By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

China’s Command-And-Control Economy

In part one, we covered a new brand of diplomacy taking hold in Beijing, and its chief architects have a suitably fierce nickname to match their aggressive style, which is all due to a movie; they are the wolf warriors. Twelve days after its premiere, Wolf Warrior 2 was not just the highest-grossing movie of the year - it was the highest-grossing movie in China’s history.

 

In part two, we chronicled why the head of strategic planning for the Walt Disney Company flew to Washington DC to explain Disney’s decision to make a movie. Still, the Chinese continued to be resolutely opposed to making this movie. Hence the head of strategic planning next felt the need to approach the former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger.

 

It was a scene laying bare the Chinese way of doing business, a top-down system in which any major decision comes with sign-off from the CEO or the president. China’s command-and-control economy was predicated on the bosses knowing precisely what every bureaucrat was approving, on every decision moving in concert with orders from the top. As Disney was a top-down organization under Eisner, he and the board did not know when cameras started rolling on every project in development. After doing their best to explain they were in the dark on the decision to make Kundun, Murphy and Kissinger left, looking at each other, unsure of how it had gone.

With his eye on building a studio in China, Jeffrey Katzenberg studied Henry Kissinger’s On China and told the heads of Warner Bros. and Disney to do the same. The book did not discuss Hollywood or the movies in China, but its study of the country’s history, culture, and political strategy through the dynasties might prove helpful. The executives would have done well to read the part of the book that concerns the fate of those who had come before them, conquerors who throughout history have believed China was theirs for the taking. Katzenberg is a film studio executive, film producer, and CEO of DreamWorks Animation. He was the former Studio Chairman of Disney in the late 1980s and early 1990s, playing a part in the Disney Renaissance, which happened despite him.

The filmmaking team immersed themselves in Chinese film history and philosophy and studied classic battle scenes and ancient Chinese painting. The result was animation far more sophisticated than what DreamWorks typically produced - not a lampooning of kung fu movies but an homage to them. One of its directors, Mark Osborne, pulled from Zhang Yimou’s color theory. Producer Melissa Cobb hired consultants to guarantee that the architectural detail of the Chinese homes and towns was precise and flora and fauna of each animated region correct. They were not going to do “generic China,” she said.

 

Kung Fu Panda

After almost five years of development and animation, Kung Fu Panda premiered in the U.S. in the summer of 2008, opening to a robust $60 million and collecting $215 million domestically. DreamWorks had another franchise in its hands. But its overseas numbers made Katzenberg sit up: the movie had grossed $416 million from international theaters, an amount on par with the second Madagascar installment and third Shrek film, both sequels with characters that had the benefit of having already been introduced to audiences.

Though the movie came out when Hollywood had awoken to China’s economic power, it had not been conceived as a strategic play for those grosses. In December 2004, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, had gone on a holiday break with homework, flipping through coffee-table books and photography for inspiration. Was the next Shrek or Madagascar in this random collection? Working over the holidays was more or less a given if you worked for Katzenberg. Since skipping college and arriving in Hollywood in his twenties, he had defined himself as the industry’s top hustler, maniacal in his work ethic. He woke at 5:00 a.m., starting the day with an exercise bike routine while reading several newspapers before leaving for three back-to-back breakfast meetings each morning. At Disney, the studio where he made his name, his motto to workers was, “If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.”

This battle between animators and Katzenberg is discussed fully in the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty and is available for streaming on Disney+.

Zhang Yimou and Steven Spielberg. Nearly twenty years after their lives had intersected over Chinese censorship of Zhang’s Oscar-nominated movie, they were tapped by Chinese leaders to direct and advise on the opening ceremony. For friends of Zhang, it was a sign of the steady absorption of filmmaking talent into the Communist Party apparatus, similar to those who accepted propaganda-film jobs as a way of currying favor with officials. Outside of his Olympics duty, Zhang had joined the country’s top political advisory committee and made films that critics said were veiled endorsements of authoritarianism. As his cooperation with the government grew, his movies were given plum release dates that boosted box-office sales.

Political issues soon consumed Spielberg’s involvement. Actress Mia Farrow and her son Ronan Farrow published an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal criticizing China’s support for the government of Sudan, where a genocidal campaign had killed more than four hundred thousand people in Darfur. The Olympics were only emboldening China’s regime, they said. “Does Mr. Spielberg want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games?” they asked, referencing the Hitler propagandist’s recording of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Spielberg immediately requested a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao. Two weeks later, with attention mounting, a Chinese official traveled to Sudan to lobby the government there to accept a UN peacekeeping force - illustrating the specific blend of publicity and political pressure that can draw attention to events that years of diplomacy cannot. But when months passed, and the situation in Darfur had not changed, Farrow called again for Spielberg to drop out, and about a week later, he did. The backlash against the director was swift. His decision to quit, another Chinese critic noted, was “aligned with imperialist assumptions bred by living in the United States. . . . Spielberg claims that China is not ‘using its influence’ with Sudan to ‘end the suffering.’ However, the notion that a ‘great power’ should ‘use its influence’ to control the internal affairs of other sovereign nations arises from the U.S., and not Chinese, assumptions.” In the narrative most Americans accepted, such standard-bearing was the duty of a world leader. Even then, China wanted to reset the terms. Inside China, Ric Birch was helping a team of Chinese nationals at the opening ceremony. A former television producer, Birch had parlayed a gig producing the Commonwealth Games in his native Australia to become a veteran orchestrator.

