China Owes Hollywood Millions

This site reported last month of the concerns that many have with Hollywood kow-towing to Chinese censors. In order to get the world’s largest cinema ticket buying audience in front of their latest efforts, movie makers were adding scenes, removing scenes with “director’s approval” and generally ingratiating themselves as much as possible with the Chinese government. It’s probably safe to say that they hadn’t reckoned with the latest wheeze that Beijing’s bean counters have come up with - not paying Hollywood it’ dues once it’s got it’s hands on the cash.

Under the WTO deal that was brokered, studios were expecting a 25% cut of all the profits, but the sate-run company that distributes the films in China has said that it intends to pay 2% VAT on the receipts. The upshot is that Hollywood studios are owed a lot of money - in fact they say they haven’t been paid since late 2012 because of the dispute. The Hollywood Reporter says that Warner Bros is owed $31million for Man of Steel, the first installment of The Hobbit, and Jack the Giant Slayer. For Iron Man 3 alone, the film that had specifically had extra scenes filmed to appease the censors and increase it’s audience friendly quotient, Disney is owed nearly $30million. Fox and Universal are owed for Oblivion and Life of Pi, and Paramount is owed another $30million for three of it’s releases.

Fearful of making too much of a scene that would upset the already highly strung mandarins at SARFT (the Chinese TV, radio and film administration), they won’t be anxious to take the case as far as the office of the US trade representative to the World Trade Organisation, but negotiations are in progress with Chris Dodd, chairman of the US film group the Motion Picture Association of America. Speaking to Variety, former U.S. Trade Representative Ronald Kirk said “Unfortunately it does not surprise me that China has come up with another creative way to cut into that revenue payment,It fits the pattern of their creative accounting at times…there are a number of ways that China has frustrated American interests.”

Delayed payment strains the already difficult relationship between American movie makers and Chinese censors. Frustrated with an organization not used to giving reasons as to why a film makes the blacklist, as happened with Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2, there’s no real way of making sure that a release is guaranteed, no matter how much soft power ass-kissing is involved. Adding to that are the problems of rampant and unregulated piracy in China, where pirate copies of the latest releases are available to buy for as little as a dollar a disc - often the illicit sellers set up shop outside the very cinema that the US battled so hard to get the film released into in the first place.

While the dispute doesn’t affect movie goers in any real sense, it does highlight the problems of the west trying it’s damnedest to get around a government that simply isn’t used to playing by the rules. Censorship laws and blacklists are more often used as an excuse to give inferior Chinese productions, unless there’s going to be a sequel to Crouching Tiger any time soon, Robert Downey, Jnr may want to to improve on his Tropic Thunder level of Mandarin just in case.

Exporting Censorship

It seems sometimes like the Internet can do no good. If you believe the writers of the Daily Mail, a popular British conservative daily, it’s responsible for almost all the ills that are inflicted on the struggling middle classes of the UK - immigrants stealing the jobs of Oxbridge graduates, immigrants moving in next door and lowering house prices. The latest wheeze is the tale of the immigrant who moved in next door after stealing the job of an Oxbridge graduate and then set about sexually abusing and murdering young innocent children. And it’s all the Internet’s fault.

Last week David Cameron announced plans to police the Internet, after meeting with the mother of a child who was murdered by pedophile. Accordingly, there are now two types of porn on the Internet: the legal type, where the risk is that children will accidentally type in “Britney Spears donkey act” into a search engine and come up with all kinds of nastiness, and the illegal kind that involves the abuse of children. Google, which hasn’t made many friends since it provided details of how it “maximizes it’s profits”, is to blame, and Cameron has threatened legal action if it doesn't comply with the new laws, which involve Google returning no search results for pornographic material that is illegal in the UK. He stopped short of using the actual words “according to relevant laws and regulations”, but you get the general idea.

Like most politicians, Cameron appears to have selective amnesia when it comes to what laws were passed during the tenure of the opposition Labour government when toothless extreme porn laws were passed, and a number of suspect arrested under the laws were promptly acquitted when the case came to trial. It’s the The Leveson Effect, whereby laws are proposed to make things that were previously illegal even more illegal in response to something that everyone has seen on new reports.

Regardless of whether new laws are really going to help curb child murders by sex fiends remains to be seen, what has made fewer headlines is that Chinese technology firm Huawei is building the censoring engine that will protect the masses from nasty blue movies. The problem is that no-one really knows what Huawei is up to, and since they’re a state owned company, there are some suspicions that not all of it’s intentions are honorable. Indeed, they’ve already been banned from providing Internet tech in Australia, and they’ve not gone unnoticed in the UK either. An independent security review of Huawei’s activities criticized the “lack of ministerial oversight” of the company’s rapid expansion in the UK.

This has led to an odd situation whereby the UK is actively investigating a company that already has won a contract with the UK government. The good news is that while many might be bemoaning the lack of innovation and the reliance on manufacturing to bolster the economy, censorship and Internet control might be the one service industry that China can successfully export.

