Hollywood actress Meryl Streep recently hitched a ride on a Chinese businessman’s private jet to Beijing. Once there, she met up with idiosyncratic writer-director Joel Coen and Raise the Red Lantern director Zhang Yimou to promote “China’s exploding film industry.”
Zhang, who served as the artistic director for both the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the lavish 60th anniversary celebrations of the Chinese Communist Party, also unveiled his remake of Coen’s influential first film – Blood Simple.
And this sounds simple enough.
But for some industry insiders, the trio personify a growing partnership between Beijing’s aspirations to export what it calls “soft power” – a sugarcoated version of China and its myriad social problems – to the West and Hollywood producers, who are bending over backwards to get a piece of the world’s fastest growing film market.
“It’s obvious why media is controlled in Communist societies. But what makes China unique is that for the first time, it has the money and market to shift control of media for a local audience to control of external representations of the country,” says Liu Lee-shin, a China film expert at Taipei’s National Taiwan University of Arts.
“Chinese-Hollywood co-productions are vehicles for Beijing to dictate the China narrative outside its borders.”
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