Marketization, Hollywood, Global China

"Marketization," a concept often used to understand China's recent economic and sociocultural transformations, indicates progress toward some forms of marketplace, bringing about privatization, growth, liberalization, and greater choice. All of these have been achieved in China, while still retaining state involvement in the market. Marketization in China needs state enterprises, proxies, and policies to manage market outcomes and not leave them to chance or invisible hands; as such, there is a signal difference between market and "marketization."

The first part of this essay tracks the paradoxes of marketization in China's film industry, explaining both structural changes and adjustments in film content. Rather than a midpoint en route to a capitalist destiny, marketization is the strategic exercise of market incentives, as well as managing externalities and risk. Later I present an account of the Chinese film industry's engagements with the world, notably Hollywood, the foremost purveyor of motion pictures. Is China in pursuit of Hollywood's global market? Yes, but the aim is not to replace or become Hollywood; instead, China's object may be a convergence of Hollywood and China's own film industries, of global market and marketization. The soft power of the film marketplace might be turned to the needs of marketization, the better to represent China to the world, in charismatic terms, on a global scale.