese to alter films like “Top Gun 2” and the “Red Dawn” remake.
We’ve always believed that open societies are inherently stronger than tyrannical ones. 

But for that to hold, freedom has to matter more than greed.

U.S. Moral Bankruptcy

Dealing With China Isn’t Worth the Moral Cost

We thought economic growth and technology would liberate China. Instead, it corrupted us.

By Farhad Manjoo

The N.B.A. store in Beijing.

The People’s Republic of China is the largest, most powerful and most brutal totalitarian state in the world. 

It denies basic human rights to all of its 1.4 billion citizens. 

There is no freedom of speech, thought, assembly, religion, movement or any semblance of political liberty in China. 

Under Xi Jinping, “president for life,” the Communist Party of China has built the most technologically sophisticated repression machine the world has ever seen. 

In East Turkestan, in Western China, the government is using technology to mount a cultural genocide against the Muslim Uighur minority that is even more total than the one it carried out in Tibet. 

More than a million people are being held in concentration camps in East Turkestan, two million more are in forced “re-education,” and everyone else is invasively surveilled via ubiquitous cameras, artificial intelligence and other high-tech means.
None of this is a secret. 

Under Xi, China has grown markedly more Orwellian; not only is it stamping its heel more firmly on its own citizens, but it is also exporting its digital shackles to authoritarians the world over. 

Yet unlike the way we once talked about pariah nations — say East Germany or North Korea or apartheid South Africa — American and European lawmakers, Western media and the world’s largest corporations rarely treat China as what it plainly is: a growing and existential threat to human freedom across the world.
Why do we give China a pass? 

In a word: capitalism. 

Because for 40 years, the West’s relationship with China has been governed by a strategic error the dimensions of which are only now coming into horrific view.
A parade of American presidents on the left and the right argued that by cultivating China as a market — hastening its economic growth and technological sophistication while bringing our own companies a billion new workers and customers — we would inevitably loosen the regime’s hold on its people. 

Even Donald Trump, who made bashing China a theme of his campaign, sees the country mainly through the lens of markets. 

He’ll eagerly prosecute a pointless trade war against China, but when it comes to the millions in Hong Kong who are protesting China’s creeping despotism over their territory, Trump prefers to stay mum.
Well, funny thing: It turns out the West’s entire political theory about China has been spectacularly wrong. 

China has engineered ferocious economic growth in the past half century, lifting hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty. 

But China’s growth did not come at any cost to the regime’s political chokehold.
A darker truth is now dawning on the world: China’s economic miracle hasn’t just failed to liberate Chinese people. 

It is also now routinely corrupting the rest of us outside of China.
This was the theme of the N.B.A.’s hasty and embarrassing apology this week after Daryl Morey, the Houston Rockets’ general manager, tweeted — and quickly deleted — a message in support of Hong Kong’s protesters. 

After an outcry from American lawmakers, Adam Silver, the N.B.A.’s commissioner, later seemed to backtrack on his genuflection.
But I wasn’t comforted. 

The N.B.A. is far from the first American institution to accede to China’s limits on liberty. 

Hollywood, large tech companies and a variety of consumer brands — from Delta to Zara — have been more than willing to play ball. 

The submission is spreading: This week the American video game company Blizzard suspended a player for calling for the liberation of Hong Kong in a live-stream. 

And ESPN — a network owned by Disney, which has worked closely with the Chinese government on some big deals in China — warned anchors against discussing Chinese politics in talking about the Rockets controversy.
This sort of corporate capitulation is hardly surprising. 

For Western companies, China is simply too big and too rich a market to ignore, let alone to pressure or to police. 

If the first and most important cost of doing business in China is the surgical extraction of a C.E.O.’s spine, many businesses are only too happy to provide the stretcher and the scalpel.
But it will only get worse from here, and we are fools to play this game. 

There is a school of thought that says America should not think of China as an enemy. 

With its far larger population, China’s economy will inevitably come to eclipse ours, but that is hardly a mortal threat. 

In climate change, the world faces a huge collective-action problem that will require global cooperation. 

According to this view, treating China like an adversary will only frustrate our own long-term goals.
But this perspective leaves out the threat that greater economic and technological integration with China poses to everyone outside of China. 

It ignores the ever-steeper capitulation that China requires of its vassals. 

And it overlooks the most important new factor in the Chinese regime’s longevity: the seductive efficiency that technology offers to effect a breathtaking new level of control over its population.
There was a time when Westerners believed that the internet would be the Communist regime’s ruin. In a speech in 2000 urging Congress to normalize trade relations with China, Bill Clinton famously quipped: “There’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet. Good luck! That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” 

The crowd of foreign policy experts erupted in knowing laughter.

China proved them wrong. 

It didn’t just find a way to nail Jell-O; it became a Jell-O master carpenter. 

Through online surveillance, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and the propagandistic gold mine of social media, China has mobilized a set of tools that allow it to invisibly, routinely repress its citizens and shape political opinion by manipulating their feelings and grievances on just about any controversy.
This set of skills horrifies me. 

China may not be exporting its political ideology, but through lavish spending and trade, it is expanding its influence across the planet. 

There is a risk that China’s success becomes a kind of template for the world. 

In the coming decades, instead of democracy — which you may have noticed is not having such a hot run on either side of the Atlantic — Chinese-style tech-abetted surveillance authoritarianism could become a template for how much of the world works.
I should say there were a couple of small reasons for optimism regarding the spread of Chinese tyranny. 

The Last Hope

The bipartisan outrage over the N.B.A.’s initial apology to China did suggest American lawmakers aren’t willing to give China a completely free pass. 

The Trump administration also did something clever, placing eight Chinese surveillance technology companies and several police departments on a blacklist forbidding them from trading with American companies.
But if we are to have any hope of countering China’s dictatorial apparatus, we’ll need a smarter and more sustained effort from our leaders. 

I’m not holding my breath.

‘South Park’ creators issue mock apology to China after being censored

• The episode, called “Band in China,” pokes fun at China’s strict censorship laws and ridicules Hollywood for shaping its entertainment to please the Chinese government.
• On Monday, Beijing responded by deleting all clips, episodes and online discussions of the long-running comedy program.
• Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of “South Park,” issued an “official apology to China” via Twitter.

By Sam Meredith

Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick attend The Paley Center for Media presents special retrospective event honoring 20 seasons of ‘South Park’ at The Paley Center for Media on September 1, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California.

