ABSTRACT
China has long placed film import quotas on foreign – namely Hollywood cinema. These quotas have been argued to protect China’s cultural values and its domestic film industry. In this chapter, we draw connections, however, between the uncanny overlaps in current Chinese import preferences for Hollywood franchise cinema, contemporary American geopolitical contexts, and the current Chinese leadership’s own ideological positioning. In doing so, we argue that the historical anxieties shown by Chinese censors have coalesced rather into opportunities for social engineering objectives in contemporary China today. First, we contextualise China’s historical resistance to Hollywood imports. This is then followed by a contextualisation of the structural changes to the Hollywood studio system that have impacted American film production. Our analysis then draws on both of these contexts to analyse the Hollywood productions approved for import into China during 2013–2019. In doing so, this chapter identifies a generic dominance of science fiction, fantasy, action, and animated films that, in their repetition, come to symbolise a version of America and American values distorted from an everyday lived reality comprehensible to a Chinese audience. Furthermore, the ideological values encompassed within the high-concept films theatrically released in China arguably complement the authoritarianism of Xi Jinping’s presidency (2012–present) rather than pose a cultural threat of Americanisation. We find that Hollywood franchise cinema and China’s current political aims have converged in mutually beneficial ways.
