China’s relationship with Hollywood in the 2010s: Agency distributed and negotiated across borders

This paper develops an understanding of China’s relationship with Hollywood in the 2010s from a political economy theoretical framework that focuses on aspects of production and distribution in light of the political science concepts of various forms of power in international relations. This relationship in the 2010s is important because this is when China greatly expanded the number of movie theaters across the country to become the world’s largest box office by 2020. As China became an important distribution territory, Hollywood developed productions to be accepted into their market, earning over $3.1 billion at the Chinese box office in 2019, while the US box office for the same 42 films was worth $7.5 billion.

This paper examines China’s influence on Hollywood and the films they produced in the 2010s based on the political science concepts of hard power, soft power, sharp power, and smart power to illuminate how China was able to have Hollywood produce films for over a decade that function as soft power for China by positively presenting the country to audience around the world. China’s economic power to influence and control the behavior of Hollywood can be considered hard power. Soft power is enacted through diplomatic relations, such as the US-China Film Summit. The simultaneous application of hard and soft power is what is known as smart power. Sharp power is enacted through censorship and induced self-censorship to appease the Chinese government. The paper will ultimately argue that China over-extended hard and sharp power over Hollywood, eroding its effectiveness in influencing Hollywood by the first half of the 2020s.