The creators of “South Park” have jokingly apologized to China after an episode of the U.S. TV comedy cartoon was made largely unavailable in the country.
The episode, called “Band in China,” pokes fun at China’s strict censorship laws and ridicules Hollywood for shaping its entertainment to please the Chinese government.
On Monday, Beijing responded by deleting all clips, episodes and online discussions of the long-running comedy program.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of “South Park,” issued an “official apology to China” via Twitter.


South Park
✔@SouthPark
Watch the full episode - https://cart.mn/sp-2302 @THR article - https://cart.mn/china


59.2K
8:22 PM - Oct 7, 2019

“Like the NBA (National Basketball Association), we welcome the Chinese sensors into our homes and our hearts,” the statement said, referring to an escalating dispute between the NBA and Chinese TV.
“We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn’t look like Winnie the Pooh at all.”
The statement continued: “Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now China?”

What happens in the episode?
Aired last week in the U.S., “Band in China” includes a plotline in which the character Randy Marsh is caught selling drugs in China. 

As punishment, he is subjected to forced labor and Communist Party re-education.
This appears to be a direct reference to the mass internment camps in East Turkestan — home to China’s Uighur minority.
The territory has made headlines for its detention and “re-education” camps that hold an estimated 1.5 million Muslims, many of them for violating what Amnesty International describes as a “highly restrictive and discriminatory” law that China says is designed to combat extremism.
In one scene, a prison guard is seen giving Marsh an electric shock.
“I am a proud member of the Communist Party,” Marsh then says, reading aloud from a card handed to him by the same guard. 

“The party is more important than the individual.”
Marsh is also depicted in an overcrowded prison cell, before engaging in conversation with Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

(L-R) Trey Parker and Matt Stone attend The Paley Center for Media presents special retrospective event honoring 20 seasons of ‘South Park’ at The Paley Center for Media on September 1, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California.

In 2017, AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh character was scrubbed from Chinese social media because people compared him to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
“Some people said Pooh looked like the Chinese president, so we’re illegal in China now,” Piglet says in the episode.
“What kind of madhouse is this?” Marsh replies.

How has China responded?
China’s government has sought to wipe almost every episode of the show and clamped down on any mention of “South Park” online, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Search results of “South Park” have been taken down on Chinese search engine, Baidu, with a video trailer from 2017 now the most recent video available.
China’s internet, sometimes referred to as the Great Firewall, heavily restricts news and information. Google, as well as social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, are blocked online in the world’s second-largest economy.
A statement from the Wikimedia foundation in mid-May said the online encyclopedia site Wikipedia had been blocked in mainland China since April this year.
Chinese newspapers and TV are under Communist Party control, with keywords and phrases censored on social media.

Conflict of Interest

Mnuchin’s Hollywood Ties Raise Ethical Questions in China Talks

By Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson

The Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and Louise Linton, his wife, at the White House before a state dinner in April honoring President Emmanuel Macron of France.

WASHINGTON — “Wonder Woman,” the 2017 film that Steven Mnuchin helped produce before becoming Treasury secretary, hauled in about $90 million at the box office in China. 

It was the film’s most successful international market and a roaring success for an American superhero export. 

But because of China’s strict laws for foreign films, the studio behind the movie, Warner Bros., received just a small fraction of those revenues.
Now, as Treasury secretary and one of the lead negotiators in trade talks with China, Mnuchin has been personally pushing Beijing to give the American film industry greater access to its markets — a change that could be highly lucrative to his former industry.
While Mnuchin divested from his Hollywood film production company after joining the Trump administration, he maintains ties to the industry through his wife, the actress and filmmaker Louise Linton.
In 2017, Mnuchin sold his interest in the company, StormChaser Partners, to Linton, who at the time was his fiancée.
In his 2018 disclosure, which was obtained from the Treasury Department through a records request by The New York Times, StormChaser is listed as one of Linton’s assets.
Since they are now married, government ethics rules consider the asset to be owned by Mnuchin. And while the documents show that Mnuchin sold his stake to Linton for $1 million to $2 million, he is now owed that same amount, in addition to interest, from StormChaser in 2026, according to the 2018 form.
Mnuchin’s remaining ties to the film industry are raising questions among ethics officials and lawmakers about whether a conflict of interest exists.
At a congressional hearing on Thursday, Mnuchin was questioned by a top Senate Democrat about those continuing financial ties.
The Office of Government Ethics still has not certified his 2018 financial disclosure, which is the first since his marriage to Linton.
Access to China’s film market has not been a primary issue in the trade talks, which have focused largely on Beijing’s treatment of foreign companies, including its requirement that firms hand over valuable technology, its barriers to foreign business and its subsidies to Chinese firms.
But Mnuchin has championed more equitable treatment of American films in China, viewing existing restrictions on foreign entertainment as part of the problematic behavior the Trump administration is trying to correct.
Under the current system, foreign companies must secure Chinese partners to enter China’s market and they are restricted in how much they can earn as part of the arrangements.
China applies a strict quota for the number of Hollywood films it lets into its theaters.
For most box office showings, Chinese companies take in 75 percent of all revenue, leaving the remainder to Hollywood. 
To operate in the tightly managed Chinese entertainment sector, American companies have also had to form a vast network of complicated ties with Chinese state-owned firms.
Since the trade talks began last year, film lobbyists have met with Mnuchin’s top deputies, as well as with officials from the Commerce Department and the office of the United States Trade Representative.
Mnuchin has been especially responsive to lobbying from the film industry, according to people familiar with the discussions, given his background and understanding of the challenges that American moviemakers face in China.
At a congressional hearing last month, Robert Lighthizer, President Trump’s top trade negotiator, said increasing the revenue share earned by American film companies in China was “absolutely” a priority in the talks, and he highlighted Mnuchin’s role.
“Mnuchin has been very much involved,” Lighthizer added.
“He of course knows a great deal about that industry, a lot more than I do.”
On Thursday, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, raised concerns about Mnuchin’s financial ties to the film industry and asked the Treasury secretary whether he had, in fact, really divested himself of the StormChaser asset listed on his disclosure form.
Mr. Wyden also suggested that the transaction might have been more of a loan to Linton than a true financial separation from StormChaser.
“What we have wondered is if there has been an exchange of an asset for a loan rather than a divestment,” Mr. Wyden said.
Mnuchin declined to discuss details of the transaction, but said that his financial disclosures were certified by career ethics officials in the Treasury Department.
“I am advised by people at Treasury that I am fully in compliance and I have no ethical issues,” Mnuchin said.
When asked by reporters after the hearing why his StormChaser ties did not represent a conflict of interest, Mnuchin said that he would not discuss any specific assets.
Treasury noted separately that Mnuchin’s disclosure was certified internally on June 27, 2018, and that the department was working with the Office of Government Ethics to obtain its certification.

