Global Impact: The Case of Film

by Sijia Yao

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.” Accordingly, ever since the KMT’s Republic of China, Hollywood and China have been engaged in a “battle of images.” 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.

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