![]() The US is an outspoken capitalist democracy. Ultimately the contradictions inherent in two such different political universes were not overcome in the CCP’s attempt at borrowing. Of course, at that time China’s “essence” was traditional Confucian culture, whereas now it is a confection known as “socialism with Chinese characteristics for the new Xi Jinping era.” The idea of China selectively borrowing from the West harkened back to a Qing Dynasty formula for modernization that called for “using things Western for matters of practice, but using things Chinese for matters of essence.” The conceit was to borrow, but only in utilitarian ways that shored up rather than undermined China’s existing system and values. “Accessing that resource would require bowing to censorship demands and navigating political land mines to build a theme park or secure Chinese financing.” But since China needed technical knowhow and Hollywood wanted more viewers, a match was tempting. ![]() “Out of nowhere appeared a market with 1.4 billion potential customers,” writes Erich Schwartzel in Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. For example, realizing that the word “propaganda” sounded indelibly malign to Western ears, the Propaganda Department changed its name (but only in English) to the “Publicity Department.” At the same time, encouraged by Washington’s policy of “engagement,” which sought to transform the Sino-US relationship through the alchemy of increased interaction, Hollywood executives began to be enticed by the potential of China’s immense and still-unexploited film audience. Both have wantonly employed wishful thinking, mendacity, and deception to create alternate realities that have managed to distract their respective mass audiences from the actual circumstances in which they have been living.ĭespite the fact that these engines of fiction are otherwise so dissimilar, when China began “reforming and opening up” in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, the CCP started sniffing around Hollywood, because its cultural overlords wanted to see if they could get some of Hollywood’s seductive storytelling magic to rub off on their turgid propaganda efforts to “tell China’s story well,” as the country’s current leader, Xi Jinping, later put it. Hollywood has engaged in its own escapist mythmaking by producing films filled with fantasy and backing them with promotional campaigns irrigated by galaxies of movie stars and inexhaustible reserves of PR and advertising. The Chinese Communist Party ( CCP) has long proselytized for sundry versions of its Maoist/Marxist/Leninist revolution through state-sponsored propaganda campaigns that have even airbrushed large chunks of its unsavory past from the historical record. ![]() Although Beijing and Hollywood inhabit political and cultural universes that have little in common, they are similar in one important respect: both have expended vast amounts of energy, time, and capital confecting imaginary universes.
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