Gal Gadot in a scene from “Wonder Woman,” which Mnuchin helped produce.

Mnuchin and Linton, who married in 2017, brought Hollywood glitz to Washington, but their continuing links to the film industry have also brought complications.
After working for 17 years at Goldman Sachs, Mnuchin in the last decade became a big name in Hollywood as a film investor.
His companies, Dune Entertainment and later RatPac-Dune, helped produce and finance dozens of films that were box office smashes in China, including “Avatar,” “Gravity,” “Dunkirk,” “Wonder Woman” and “Ready Player One.”
Mnuchin was also a co-chairman of Relativity Media, a fledgling Hollywood studio that had a joint venture in China.
During his confirmation hearing in 2017, Mnuchin said that Relativity’s joint venture in China was “not particularly successful.”
He said that he was not aware of direct Chinese investment in the business but that, in the future, Chinese investments in Hollywood may need to be reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which the Treasury secretary oversees.
Mnuchin agreed to divest from dozens of investments in early 2017, after he was nominated by Mr. Trump.
Later that year, he sent a letter of apology to the Office of Government Ethics after appearing to promote one of his movies when he said at an event, “Send all your kids to ‘Lego Batman.’”
This month, the Center for Public Integrity reported that Mnuchin’s most recent financial disclosure, which Treasury approved last June, has yet to be certified by the ethics office.
That has raised questions about the reason for the delay.
Ethics experts have pointed to Mnuchin’s continuing ties to StormChaser Partners as a potential reason for the holdup.
“It certainly creates a significant appearance issue,” said Virginia Canter, a former senior ethics counsel at the Treasury Department.
“Not just because he previously was in the entertainment business, and may in fact go back into it at some point when he leaves Treasury, but because his spouse appears to have holdings in these films and is part of the film industry and may benefit if favorable terms are negotiated with China.”
According to a report in The Hollywood Reporter this year, Linton spends much of her time in Los Angeles, where she has been writing, directing and producing a comedy called “Me, You, Madness.”
She has also been busy reshooting “Serial Daters Anonymous,” a 2014 satire that was never released in which she had a starring role.
She told the magazine that financing for her films comes from “a variety of investors.”
While Mnuchin’s role in pressing for the film industry has raised some concerns, there is broad support in the United States to push for changes to China’s film regulations.
The film industry supports more than two million American jobs, according to industry data, and Hollywood has been a powerful force for exporting American culture around the world.
“Even if concessions are made in trade negotiations there’s a long way to go, because the business environment continues to keep Hollywood from operating on an equal plane,” said Aynne Kokas, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “Hollywood Made in China.”
Still, the China market has been lucrative for Hollywood, offering a rapidly growing box office and a ready source of financing, at a time when the American industry faces pressure from streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime and a saturated film market in the United States.
Hollywood has found the lure of the China market irresistible, even though operating in China means enduring censorship and unfair treatment as well as working with state-owned companies.
Hollywood has long been a victim of rampant piracy in China, including from bootleg DVDs distributed in back alley stores and online streaming services.
But China has done a better job of policing these forms of piracy in recent years as its own industry has developed, said Stanley Rosen, a professor at the University of Southern California.
“As their films are being pirated, they are now beginning to enforce copyright protections of their own films,” Mr. Rosen said.
Despite better intellectual property protection, the playing field for foreign companies is far from even.
China still limits the number of Hollywood films that can appear in its movie theaters, the dates those films can appear and the distributors they can use to reach the theaters. 
And Chinese censors only welcome films that show their country in a positive light — censorship that has led American studios to make editorial choices like depicting North Koreans as villains rather than the Chinese, or smashing the Taj Mahal rather than the Great Wall of China.
Even for box office hits, Hollywood studios receive a quarter of ticket proceeds, with the rest going to Chinese partners. 
Increasing that to the global average, which is around 40 percent, is one of the industry’s biggest requests.
Last month, Mr. Lighthizer said that this was a “key issue” that “had not been resolved” in negotiations.
Mr. Lighthizer also described restrictions on distribution as complicated, saying: “There should be some changes there, too, but what we haven’t done is challenge control. It’s not something we want to bring into this, the idea of challenging control in China.”
In another congressional hearing this week, Mr. Lighthizer reiterated that the United States was renegotiating the amount of Chinese box office revenue shared with American firms, saying it was a “very unfair situation.”
Like many other American industries, Hollywood has grown frustrated with China’s pattern of promising to open its film market, only to fail to do so. 
As early as 2001, the World Trade Organization urged China to open up its film market.
An agreement between the two countries governing China’s rules for Hollywood films expired in February 2017, and it has not been renegotiated.
Some lawmakers hope that Mnuchin and Mr. Lighthizer will be able to finally change that.
“This is our opportunity to even the playing field here to some extent,” Representative Judy Chu, Democrat of California and a member of the Ways and Means Committee, said in an interview. “The U.S. film industry clearly has been at a disadvantage.”

Chinese Propaganda

Beijing Is Pushing Hard To Influence U.S. Views Of China
By ROB SCHMITZ

Beijing is mounting an aggressive influence campaign targeting multiple levels of American society, according to a report published Thursday that is written by some of the top China experts in the U.S.
The working group that compiled the report includes scholars who for decades have agreed that as long as the U.S. continued to engage the People's Republic of China, the paths of both countries would eventually converge and that when they did, China's political system would become more transparent and its society more open.
However, as China's economy climbed to unprecedented heights, Xi Jinping has consolidated power, and in the eyes of the report's authors, the idea of convergence has been put to rest.

