Erich Schwartzel - Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy

In the weeks following the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, a group of Chinese executives traveled to Los Angeles for a crash course in influence. Inside the UCLA classroom of film professor Robert Rosen, a parade of Hollywood executives conducted a series of lectures on Americas entertainment industry. The students had been chosen by their countrys State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, and they were in Los Angeles with a mandate: to learn how the American film industry had achieved its status as the leader in global cultureand how China could re-create that achievement back home.

The head of Universal Pictures, the studio behind Frankenstein, Back to the Future, and The Fast and the Furious, spoke about his film operation, a conglomerate grown out of a collection of nickelodeons founded in 1912. So did the CEO of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a company that was established before the talkie and eventually produced The Wizard of Oz, West Side Story, and The Silence of the Lambs. An agent at William Morris, the talent agency that counted Matt Damon and Denzel Washington as clients, talked about how he managed Americas biggest movie stars. An independent producer explained the art of putting a movies finances together, and the head of the Motion Picture Association of America detailed his organizations lobbying work on behalf of the nations entertainers in Washington. It was hard to imagine a more glamorous set of day jobs, positions that turned the men and women who held them into stewards and emissaries of American culture.

That China would send officials to Los Angeles to learn from Americas most famous capitalist enterprise would have been unthinkable just decades before, when the Cultural Revolution and the massacre of protesters at Tiananmen Square left little doubt about the governments attitude toward free expression. Yet China in 2008 was ascendant itself, even if that rise occurred out of view of many Americansincluding many in Hollywood, where the countrys work was just beginning. At the time, the Chinese visitors unassuming exterior masked incredible power. One young executive worked at a movie channel with eight hundred million viewers, a scale beyond what any of his Hollywood instructors could fathom.

It would take only a decade for the positioning of the two parties in that classroomthe Chinese as students and the Hollywood executives as teachersto seem both prescient and absurd. In the years that followed, the dynamic would reverse, and it would be Hollywood looking to China for help.

Consider the future of the entities represented in that classroom alone. Within a decade of those classes, Universal would complete a $500 million financing deal with a Chinese firm, cast Chinese actresses in its biggest movies, and construct a Universal theme park outside Chinas capital city. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would shop itself for a Chinese takeover and censor James Bond movies to make sure Chinese citizens never looked weak when matched against Englands ageless secret agent. William Morris would open an office in China to help the countrys new class of A-listers win over global audiences. Producers would rewrite scripts, trading New York for Shanghai if it meant getting a movie financed by Chinese billionaires. The MPAA and other officials in Washington would do anything they could to maintain access to the Chinese box office, which grew at a clip as domestic moviegoing flatlined.

Chinese theaters were largely closed off to the world until 1994, when Hollywood studios started exporting ten movies a year to the country. At the time, $3 million was a record-setting gross. By the time those Chinese students arrived at UCLA fourteen years later, the market was growing but still a bundle of optimistic projections. By 2020, China would be the number one box-office market in the world, home to grosses that routinely neared $1 billiona market that became too big to ignore and too lucrative to anger. Through it all, China would continue to see Hollywood much as those early visitors did: as the ultimate template for building a show business that helped fuel a countrys rise, their goal a twenty-first-century sequel to what Americas entertainers had done for their country over the course of a hundred years. The Chinese were quick studies.

I joined the Los Angeles bureau of The Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2013. I had spent the previous four years covering the energy industry for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, reporting on a fracking boom in Appalachia that had transformed the regions politics, economy, and culture. I was hired to be a fresh set of eyes on the Journals Hollywood coverage, and I soon started seeing China everywhere I looked.

One announcement followed another: Chinese star Fan Bingbing was appearing in the new X-Men. An American theater chain headquartered in Leawood, Kansas, was trading on Wall Street thanks to financing from Chinas richest man. Paramount Pictures was rushing to edit World War Z to remove a scene that implied a zombie outbreak had originated in China, a plot detail that executives feared would lead to censors denying the movie a Chinese release. Seemingly every producer in town was shopping a script based on the Flying Tigers, the World War II pilots who helped defend China against Japan. Moviegoers in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao were flocking to see the latest