Related articles

• UK Porn Filter: Censorship Extends Beyond Pornography, But One ISP Is Fighting Back


• UK ISP on porn filters: if you want internet censorship 'move to North Korea'


• Censorship and surveillance: Cameron's internet


• Meet The UK's Chinese Firewall - Censorship Extends Far Beyond Pornography

Soft Power and Chinese Cinema

Someone, somewhere in the Beijing higher ups has decided that The Thing that’ll get China onto the world map is making a load of really, really cool movies that show the country in the best possible light.  In the same way that (I’m told) Hollywood and it’s related nonsensical chic is lusted after in the west.  To really complete the PR package, China needs to be seen on the big screen.

While speeches that go on for hours and endless meetings are winners if you want to get ahead in Chinese society, the movers and shakers in China’s recent soft-power drive have realized that promoting China just by putting a few very old things in a museum doesn’t actually resonate with your average foreigner.  To really win the foreign hearts and minds, you need to find something that’s the equivalent of Bruce Willis running around in a dirty vest.

Chinese movies don’t do well overseas - at least when they don’t follow the Zhang Yimou schtick of brightly coloured action sequences filmed at varying speeds.  Recent exports from China have produced nothing more than a whimper at the US box office.  When the low-budget sleeper hit Lost in Thailand debuted in America, it didn’t even come close replicating it’s runaway success that it had in China.  The film, a feel-good comedy about an ambitious executive trying to negotiate and important deal with his boss in Thailand, proved that dealing with contemporary issues in Chinese cinema can be both censor and box-office friendly - the film managed to beat out James Cameron’s Avatar in ticket sales, taking $200 million on it’s $2.2 million budget.  Conversely, proving the adage that comedy never travels well, the film bombed in the US, managing a paltry $88000 upon it’s release.

So alienated are audiences from the Chinese propaganda machine that a recent biopic of idolized revolutionary soldier Lei Feng failed to sell one single ticket in it’s opening weekend.  When a film celebrating the founding of the People’s Republic was released, mandarins put all other releases on hold, and even resorted to faking ticket returns in order to generate buzz.  Needless to say that with all the Iron Mans and Kung Fu Pandas, both of these expensive failures by the Chinese government have sunk without a trace to the bargain DVD bin.

Which is the reason, you may have noticed, that you’ve been finding bits of China in your blockbuster.  Hollywood pap is the quite possibly the best vehicle for promoting Chinese pap, mostly because they don’t do things like contemplate human rights, or civil liberties, and they focus on pleasing as many people as possible in order to extract as much money as possible from people who enjoy watching famous people walking away from big explosions.

The big draw for American movie producers is that while Chinese people have a lot of money, or, at the very least, there’s a lot of Chinese people will little bits of money that add up to one big bit of money.  The problem is that the movie industry is pretty much monopolized by the government, so it’s prudent business sense that no one tries to market a movie that will hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.  Of course, you could argue that Chinese people complaining about how Chinese people always seem to be the bad guys in movies is kind of like Auschwitz prisoners complaining about pickpockets in the shower room, this is soft power we’re talking about here.

Sucking up the Chinese government so that your movie gets approved for distribution is one way of trying to get your hands on the slice of entertainment pie - only 34 foreign movies are approved every year and your movie has to be the suckiest in order to get a screen at the local multiplex.  Another way of getting seen in the mainland would be to do the co-investment thing, whereupon a state-run Chinese film production company gives you money in exchange for positive exposure on the big screen.  This second option has the added benefit of side-stepping the quota, since it’s a co-production, it’s no longer seen as being a foreign import.

Selling out artistic credibility in order to please shareholders is never going to go down well with the libertarian lefties, even when you pull out a Powerpoint presentation and try to explain in simple language that Iron Man 3 isn’t really about artistic credibility, it’s about getting Robert Downey, Jr’s kids through college.  The movie industry has been called out for pandering to the whims of the Chinese government, without grasping the idea that American movies are doing pretty badly in the Chinese marketplace.  On it’s release in China, Mission Impossible 3 held the number one spot for a mighty 23 weeks, yet in the past year, the market share for American movies has dropped 65%, with domestically produced romantic comedies and feel-good buddy flicks trouncing Hollywood efforts at the box office.

In a final testament to the place that cinema holds in the push for soft-power, the Chinese government recently spend $13 million turning swampland outside Tianjin into a square kilometer of housing, office space, state-of-the-art computer facilities for CG animation and special effects and a cavernous complex of film studios.  The rebound in Chinese cinema removes a multitude of headaches for the government.  The stars are less likely to go on human rights crusades, like our dear friend Christian Bale did, fighting his way to see dissident lawyer Chen Guang Chen in his village, and the films are more likely to promote the China and the values that the Chinese government desperately wants promoted.

 

Related articles

• Chinese Coming-of-Age Drama 'Tiny Times' Eyeing Huge Local Debut


• Xinhua Insight: New rise in Chinese film market vicissitudes [China Economic Information Service (Xinhua)]


• Chinese films gain box office edge with reality-based films