A different path
As Xi took office in 2013, China "began to take a very different path forward," says Orville Schell, a China scholar who co-chairs the working group that produced the 200-page report, "Chinese Influence and American Interests."
Schell says that prior to Xi, China's leaders viewed their country as in a state of transition, but since Xi's ascendancy, China is seen internally more as a country that has arrived in its own right.
"Then the whole idea of engagement took on a very different character," he says.
The report is sponsored by Stanford University's Hoover Institution, the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands and the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, which Schell directs.
The publication comes amid rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China and just days before President Trump's planned meeting with Xi during the Group of 20 events in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this week.
The report's authors assert that China's Communist Party has launched a campaign aimed at influencing the U.S. as part of a broader expansion of aggressive policies spearheaded by Xi.
"These policies not only seek to redefine China's place in the world as a global player," the report asserts, but also to advertise a "China Option" to the rest of the world as "a more efficient developmental model" in much the same way that the Soviet Union sought to present itself as a viable alternative to the West's liberal democracies during the Cold War.
Schell says that China's doing away with presidential term limits earlier this year, effectively clearing the way for Xi to rule indefinitely, became a metaphor for the leader's expansion of control and power both inside and outside China, firmly placing his country on a separate competing path with the U.S.

The scope of influence
The report examines eight sectors of American society that China's government is attempting to influence — including the U.S. Congress, local governments, universities and corporations. 

While nearly all examples cited have been widely covered by the media and academia, the report aims to add historical context to weave them together and to make concrete suggestions to the U.S. government and institutions on how to handle the growing threat.
One section of the report examines the large amounts of money China's government and Chinese individuals who are loyal to the Communist Party are investing into U.S. universities.
"[Very] often, that money will come not with any explicit prohibitions, but with implicit ones," says Schell.
"If you want to get more money, don't say this, don't say that. In other words," he says. 

As a result, China aims for "modulating and controlling what people say about it and how they view it."
China's government has, with the help of dozens of U.S. universities, established 110 Confucius Institutes on campuses throughout the United States. 

The institutes are forced to use Communist Party-approved materials "that promote PRC Chinese viewpoints, terminology and simplified characters; the avoidance of discussion on controversial topics such as Tibet, Tiananmen, East Turkestan, the Falun Gong, and human rights in American classrooms and programs," the report says.
Several U.S. universities, such as the University of Chicago and the Texas A&M system, have had second thoughts about the Confucius Institute and have closed their branches. 

The report suggests that U.S. institutions rewrite their contracts with their Chinese government partner by eliminating a clause that stipulates Confucius Institutes must operate according to China's laws.

China and Hollywood
Another section examines how Hollywood has come under the influence of Chinese investment and, as a result, now routinely makes films that portray China's government in a favorable light. 

Whereas in 1997, films such as Red Corner, Seven Years in Tibet, and Kundun addressed topics the Chinese government deemed sensitive, now Hollywood studios are teaming up with Chinese partners to make films such as The Martian, a blockbuster hit backed by Chinese money in which the Chinese government saves the American protagonists.
"The rush of Chinese investment into the American film industry," the report concludes, "has raised legitimate concerns bout the industry's outright loss of independence."
Schell says after a year and a half of research, he and his team came to the conclusion "that the relationship between the U.S. and China when it comes to influence is not reciprocal," he says. 

"The open society of the United States gets used for Chinese purposes in myriad ways that are not available to Americans in China."
For example, American universities have not been granted the same access to China as Beijing has received and Chinese media is able to operate freely inside the U.S., while American journalists are severely restricted inside of China. 

The report's authors suggest that the visas of visiting Chinese scholars and journalists be redirected unless American scholars and journalists are able to operate with more freedom inside of China.
The report's solutions urge the U.S. government and society to be more transparent about their relationships with Chinese institutions, and when Beijing limits the rights of American institutions inside of China, the U.S. should consider doing the same to Chinese institutions on American soil.
It also urges Americans to act with integrity when Chinese state-sponsored actors try to coerce them or manipulate America's core principles. 

"Openness and freedom are fundamental elements of American democracy and intrinsic strengths of the United States and its way of life," the report concludes. 

"These values must be protected against corrosive actions by China and other countries."

Chinese Peril

Tensions flare between US and China, this time in Hollywood
Rebecca A. Fannin

China investment into overseas transactions doubled last year to peak at $225 billion, according to data firm Dealogic, which tracks deals across real estate, tech, industry and Hollywood. 

Now Chinese acquisitions overseas have slowed to a small fraction of that former record, especially when it comes to Hollywood. 

At least one dozen cross-border, China-U.S. deals in the tech, media and entertainment space have dried up over the last six months, according to a studio executive with close ties to investment bankers and private equity dealmakers involved in these transactions.

Just take note of some of the high-profile deals that have been scrapped over the last year.
In March the $1 billion deal by Chinese real estate and entertainment conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group to acquire Dick Clark Productions, producer of the Golden Globes and American Music Awards, collapsed. 

Regulatory pressures, as well as payment issues from Wanda's side, were the cause, according to one principal involved in the deal.
Other China-to-Hollywood deals are in trouble or have been abandoned. 

A $1 billion, three-year deal by Chinese firms Huahua Media and Shanghai Film Group with Paramount Pictures was intended to help the studio finance films and get released and marketed in China, but has stalled since former Paramount head Brad Grey was forced out, though Paramount has insisted in recent press reports it will still happen.
In a related entertainment and distribution deal that was meant to capitalize on the growing trend toward live streaming and internet distribution of content, a $2 billion agreement by Chinese tech and entertainment conglomerate LeEco to acquire LA-based TV maker Vizio is officially off due to "regulatory headwinds." 

The deal's collapse in early April was the result of tighter currency controls and a crackdown on China-U.S. deals, in addition to a cash crunch at LeEco, which has been facing financial difficulties and retrenching after rapid expansion into smartphones and electric vehicles, according to deal makers involved in the industry. 

The two companies will seek to collaborate on content and distribution now that the acquisition is off.
Meanwhile, the Middle Kingdom's moves into Hollywood have been facing scrutiny on Capitol Hill as concerns grow about too much influence and control on American content by China, a market that blocks social media services Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on the Chinese internet. 

In the run-up to the presidential election, 17 lawmakers pushed for Wanda to be investigated for violations to the Foreign Agents Registration Act and require it to publicly disclose its relationship to the Chinese government. 

More recently, New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer has voiced concerns over Wanda's Hollywood dealmaking.
"No Chinese buyers are coming to the table," says Chris Fenton, a trustee of the U.S.-Asia Institute in Washington, D.C., and president of DMG Entertainment Motion Picture Group in Los Angeles and Beijing. 

