that wasn’t what earned the particular ad-
miration of the president of the People’s
Republic of China. No — Jiang, reports
Erich Schwartzel in “Red Carpet,” was
blown away by the movie’s “emotional ap-
peal”: Leo and Kate, the gale-like voice of
Celine Dion, the artistic engineering of the
feelings. “I invite my comrades of the Polit-
buro to see the movie,” he said at the next
National People’s Congress. “We should
never think that we are the only ones who
know how to persuade people.”
Persuade people to do what, is the ques-
tion. To buy movie tickets and associated
merch? To conform in a totalitarian state?
Both? “There is, in fact, no such thing as
art for art’s sake,” Mao Zedong said in a lec-
ture delivered in Yan’an in 1942. On this
point, he and capitalism were in complete
agreement: You’re always selling some-
thing, be it a revolution or a pair of sneak-
ers. “Red Carpet” is the story of the nexus
that formed when Hollywood realized it
needed China’s cash, and China realized it
could first manipulate — and then appro-
priate — Hollywood’s special gifts for en-
chantment, coercion, lifestyle control, and
inducing audiences to tear up by means of
orchestral swells and Tom Hanks talking
earnestly to small children. Or, for that
matter, an 18th-century Mel Gibson all
bulging with love of freedom: When Sony
executives sent a print of “The Patriot” to
the censors in Beijing, hoping for a release,
they were told that such approval had been
denied — but could Chinese officials hold
onto the print? “We want others in the bu-
reau to watch it so they can understand
how to make a good propaganda film.”
The two stories, the humbling of Holly-
wood and the swelling of Chinese soft
power, twist and combine across
Schwartzel’s masterfully organized book.
Hollywood is felled by, among other things,
prestige television and the collapse of the
DVD market. (In 2003, on the day of its re-
lease, Disney sold eight million copies of
the “Finding Nemo” DVD; by 2008, Dis-
ney’s DVD sales had fallen by 33 percent,
more than halving the studio’s operating
income.) As domestic and global box of-
fices slump, China — slowly and suspi-
ciously opening itself up to Western influ-
ences — becomes the new frontier: a great
lake of virgin moviegoing imagination, a
vast untapped resource.
But China is not a democracy, and its eco-
nomic leverage over Hollywood allows its
leaders to subject American movies to an
unprecedented process of ideological filtra-
tion. In the movies approved by China’s cen-
sors you will find no mention of an afterlife,
no time travel and no masturbation.
(There’s a great joke in there somewhere.)
“Underdog narratives” — little guy takes on
the system — are a problem. Hollywood
stars on promotional visits have to follow
the rules (don’t mention Tibet or Taiwan)
and negative images of China are to be ex-
punged. “Red Carpet” itemizes the removal
of clotheslines in a Shanghai street scene
from “Mission: Impossible III” (drying un-
derwear too retrograde); the rewriting of
“World War Z” to clarify that the apocalyp-
tic zombie virus did notactually originate,
as previously thought, in China; the cutting
of a scene in “Skyfall” in which James Bond
Bondishly offs a Chinese security guard
(makes Chinese people look weak); and —
most spectacularly — in a remake of “Red
Dawn,” the postproduction pixel-by-pixel
transformation of an entire invading Chi-
nese army into an army from North Korea.(“The flags are one nightmare unto them-
selves,” a weary special-effects wizard tells
Schwartzel, “and then there are all these
subnightmares.”)
In addition to those things being taken
out of American movies at the behest of
China, there are also things being put in,
generally by eager-to-please American
producers. “A Chinese city, actress or ener-
gy drink,” Schwartzel writes, “which
producers referred to as ‘Chinese ele-
ments,’ became selling points for a film.”
Sometimes the Chinese film bureau will
make a suggestion: Instead of heroic
American jets roaring in to save Hong
Kong from marauding giant robots in the
climactic scenes of “Transformers: Age of
Extinction,” how about — oh, I don’t know
— heroic Chinese jets? Sure! says the stu-
dio, for whom Chinese cooperation is “an
economic no-brainer.”
At the same time, in Chinese films,
Americans are getting worse. “While Hol-
lywood studios were stripping their mov-
ies of Chinese villains,” writes Schwartzel,
“Chinese filmmakers were not extending
the same courtesy.” He instances the 2017
mega-smash “Wolf Warrior 2,” in which
the Chinese hero Leng rescues African vil-
lagers from a disgusting, stomping, su-
premacist American mercenary called Big
Daddy, handsomely played by Frank
Grillo. “People like you will always be infe-
rior to people like me,” grunts Big Daddy,
locked in bloody struggle with Leng and
pushing a blade toward his throat. “That’s
history,” says Leng, the second before he
twists away and stabs Big Daddy in the
neck. “In the movie’s closing credits,”
Schwartzel writes, “played as some sold-
out auditoriums sang or burst into ap-
plause — a pronouncement appeared: ‘Cit-
izens of the People’s Republic of China,when you encounter danger in a foreign
land, do not give up! Please remember, at
your back stands a strong motherland!’”
This is a fascinating book. It will educate
you. Schwartzel has done some extraordi-
nary reporting, and a lot of legwork. He
talks to Disney executives and compulso-
rily rehoused Chinese farmers; he talks to
Michael Gralapp, an American actor who
made a career out of playing Winston
Churchill in Chinese movies, until he sud-
denly found himself playing Warren Buf-
fett. He ends up in the Masai village of
Suswa, Kenya, at the end of one spoke of
China’s world-historical Belt and Road ini-
tiative, a “collection of Chinese loans and
infrastructure deals aimed at redrawing
global trade maps.” China is building a
train station in Suswa, as part of a grand
project to connect the city of Mombasa, on
the coast, with the Kenyan interior. It has
also delivered StarTimes satellite dishes to
some of the villagers, and is piping in,
among other entertainments, Chinese
game shows and 24-hour kung fu. All part
of the same “campaign for African opinion”
that brought you “Wolf Warrior 2.”
During the ’80s, in what Schwartzel calls
the “rah-rah era” of American cinema —
“The Right Stuff,” “Back to the Future,”
“Dirty Dancing,” “Top Gun” — the inward-
looking Chinese were mainly consuming
their own rather stodgy propaganda. “Su-
perman,” starring Christopher Reeve, was
briefly released eight years after its Amer-
ican debut, but condemned on the grounds
that Superman himself was “a narcotic
which the capitalist class gives itself to cast
off its serious crises.” The possibility of a
state-administered political narcotic, it
seems, had not yet, or not quite, occurred
to Chinese leadership. “Red Carpet” is
about what happened next. 0Tom Cruise at a 2018 movie premiere at the Ancestral Temple in Beijing.
PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM LEFT: YANSHAN ZHANG/GETTY IMAGES; ROLEX DELA PENA/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
JAMES PARKERis a staff writer at The Atlantic
and the editor of The Pilgrim, a literary
magazine from the homeless community of
downtown Boston.
‘Red Carpet’
Optimus Prime from the “Transformers” franchise looms over Beijing’s Qianmen district in 2014.THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 17CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1