Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy , by Erich Schwartzel, pub. Penguin Press “I was writing a book about some big consequential ideas, but I was reminding myself how silly it could be as well,” says Erich Schwartzel, The Wall Street Journal ’s Hollywood reporter, on a video call from Los Angeles. His Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy sets out the history of the American film industry’s relationship with what has recently become its largest market, and its willingness to do the Communist Party’s bidding, changing what the cinema-going public sees on screen not only in China but also the rest of the world. This is indeed consequential. “Hollywood is still probably the most powerful commercial media force in the world,” says Schwartzel, “and if you are a country dedicated to shifting your narrative and the way the world views you, there are still fewer avenues more effective than in a Hollywood movie.” The petty, however, includes the Party’s insistence on having washing found on rooftops and balconies digitally removed from the Shanghai scenes of 2006 film Mission: Impossible III . “If it gets out it’s far worse than just leaving it in and letting people see what Shanghai really looks like,” says Schwartzel. “I think there are a lot of readers who will read that and think China is in many ways not acting in its best interests.” You can really tell a lot about what a culture and society is by what they don’t allow in their movies Erich Schwartzel Schwartzel cheerfully admits to attempting to attract readers by using Tom Cruise, Transformers and Richard Gere “to serve as a bit of a bait and switch to get them just to pick up the book”. “Over the past four or five years we’ve seen the conversation about China reach such a tenor of divisiveness and sometimes the only thing you can find on the topic is laced with opinions. So I thought this was the best way to tell this particular story.” Some popular inaccuracies about China are repeated, and the rest of the world outside America is largely invisible, despite other countries being no less democratic, equally in favour of free speech and open economies, and themselves exporters of films to China. There’s little on Hong Kong’s film industry beyond acknowledgement of the expertise lent in helping the motherland’s counterpart develop almost from scratch in a short time. But Schwartzel does himself a disservice in suggesting there’s bait and switch. This is no dry reds-under-the-bed narrative, but rather an admirably balanced account, and a good read with plenty of pace and amusing detail, although it shows neither side in a good light. Hollywood has long been willing to censor itself to enter profitable markets, having forbidden negative depictions of Mexicans in the 1920s, when that market mattered, and adapted films to Nazi wishes in the 1930s – not only for Germany but for worldwide distribution. “The quickest defence that a lot of people in Hollywood make when I ask about the concessions they’ll make to China is that Hollywood has always made concessions to the global marketplace and you’re a bad businessman if you don’t,” says Schwartzel. This hardly reflects well on Hollywood. “Delete references to democracy,” read one studio executive’s notes in 1938, and references to homosexuality are removed to please China’s censors today. There’s much laundry in this book that Hollywood would also prefer were digitally excised from the final cut. Nine years after Schwartzel took on the Journal ’s Hollywood beat, will he ever be able to eat lunch in that town again? Similarly, accounts of Chinese investments that failed to materialise, the money-losing acquisition of chains of American cinemas , expensive films with heavy-handed pro-Party messages that flopped, and stories of careful manipulation of release dates and box-office takings to ensure that locally produced propaganda films seem the more popular, are unlikely to leave Schwartzel as free to wander on Chinese sound stages or get comment from Chinese studio executives in the future. “I don’t have any trips booked,” he says, laughing. “But it just felt that to tell the story as thoroughly as possible I couldn’t really worry about that kind of personal retribution.” But as Hollywood’s share of Chinese box office revenue declines in the face of local productions that are now technically a match for those from overseas, whether in terms of fight choreography or computer-generated imagery, will its willingness to kowtow to Party requests also decline? “With all hope of profit gone, we can, at last, become properly indignant and raise our voices in shocked protest without any pecuniary regrets,” wrote director William C. de Mille in 1940, after war broke out with Germany. But Chinese mega-hits such as Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) and The Wandering Earth (2019) are still making 95 per cent or more of their revenue at the Chinese box office, Schwartzel points out, resonating overseas only in diaspora communities. There’s little of the warming to modern Chinese cultural products that there has been towards the Korean-language yet globally popular Squid Game , or 2020 best picture Oscar winner Parasite . And with the transfer of control of the Chinese film industry to the Central Propaganda Department, and recent Xi Jinping edicts on the purpose of art, it seems less likely that plans to make China a “strong” film power by 2035 will succeed. A mainland Chinese director finally winning an Oscar would normally be cause for mass celebration. But all news in 2021 about Chloé Zhao ’s huge success in winning both best picture and best director (for Nomadland ) was suppressed in China because of an eight-year-old interview in which she described it as a place with “lies everywhere”. Nomadland showed America’s inadequate social safety net in a way that should have pleased authorities frequently stung by criticism of China’s own failings. But all mention of the film was suppressed on the Chinese internet. “You can really tell a lot about what a culture and society is by what they don’t allow in their movies,” says Schwartzel. And by what they allow to be shown at all.