"No Chinese entity wants to test this," he said, referring to the potential limits of regulatory scrutiny. Most of Chinese investment in U.S. assets has dried up in the final hours of negotiation," he said. Fenton helps organize congressional visits to China. 

This summer he has added a trip focused on the high-profile media and entertainment industry.

Behind the Sino-American skepticism
Issues have been brewing on both sides of the ocean over China-Hollywood deals. 

As China has turned to Hollywood as part of its outward reach and bid for soft power, such transactions have been ensnared by Chinese regulators. 

China policymakers have been closely examining transactions that cut across industry lines and command big price tags, while the Chinese government has tightened controls over capital outflows to shore up foreign currency reserves and gains in the yuan currency.
"The Chinese government crackdowns have made it extremely difficult to get money out," said Rob Cain, president of advisory firm Pacific Bridge Pictures, focused on United States and China entertainment markets.
Hollywood is also becoming more cautious about Chinese capital, Cain said, and also more cautious after earlier — naive — infatuation. 

"There's a lot of skepticism now by Hollywood about these deals," he added, continuing, "On the U.S. side, there's very little sophistication about how to vet potential investors. You have to have dedicated teams and be on the ground in China. It takes a lot to learn the market."

Wanda's Hollywood plans fall through Sunday, 12 Mar 2017

Wanda had led the Hollywood empire building in 2015 by acquiring American film production house Legendary Entertainment, co-producers of "Jurassic World" and "Godzilla" in a deal for $3.5 billion in cash, adding to a U.S. portfolio that included theater-chain giant AMC Entertainment and a deal to finance films with Sony Pictures. 

China's tech titans Alibaba and Tencent have also been on the hunt in Hollywood for inroads into this glamorous and high-profile sector, just as these Chinese leaders have in Silicon Valley for the past few years for technical know-how.
In 2016, Tencent invested in movie studio start-up STX Entertainment, while Alibaba announced a minority stake in Hollywood director Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners to produce, distribute and finance films globally and in China. 

Alibaba chairman Jack Ma has said the e-commerce company will invest $7.2 billion over the next three years in Hollywood pictures.
"China absolutely wants to have its own home-grown film business," said Elizabeth Dell, a content producer at Two Camels Films and head of the China task force of the Producers Guild of America.

Collaboration may be the hottest ticket
The infatuation between China and Hollywood probably won't fade soon. 

As China's middle-class population has increased and second- and third-tier cities have seen dozens of new cinemas open, China's box-office revenues have soared. 

Annual revenues in China movie tickets have been growing by 35 percent each year since 2011, according to Chinese media and entertainment researcher EntGroup in Beijing. 

It's a frontier market that can't be ignored while U.S. movie ticket sales are relatively flat. 

China is on track to become the world's largest box-office market.
Moreover, Chinese companies are luring filmmakers to China to make movies. 

Wanda's billionaire chairman Wang Jianlin created a stir in Los Angeles last October by announcing a 40 percent subsidy for Hollywood to come to China to create films at its state-of-art movie production facility in the coastal Chinese city of Qingdao. 

A number of companies agreed to shoot there, including Arclight Films and Lionsgate and China Media Capital-backed Infinity Pictures.
Hollywood has turned to co-productions with a China partner to avoid a quota system that limits big-budget imported feature films to 34 per year and limits foreign studios from keeping more than one-quarter of Chinese box-office revenues.
A recently released U.S.-China co-production — The Great Wall, by Universal Pictures, Wanda's Legendary and a LeEco film division — was looked at as a trendsetting deal. 

It was the most expensive feature ever shot in China, and it starred Matt Damon. 

But the film, which melded Chinese action sequences with Hollywood-style romances, did not go over well at the box office in China or the United States, and losses are expected to hit $75 million.

Per un pugno di renminbi

With an eye on China, greedy Hollywood is already self-censoring in its pursuit of profits.
By Matt Lewis

President Donald Trump has spent a significant amount of time talking about our trade balance with China and how American businesses have shipped jobs overseas. 

However, the real story may be about our stories.
I’m speaking of Hollywood: the industry that has done more to promote and export American culture than any government program ever could. 

But that could be changing.
Few Americans realize that a Chinese company, Dalian Wanda Group, is the world’s largest cinema operator (the company owns AMC Theaters and Hoyts Cinema). 

Even fewer probably realize that this same Chinese company owns Legendary Entertainment (Jurassic World and Interstellar)—and that their plans include the acquisition of one of the “Big Six” movie studios.
It doesn’t take the imagination of a La La Land auteur to envision the potential negative consequences.
Last September, 16 members of Congress sent a letter to the head of the Government Accountability Office, asking this question: “Should the definition of national security be broadened to address concerns about propaganda and control of the media and ‘soft power’ institutions?” 

And they’re not alone in their concern. 

A clandestine group called “Wolverine Entertainment” created a Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary about Chinese influence in Hollywood.
While there are reasonable concerns about China exporting overt propaganda via their increasing control (through a private company) of production and dissemination, we are already witnessing a less-paranoid scenario: self-censorship in Hollywood in pursuit of profits.
Hollywood is understandably interested in reaching an audience of more than a billion Chinese consumers, and China’s increased media presence is already affecting the types of movies that are green-lighted. 

As the Washington Post reported, “the Chinese government and its support of censorship now has a surprisingly big hand in shaping the movies that Americans make and watch. Films like ‘Transformers IV,’ ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past,’ ‘Looper,’ ‘Gravity,’ ‘Iron Man 3’ and many more have adapted their plots to woo Chinese censors and audiences.”

Comedian Stephen Colbert has mockingly named this phenomenon the “Pander Express.” 

But he wasn’t joking when he said that “It’s only natural for American movie makers to try to please the cultural gatekeepers of the Chinese government.”
In The Martian, China saves Matt Damon—a plot point that spurred Colbert’s commentary. 

In fairness to the filmmakers, the Chinese involvement tracks well with the book’s narrative. 

However, this likely made for a nice selling point when it came time to pitch the film to investors.
Interestingly, Damon is now starring in a Chinese production called The Great Wall. 

As Forbes contributor Scott Mendelson notes, “the entire arc of the movie is watching a white American realize that [the] Chinese army and the Chinese culture is [sic] inherently superior.” 

He continued: “It’s amusing to see a Chinese/American blockbuster where the would-be virtues of western individualism are all-but-villainized.”
What we are seeing is a feedback loop where American movie producers are attempting to appease the Chinese market. 

