Over the past several decades, America’s Hollywood as a cinematic and entertainment industry has emerged and maintained a successful model of cultural globalization. In the past two decades, Hanliu or the Korean Wave, which first gained popularity in East Asia, has expanded its cultural influence at an exponential rate. It seems that any country with influence naturally seeks to expand its influence from a regional to a worldwide level. For the past two decades, China has also been attempting to increase its “global impact,” or quán qiú yǐng xiǎng lì (全球影响力), especially on the cultural level. Its goal has been to increase the nation’s standing in the world as the purveyor of a Chinese alternative that could displace a Western model of governance and order. Recognizing that its hard power depends on the alliances and good will that arise from cultural soft power—and even more than this, believing that the latter should be put into service of the former—the Chinese government has been pushing Chinese culture out into the world.
One aspect of this cultural campaign has involved film.
As Ying Zhu asserts, in the United States “soft power is more or less synonymous with Hollywood.”1 Accordingly, ever since the KMT’s Republic of China, Hollywood and China have been engaged in a “battle of images.”2 Yet it is only recently that China began to take a leading role in generating and circulating cinematic soft power.
Beginning in the 2000s, the Chinese film industry was no longer satisfied by merely copying its Western counterparts and instead started to seek international visibility and global influence on its own terms. This change could be said to mark a new era in which Chinese economic power began to be transformed into cultural appeal. After the 2010s, Chinese cinema in turn became increasingly tied to the political mission of the country, with the specific goal of replacing American hegemony.
Zhu further notes that “China is desperately seeking soft power,” a term “for an older idea about using cultural sex appeal to win friends and influence people.”3 However, these efforts have not been particularly successful in the West. As Stanley Rosen observes, “a massive Chinese governmental effort at a cost of over $10 billion a year in support of its ‘go abroad’ (zouchuqu) strategy, while certainly enjoying some success, has been less effective in the United States and most countries outside the Third World.”4
Scholars habitually conceive of the rivalry between Hollywood and China in binary terms. Yet, in contrast to Chinese cinema, Hollywood films aren’t directed or promoted by the U.S. government. As Rosen notes, “American soft power has been notably successful in China—and throughout the world—despite the lack of soft power promotion by the American government.”5
While this may be true, the reasons Rosen offers to explain the lack of American government involvement in Hollywood also indicate a political bias underlying his judgment. For Rosen, “American government neglect of soft power promotion is due, in part, to the nature of the American political and electoral systems, and in part to the belief that America is strong enough to do as it pleases with or without approbation from outside its borders.”6
Such an extrapolation, if not an accusation, presumes the United States is a hegemon that always chooses to conspire against the rest of the world. This presumption shows a misunderstanding of American soft power and how it works politically. The primary example of soft power promoted by the U.S. government is not the film industry but the Voice of America.7 Yet precisely because of its government background, VOA is trivial in its impact when compared with Hollywood, or even with McDonald’s.8
The American government has of course cared about the promotion of liberal democracy since World War II, but this concern is separate from its commercial, mass-cultural system, whose main concern is nothing more than profit and market success. It is the commercial desire for profit, not anything political or ideological, that drives cultural producers to create entertaining products and to win the global market. The reason why American soft power is more successful than its Chinese counterpart is straightforward: the former never tried to use the mass culture industry to pursue political goals, while the latter clearly sees mass culture as a propaganda tool, which reduces its attractiveness and appeal.
In this light, “global impact,” ironically, cannot be achieved through Chinese film as long as the purpose of China’s cinematic storytelling is to create soft power. The country’s potential to achieve the kind of deep cultural influence that the United States has had on the world is limited by its own conceptualization of power and how it works.
Moreover, the logic of “global impact” subjects popular art to the narrow purpose of politics, limiting the very possibilities of intercultural translation. Art can transcend partisan nationalism and the logic of power. But to do so, it must operate within a broader vision of humanistic inquiry and strive to reach a universal, foundational basis of values. For China to truly achieve quán qiú yǐng xiǎng lì, art must be granted full autonomy.
Topics: China Initiative
Sijia Yao (Ph.D., Purdue University) is Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Culture at Soka University of America and has previously taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has published articles on Chinese and comparative literature, film, music, and culture in journals such as The Comparatist, Comparative Literature Studies, and Tamkang Review. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang (University of Michigan Press, 2023).
Ying Zhu, “The Battle of Images: Cultural Diplomacy and Sino-Hollywood Negotiation,” in Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds, ed. Kingsley Edney, Stanley Rosen, and Ying Zhu (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), p. 100.
Ibid. See also Wendy Su, China’s Encounter with Global Hollywood: Cultural Policy and the Film Industry, 1994–2013 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2016).
Zhu, “The Battle of Images,” p. 100.
Stanley Rosen, “Ironies of Soft Power Projection,” in Edney, Rosen, and Zhu, Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics, p. 65.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Geoffrey Cowan, Why the Voice of America Remains a Vital Force in the World (Los Angeles: Figueroa Press, 2017).
Sharon Wang and Junhao Hong, “Voice of America in the Post-Cold War Era: Opportunities and Challenges to External Media Services via New Information and Communication Technology,” International Communication Gazette 73, no. 4 (2011): 343–58.