It’s no coincidence—or secret—that China is churning out patriotic blockbusters, which have overtaken Hollywood films at the Chinese box office in recent years. But it’s not as explicit as Beijing handing out orders. Instead, the government has shifted its approach from direct intervention to indirect incentivization by shaping the economic conditions of the film industry to favor patriotic cinema. China’s film industry has been a fundamental extension of the state since the founding of the country in 1949. State-run studios dominated production until the 1990s when the state allowed private film companies to form to save the industry from financial collapse. In 1990, the head of the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television’s film bureau told the New York Times that the Chinese film industry was facing a “colossal” financial crisis because of the dominance of party-line ideological films that few people actually wanted to watch.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) faced a trade-off between economic liberalization and social control of the film industry, especially after the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. Rejecting the contradiction, the party pursued both—a balancing act that would come to define the Chinese development experiment across sectors.