Why else would the remake of Red Dawn voluntarily swap villains, replacing the Chinese with North Koreans?
Part of the reason for this is that there is a lot of competition, not merely to reach China’s large population of moviegoers but also because China has a quota for how many foreign films they allow in. 

This might change. 

According to a recent report, “government officials and industry representatives from China and the U.S. meet to renegotiate trade terms later this month… .”
But who is empowered to negotiate such a deal? 

“This is exactly why General Michael Flynn is in trouble,” a film producer, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of backlash from studio executives, told me. 

“It is against the law for American citizens to negotiate deals with other countries for this very reason—these deals could have a catastrophic impact on the American economy [speaking here of unionized movie crews] and the best and brightest example of our First Amendment to the world.”
It is highly unlikely that anyone will face prosecution for violating the Logan Act, but the notion that a single entity could own both movie studios and theaters might be seen as a violation of anti-trust laws.
Regardless, concerns about incipient propaganda and censorship are the big story. 

The media we create and consume inform our perceptions about life. 

Stories matter. 

Narratives help develop our worldviews; over time, these narratives could even influence our decisions.
This is why Joe Biden believes Will & Grace “did more to educate the American public [about marriage equality] more than almost anything anybody has done so far.” 

It is why The Cosby Show gets credit for helping elect Barack Obama. 

This is also why some people worry about violence in movies. 

People who argue that media doesn’t inform our worldview can never fully explain why businesses spend so much money on advertising.
For better or worse (and sometimes both), popular culture changes our perception. 

So what happens if a few generations of Americans are fed a steady diet of films portraying the Chinese as heroic and superior? 

American public opinion is eventually swayed.
Losing jobs to China is a standard talking point for protectionist politicians, but preserving culture is hardly mentioned.

Massive Chinese Fifth Column

The Gulag Aperture: Hollywood Becomes Handmaiden To China's Communist Party

By Capital Flows

Wang Jianlin arrives before the company’s IPO at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on December 23, 2014.

On New Year’s Day, China Central Television (CCTV) unveiled its newest “soft power” entertainment media venture, whose purpose is to extend China’s global media influence. 

Xi Jinping said that the overriding directive of this new collection of television stations and news agencies will be to “follow the party line and promote ‘positive propaganda as the main theme.’”
The CCTV announcement compounds the growing risk that increased Chinese investment will entice Hollywood into volunteering itself as a propaganda division of the Communist Party of China (CPC). 

And if these trends continue, the Western world’s outlet for Chinese dissenters will be closed.
China’s film industry has in recent years grown approximately 34% annually and generated $6.8 billion in 2015. 

While many applaud the very modest political reforms that sometimes complement China’s market liberalization, one should be wary of the country’s iron grip on its entertainment industry.

China’s industry players are inextricably bound to the CPC, as evidenced by the ascent of Wang Jianlin, China’s richest man. 

Jianlin’s successes are a product of quid pro quo arrangements between himself and the CPC’s top officials. 

Further, Jianlin is a delegate to the CPC congress and was a high-level advisor in China’s faux legislature from 2008 to 2013. 

Today, CPC delegate Jianlin can count several American awards shows, including the Golden Globes, the Billboard and American Music Awards, and even AMC Theaters as part of his recently accrued collection.
One may argue that the influence of China’s propaganda machine is overstated. 

After all, Russia has been doing the same thing for years through its RT media network. Economically though, Russia is little more than “Upper Volta with missiles.” 

The Russian Bear simply can’t wield a cudgel or dangle a financial carrot the way the Red Dragon can. 

If Putin threatened to remove Russian funding from Western media, it would be like threatening to remove a bucket of water from the ocean.
Jianlin, on the other hand, has made clear exactly what would happen if President Trump followed up on the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission’s recommendation to ban China’s state-owned companies from buying American ones: “Tell Mr. Trump that I have $10 billion of investments in the United States and more than 20,000 employees there who wouldn’t have anything to eat should things be handled poorly.”
Jianlin demands American compliance with Chinese propaganda prerogatives, all while U.S. film investments are barred from the Chinese market. 

It’s no wonder the Justice Department and Congress have begun to look askance at this exclusively CPC-friendly arrangement.
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission issued a report in October 2015 detailing the consequences of China’s far-reaching propaganda efforts. 

The Commission noted that the chilling influence of Chinese media propagandists is already felt, that it is a “truism” that Hollywood won’t make a film “that the Chinese would reject for social or political reasons.”
The Commission elaborated by explaining that “Hollywood confronts broad consequences when it does not appease Chinese regulators: Captain Phillips found itself $9 million short of its anticipated revenue after finding itself unable to distribute in China [due to censorship].”
Seeds have now been sewn for an American entertainment industry financially beholden to Chinese investors whose purpose and direction begins and ends with the CPC.
The entwining of Hollywood’s and the CPC’s dual fates, and so Hollywood’s complicity in pitching communist propaganda, will persist so long as China continues its aggressive courtship. 

An announced production and distribution partnership between China Film Co. and Paramount Pictures, as well as the $100 million establishment of a U.S.-China cooperative film fund by China Film Co., proves as much.
Is it even possible for the mission of Chinese film and television projects to diverge from the mission of the CPC? 

The evidence isn’t heartening.
China Film Co. is state-owned, meaning that the creative direction of Chinese filmmakers following, say, a $610 million share flotation, will be influenced by the CPC, as will the aforementioned partnership with Paramount. 

Who would believe that this influence doesn’t spill over into Hollywood, when it’s been said that La Peikang, the head of China Film, is the “man to whom Hollywood now goes [to], cap in hand”? Regarding television, the head of CCTV is also the television industry’s chief regulator.
Private companies should be wary of playing devil’s handmaiden to China’s communist propagandists. 

American social media has already proved itself willing to help China’s state apparatus surveil Chinese citizens. 

If the American film and television industry joined in this promiscuous courting of CPC largesse, the net effect might be too great to overcome. 

The CPC’s agitprop would echo across continents.

Chinese Peril

• China’s Dalian Wanda Group faces renewed scrutiny
• Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer raises concerns over Chinese conglomerate’s Hollywood takeovers

By ERICH SCHWARTZEL in Los Angeles and SIOBHAN HUGHES in Washington

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sent a letter Wednesday calling for further scrutiny of Chinese deals.
A top Senate Democrat is calling for increased scrutiny of China’s ambitions in Hollywood and other sectors, lending a critical new voice to a cause championed by President Donald Trump.
In a letter sent Wednesday, incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the takeovers of U.S. companies by China’s Dalian Wanda Group Co. and others warrant further scrutiny to determine whether they are being orchestrated by Chinese government interests—leaving U.S. companies to compete on an uneven playing field. 

