The former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott was once asked by Germany’s Angela Merkel what drove Australia’s policies on China. Fear and greed, he replied.
Fear has been the focus of many books on China recently. Bestsellers like Graham Allison’s Destined for War: can America and China escape Thucydides’ Trap asked whether conflict between a rising power like China and the reigning super power is inevitable.
Two new books have turned their attention to the other pole. Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy by Erich Schwartzel details how Hollywood is so in thrall to the money to be made from China’s billion cinema-goers that there is nothing it won’t compromise on to keep in with the Communist Party. Isaac Stone Fish’s America Second: How America’s Elites are Making China Stronger goes further. He criticises Hollywood, business elites, political leaders and universities for being ready to sell out America out of greed, vanity or even just access to China.
Photo: Greg Baker / AFP or licensors
Of the two, Red Carpet is the more entertaining as it details Hollywood’s every step towards passivity. America Second is far more polemical and probably farther-reaching. Together, they sketch the problem of the so-called “anaconda in the chandelier” in dealing with Chinese authorities, first cited by an American sinologist 20 years ago.
Simply, it says, that if there is a giant snake in your chandelier, you would at first tip-toe warily. If it doesn’t strike, the tip-toeing becomes ingrained, normal, a “dull, well-entrenched leeriness”, as Perry Link put it. Schwartzel details how the Party as the anaconda in the chandelier has tamed Hollywood.
A former Hollywood reporter for The Wall Street Journal, he implies that self-censorship to keep the Party anaconda at bay has done more harm than Chinese censors. His story starts in the 1990s when Tibet was all the rage in Hollywood. Brad Pitt was starring in Seven Years in Tibet; Richard Gere, a Buddhist, was meeting the Dalai Lama. Disney had asked Martin Scorsese to make a movie about the Dalai Lama, Kunlun. China, emerging from post-Tiananmen isolation with its economy growing, expressed its displeasure to Disney, which had its eye on theme parks in China, and other film companies, waking up to the money to be made from China’s cinema audience. The result; Tibet has largely disappeared from Hollywood. Schwartzel follows the process of self-censorship, from Tibet to film execs removing scenes which could offend Chinese authorities to editing out a patch on Tom Cruise’s famous leather Top Gun jacket showing Taiwan in the sequel, Maverick. Out went an invasion by China in Red Dawn, in came a North Korean invasion instead.
More importantly, says Schwartzel, Hollywood moved from self-censorship to actively working with Chinese censors, as film houses became more reliant on profits in China. Studios would co-operate on plot lines or themes. Chinese characters and sub-plots would be inserted into Avengers or Transformer movies (Chinese audiences called this being “soaked in soy sauce” to pretend it was Chinese-made). China’s film authorities wanted scenes in China to feature only a high-tech China (Shanghai, used extensively in Mission Impossible III, was the go-to setting) rather than rural backwaters. Film-makers complied. They wanted the Party anaconda to stay in the chandelier and not bite their next blockbuster.
At the same time, China set out to re-make its own industry. Xi Jinping has led a Five-Year Plan to increase cinema production - as long as it told approved stories. China has set itself a goal of being a “strong power” in moviemaking by 2035. In 2020, China overtook North America as the world’s largest box office. It was helped by movies like the hit, Wolf Warrior 2, featuring a Chinese Rambo-type rescuing hostages being brutalised in Africa by (white, American) mercenaries; symbolically, an urgent call to the US consulate goes unanswered, reluctantly the Wolf Warrior must step in.
The blockbuster Wolf Warrior film poster Photo: Supplied
But, while it is entertaining, does all this matter? Schwartzel argues yes. The strength of his book really comes when he pans up from the Hollywood-China imbroglio to a wide shot of world cinema. American ideals travelled in its movies, he says. American culture exerted a pull, a “soft power”. Even when America is shown as degraded, it usually shows a lone individual able to overcome. Think The Batman.
But now Hollywood movies travel among Chinese films packed with alternative ideas. He goes to Africa where China has paid for new satellite dishes to be installed, tuned to Chinese TV providers. He asks Kenyan villagers who they like watching. They like Chinese soaps and Jet Li. Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, too. But number one is the Monkey King (many New Zealanders know the story, Journey to the West, a Chinese classic, from the 1980s Japanese-Chinese cult production, Monkey, now rebooted over and over).
Schwartzel concludes that American soft power is waning at the same time Hollywood has caved to China for access. “Hollywood, once America’s pervasive evangelist, remains beholden to another country.”
Isaac Stone Fish reaches a similar conclusion as Schwartzel on Hollywood but he then goes further. He argues in America Second that China has been remarkably successful in neutering American ideals, through the greed and compromises of America’s own elites. Fish takes special aim at Henry Kissinger, in probably the hardest hitting part of his book.
Kissinger, who helped bring about Nixon’s famous visit to Mao’s China 50 years ago last month, set up a geo-political consultancy after leaving office. In Fish’s telling, Kissinger’s consultancy represented billion dollar business clients who wanted to ensure their firm could operate in China; Kissinger had friends in Beijing. He would be greeted with full pomp and ceremony by the Party hierarchy when he visited. Xi called Kissinger an “old friend of the Chinese people”. In return, Kissinger would argue in Washington for continuing doing business with the Party, and gliding over issues like human rights abuses or Tibet.
“The Party expects friends to silence their criticism, so as not to “embarrass” or “offend” China and to praise and advance the Party’s policies,” says Fish.
Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Photo: AFP
He puts this down to the Party’s United Front work, an entity Professor Anne-Marie Brady of Canterbury University, has been investigating. Fish says it recruits “friends” by flattery and warm embrace.
It is worth noting (and not just to cover reviewer's legal indemnity) the book says “a Kissinger representative denied that Kissinger was an agent of Chinese influence and called the allegation libelous”. In fact, Fish’s book is filled with both facts and denials by business people, politicians, university professors and journalists that they put access to China and its market above America’s interests. I have never seen so many in one book.
His most serious claim is that elites knowingly dissembled for years about policy towards China before and after its accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001. US leaders held out the possibility that China would become democratic. If China became wealthier then its economy would become more capitalist, they argued. And if it became more capitalist, it would inevitably become more democratic. Except, says Fish, this was a fiction. The opposite happened. He quotes a high-ranking source in the US government as saying everyone knew it to be false at the time. (Cue: denials) Instead, business elites carried on doing business with China as the Party grew stronger, all under the cover of the fiction the country may eventually democratise.
Photo: AFP
After these broadsides, the section on how universities have pulled their criticisms of the Party, so as to keep a flow of students and access to research in China, is more subdued. Fish even ends up supporting the Confucius Institutes, Chinese state language schools embedded in universities, which have been controversial here and elsewhere for having their own rules. The West needs to learn Chinese; better to have some language schools, even Party-sponsored ones, than none at all, he concludes.
Fish is a former Newsweek correspondent in Beijing who set up his own consultancy on risks of doing business in China. His America Second is a short, sharp slap at the great and good for greed and complacency, backed by an array of facts.
But what makes it stronger is his willingness to question his own behaviour. At times, he will set out what he has done; did he ever soften his criticisms to make sure he got a visa back into China, or curry favour with authorities. It is a smart move. His arguments are more nuanced for showing his own struggles. He reveals his own dealings with the anaconda in the chandelier.
America Second: How America’s Elites are Making China Stronger
by Isaac Stone Fish
Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy
by Erich Schwartzel
