It opens with a description of a gathering following the 2008 Beijing Olympics that was effectively a training session delivered by Hollywood experts in all aspects of the film industry—finance, production, marketing, to hand-picked representatives of emerging Chinese media.
It goes on to document how the balance of power in this relationship reversed in the years that followed, with Hollywood becoming increasingly dependent on the regime's good graces for finance, and most importantly the enormous Chinese market, now the world's largest, grossing over $US1 billion per annum.
Worst of all, the American industry has been prepared to censor its productions to avoid the slightest offence to the regime's concerns, or to portray modern China as anything other than a model international citizen. Any portrayal of Chinese as villains is out, as is any depiction of Chinese history that conflicts with regime's narratives.
Even more sinister is the movies not made. Don't expect to see any films about the shocking human rights abuses in Xinjiang or Hong Kong, or the incarceration of dissidents.
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That China would send officials to Los Angeles to learn from America’s most famous capitalist enterprise would have been unthinkable in prior decades, when the Cultural Revolution and the massacre of protesters at Tiananmen Square left little doubt about the government’s attitude toward free expression. Yet China in 2008 was ascendant, even if that rise occurred out of view of many Americans—including many in Hollywood, where the country’s work was just beginning. At the time, the Chinese visitors’ unassuming exterior masked incredible power. One young executive worked at a movie channel that had 800 million viewers, a scale beyond what any of his Hollywood instructors could fathom.
In a matter of years, the positioning of the two parties in that classroom—the Chinese as students and the Hollywood executives as teachers—would seem both prescient and absurd, the dynamic soon to reverse, with Hollywood looking to China for help.
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China’s economic leverage had quickly translated into political sway, most often in the censorship practiced by Beijing bureaucrats. Unbeknownst to most moviegoers, studios were removing scenes and dialogue from scripts and finished movies to appease Chinese censors—scrubbing any production of plot points that brushed up against sensitive Chinese history or made the country look anything less than a modern, sophisticated world power. Even more disturbing than the movies being changed were the ones not getting made at all, for fear of angering Chinese officials. Hollywood became a commercial arm for China’s new ambition, and piece by piece, China’s interest in the American film industry revealed itself to be a complement to its political ascendance, one that is rewriting the global order of the new century.