The move increases the likelihood of a re-examination of how the U.S. allows Chinese to invest in American companies.
“I am concerned that these acquisitions reflect the strategic goals of China’s government,” he told Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman in the letter, a copy of which was seen by The Wall Street Journal.
Wanda and its U.S.-based holdings have completed several entertainment acquisitions this year, and the conglomerate has a pending deal to buy Dick Clark Productions for $1 billion.
Mr. Trump, who has indicated his administration will also take a closer look at such deals, was copied on the letter.
If the president-elect follows through on promises to scrutinize such deals more closely, Mr. Schumer’s letter could signal a shift for U.S. policy toward China. 

For decades, some lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been unhappy with the White House, both under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, whom they saw as timid about confronting China, the biggest holder of U.S. debt.
Now, a senior Democratic lawmaker and the incoming Republican U.S. president could be on the same side of the issue, potentially shaking up the landscape. 

Congressional backlash to Chinese investments have lately focused on flashy Hollywood deals, but the outcry could have sweeping ramifications across other sectors of the economy.

Beijing stooge Wang Jianlin

“You can be certain that the new Congress in 2017 will work on legislation to further expand CFIUS oversight authority,” Mr. Schumer wrote, referring to the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which examines foreign deals seen as potential threats to national security. 

CFIUS reviews have traditionally concerned sectors like aerospace.
Wanda has previously responded to similar calls for scrutiny by saying the company “has and will continue to comply with all applicable U.S. law in connection with its media and entertainment investments in the United States, including without limitation making the appropriate filings with the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice.” 

The company declined to comment on Mr. Schumer’s letter.
Mr. Schumer’s stance aligns the Democrat on one issue with the President-elect. 

A document circulated by Mr. Trump’s transition team stated that the administration would ask CFIUS to review foreign transactions that couldn’t be replicated by a U.S. entity. 

That could cover Chinese investment far beyond Hollywood, since Chinese companies can become majority owners of U.S. assets but China doesn’t allow U.S. companies to do the same.
Mr. Schumer said the ability for Chinese companies to take a majority stake in U.S. assets, often backed by state officials and China’s sovereign-wealth funds, is unfair considering stateside companies are handicapped from doing similar deals in China. 

U.S. companies hoping to do business in China usually have to form a joint venture that often includes the sharing of intellectual property—an arrangement that Mr. Schumer called a “pay to play system.”
“While China’s government has aggressively pursued policies that encourage strategic acquisition in the U.S., U.S. companies continue to face steep barriers to market access in China,” he wrote. 

Mr. Schumer said Chinese acquisitions across multiple sectors—information technology, transportation, manufacturing and agriculture, among others—are often supported by Chinese government subsidies designed to encourage global expansion.
Like several politicians before him, Mr. Schumer set his sights on Wanda, whose chairman, Wang Jianlin, is China’s richest man, according to Forbes. 

Wanda’s acquisitions in Hollywood have raised concerns among politicians and some entertainment executives that they are “soft power” plays designed to spread Chinese propaganda and messaging through American media. 

The country is the second-largest movie market in the world behind North America, but it imposes a quota of 34 movies that can be imported from ALL countries to its theaters each year.
In the past several years, Wanda has become the world’s largest movie-theater operator through its $2.6 billion acquisition of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., expanded into film production with the $3.5 billion purchase of Legendary Entertainment and its Dick Clark deal signaled an expansion into television. 

Wanda has become known in Hollywood for an insatiable interest in acquiring more assets, and Wang has publicly indicated his hopes to own one of Hollywood’s major studios.
Congressional scrutiny of China’s media acquisitions has been ramping up since September, when 16 members of the House of Representatives asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether CFIUS’s authority has kept up with the expanding scope of foreign investment in the U.S.

Chinese soft power: Hollywood take-over on the cards in quest for cultural influence

The term "soft power" has been thrown around the media and academic circles for the last couple of years, but its currency has heightened in regards to Australia's relationship with China.
By MATTHEW CARNEY

Xi Jinping's directions for China's soft power strategy are specific: "To give a good Chinese narrative and better communicate China's messages to the world. To be portrayed as a civilised place featuring a rich history, with good government and developed economy, cultural prosperity and diversity and beautiful mountains and rivers."

All countries practise some form of soft power — the ability to coax and persuade other countries that their culture and values are desirable — through organisations like the British Institutes, Alliance Française or the Goethe Institutes.
American soft power regularly tops the tables and largely because of its popular culture, like Hollywood films or corporate labels like Levis.
In North Asia, South Korea has been successful with K-pop songs like Gangnam Style.
It is a recognition that for nations to be powerful they need more than economic might and military threat. 

They need soft power.
Soft power is by its very nature not coercive and is determined by its ability to appeal and attract others.
China has realised this and come to the game much later than most other countries. 

In the late 2000s, it identified "the threat theory" that much of the Western world sees China as distinctly unfriendly.
Now China is devoting billions to try to refashion its image.
Xi Jinping has made it a priority and has said China has to become a "cultural superpower".
His directions for China's soft power strategy are specific: "To give a good Chinese narrative and better communicate China's messages to the world. To be portrayed as a civilised place featuring a rich history, with good government and developed economy, cultural prosperity and diversity and beautiful mountains and rivers."
A big part of the plan is to take over Hollywood. 

The Chinese want to take back some of the popular global narrative to drive their message home. 

It means no longer will China be presented as the bad guy, but as a noble civilised place as Xi wants.
The Chinese have the market power to make sure it happens.
In 2018, China will become the world's biggest box office, surpassing America, and it will keep growing, at least doubling before peaking.
Now in China, 22 new cinemas open everyday.
Hollywood producers are now considering the "China factor" in any future profitability. 

Stories and narratives are changing to become more appealing to the Chinese. 

Many of the world's future blockbusters will be made in China.
When the Oriental Movie Metropolis in the Chinese coastal city of Qingdao becomes operational next year it will dwarf any Hollywood studio.
Thirty big-budget films are slated in first couple of years. 

The first, The Great Wall, with a budget of $180 million, has Hollywood star Matt Damon playing the suspicious savage who is finally convinced by a noble Chinese warlord and beautiful maiden to take up the good Chinese fight.
The man in charge of making the reality a vision is Wang Jianlin — China's Rupert Murdoch — and he has the backing of the top leadership.
Wang is a party member and spent 16 years in the People's Liberation Army before he quit to build a real estate and media empire.
Wang has gone on a $10-billion buying spree and is buying up Hollywood one piece at a time. 

He has bought US production house Legendary Entertainment and Dick Clark Studios.
He has also purchased AMC entertainment — the second-biggest cinema chain in the US — as well as snapping up Europe's biggest cinema group Odeon and Hoyts in Australia.
A big part of Xi Jinping's plan for China to become a "cultural superpower" is to take over Hollywood. 

Australia 'fertile ground' for China's soft power
But film is just one part of China's soft power strategy. 

The Government has put $10 billion into promoting Chinese traditional culture and language. 

It has set up 500 Confucius institutes in 140 countries all controlled by the Central Propaganda Committee in Beijing.
Australia has been fertile ground for China's soft power. 

Fourteen Confucius Institutes have been established at Australian universities and 60 schools around Australia have introduced Confucius classrooms.
Many say it is smart and proper to establish a bigger understanding and deeper relationship with our biggest trading partner. 

But others say the Confucius institutes overstep the mark, and attempts at soft power backfire when the Chinese try to control what can be said about human rights or the independence of Taiwan or Tibet.
Chinese "values" clash with Australian ideals of freedom of speech and inquiry.
There are a growing number of Australian academics like former ambassador to China Stephen Fitzgerald, who say the Confucius institutes should be scrutinised much more as they compromise academic integrity.
At Peking University I had the good fortune to hear the man who invented the term 'soft power' and inspired the Chinese leadership to take up the cause, Harvard professor Joseph Nye.
But Professor Nye says China's soft power has fundamental flaws.
Its claims in the South China Sea undermine attempts to make it appear friendly or attractive. 

Also, its program is being driven by the top leadership and not the people.
Professor Nye says soft power is usually more successful if it comes from the grass roots and is not a dictated program.
"Civil society is really crucial to developing soft power and I think it's very difficult for the party to unleash the full talents of China's civil society," he says.
Professor Nye says it will be some time yet before China overtakes America as the dominant global power, so in the meantime, get ready for more Chinese "heroes" at the movies.

Chinese Peril

Why DC Started Caring About Dalian Wanda Group and China in Hollywood
By Matt Pressberg

China’s Dalian Wanda Group made its first big splash in Hollywood back in 2012, when it acquired AMC Theaters. 

Since then, the real estate and media conglomerate has been on quite a shopping spree, including buying “Jurassic World” production company Legendary Entertainment for an aggressive $3.5 billion in January — which made Wanda the first Chinese company to own an American studio or production house.
But it was only the past few days when D.C. really took notice — and began pushing back.
The Washington Post published a strongly worded Oct. 5 editorial that raised red flags over the possibility of China’s ruling party using its entertainment assets to spread propaganda.
Also last week, the Government Accountability Office agreed to a request from 16 members of Congress to review the legal powers of a foreign investment committee, and Rep. Jim Culberson sent a letter to the Department of Justice urging it to take another look at the Foreign Agents Registration Act, specifically mentioning Wanda’s entertainment purchases and their potential to be used for “propaganda purposes.”
So why did Washington decide to start paying attention now?
For one, Wanda — and other Chinese firms — are stepping up their investments in Hollywood. 

Co-financing deals between U.S. studios and Chinese partners have been booming for a couple years now, including arrangements such as Lionsgate’s deal with Hunan TV, STX’s with Huayi Bros. and Universal’s with Perfect World Pictures.
This year, in addition to purchasing Legendary, Wanda was also a leading contender to buy a minority stake in Paramount Pictures — before that was taken off the table — and is also in talks to acquire Dick Clark Productions for $1 billion.
Wanda isn’t a typical entertainment company, either. 

Its founder and CEO, Wang Jianlin, is China’s richest man and very close to the ruling party. 

Several individuals with ties to government officials have significant economic interests in Wanda’s businesses. 

Wang has made no secret of his desire to spread “Chinese values” around the world via entertainment, making that point — and criticizing U.S. rivals like Disney — in a blustery fashion that can rub people the wrong way.
But as members of Congress have plenty of issues to occupy their minds and public pronouncements aside from Chinese investments in entertainment companies, one instrumental factor in the recent string of fusillades from Capitol Hill has been a campaign by Richard Berman, the president of D.C. lobbying firm Berman & Co.

Berman started paying attention to the fire hose of Chinese money flowing into Hollywood this summer and had one of his staffers do more research, realizing it was bigger than he thought. 

He then began reaching out to sympathetic legislators.
“We reached out to some people on the Hill that we knew already had an agenda,” Berman told The Wrap. 

“There are people who are predisposed to being suspicious [of China] because of some other issues. And a lot of those people have committee assignments that overlap [with Chinese investment in Hollywood].”
Berman said last week’s events were the culmination of that work, and that someone on his staff had been in touch with Culberson.
“My fingerprints are all over this,” he said.
Berman acknowledged that studios tailoring their product to appease the China’s gatekeepers — don’t expect to see a Chinese villain in the next James Bond film — is primarily a business decision driven by the desire to get into the world’s second-biggest and one of its fastest growing movie markets, but he’s more focused on China’s ownership of distribution outlets.
“The issue of censorship in China is not my concern,” he said. 

“People changing their movies so they can be shown in China is not my concern. The thing that really triggered my interest is the distribution issue. If you control distribution, you control what the retail market sees.”
To that end, Berman pointed out Wanda’s ownership of AMC Theaters, which is currently in talks to acquire Carmike Cinemas — making it America’s biggest theatrical exhibitor. 

He said he had conversations with AMC personnel that didn’t give him great comfort that the theater chain would be free to show movies that the Chinese government didn’t like.
“Wang has been pretty blatant that AMC is owned by the Chinese,” he said.
Berman said he’s doing this “just to make people aware,” adding that he’s satisfied with last week’s Washington Post editorial and the correspondence between members of Congress and the GAO and DOJ.
“I’m not trying to make this a McCarthy-ite type issue; but as far as I’m concerned, it needed to have more light shown on it,” he said.