Disney’s filming in Xinjiang sparked criticism from viewers worldwide, including in the US Congress. In a letter to Disney Chief Executive Bob Chapek, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) described the company’s willingness to “put profit over principle.”

Behind the scenes, Disney publicists defended the decision, pointing out that Xinjiang footage accounted for seventy-eight seconds of the movie. The Chinese production company that Disney had partnered with had requested filming permits in the region in 2017 before the U.S. government had issued any advisories to businesses operating in Xinjiang. But the damage was done.

The Guardian wrote that if Spielberg and Zhang do eventually work together, it will undoubtedly make up for Spielberg’s withdrawal from a consultancy role for the Bejing Olympics as a protest against Chinese involvement in the Darfur conflict.

In Oct. 2019, Universal Beijing Resort announced the creative vision behind its widely anticipated theme park, Universal Studios Beijing – unveiling seven highly-themed and immersive lands that will bring incredible experiences to China.

In addition to the lands, Universal Beijing Resort will include a signature Universal CityWalk Beijing entertainment complex and two resort hotels. The vision is to become a theme park and resort destination that provides unique, extraordinary, and thrilling experiences for visitors from China and worldwide.

The Highly Anticipated Theme Park includes seven Themed Lands that will Immerse Guests In Extraordinary and Thrilling Adventures The New Themed Lands will include Kung Fu Panda Land of Awesomeness, Transformers Metrobase, Minion Land, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Jurassic World Isla Nublar, Hollywood and WaterWorld.

 

Kung Fu Panda two and three

To make Kung Fu Panda the filmmaking team immersed themselves in Chinese film history and philosophy and studied classic battle scenes and ancient Chinese painting. The result was animation far more sophisticated than what DreamWorks typically produced - not a lampooning of kung fu movies but an homage to them. One of its directors, Mark Osborne, pulled from Zhang Yimou’s color theory. Producer Melissa Cobb hired consultants to guarantee that the architectural detail of the Chinese homes and towns was precise and the flora and fauna of each animated region correct. They were not going to do “generic China,” she said. 

After almost five years of development and animation, Kung Fu Panda premiered in the U.S. in the summer of 2008, opening to a robust $60 million and going on to collect $215 million domestically. DreamWorks had another franchise on its hands. But its overseas numbers made Katzenberg sit up: the movie had grossed $416 million from international theaters, an amount on par with the second Madagascar installment and third Shrek film, both sequels with characters that had the benefit of having already been introduced to audiences.

While Kung Fu Panda delighted Chinese moviegoers, it immediately threw Chinese leaders into an existential crisis. “The film’s protagonist is China’s national treasure and all the elements are Chinese,” said Wu Jiang, president of the China National Peking Opera Company. “Why didn’t we make such a film?” 

No movie occupied the minds of Chinese authorities trying to learn commercial cinema quite like Kung Fu Panda. American filmmakers had conceived of Po as an adorable vehicle of Chinese culture. The animation, which featured scenes of shadow puppetry and kinetic kung fu sequences, was a top-notch representation of the culture they in 2008 wanted to show the world.

The Chinese box office had never seen anything like it, and the studio chiefs in Los Angeles - many of whom still categorized China as a place of novelty hits like Kung Fu Panda - woke up to the grosses it could generate. Moviegoers waited in line for six hours. Tickets were scalped for $100 apiece. 

Members of the politburo closed an auditorium so they could watch it in private.

In 2011, a second Kung Fu Panda film had set records in China. and Kung Fu Panda 3 would be the first animated coproduction between China and the U.S. The original film was made without the Chinese box office in mind; by the time of the third installment, it factored into major decisions. Screenwriters placed a scene on Mount Qingcheng, a mountain known as a Taoist landmark, as well as other subtle nods that would mean nothing to most American viewers but carry heavy symbolic resonance for most Chinese ones. Dubbing the movie wasn’t enough; artists reanimated the mouths of Po and others in 60 percent of the shots so their cartoon lip movements matched the Mandarin being spoken. Katzenberg was so bullish on the film that he predicted Chinese moviegoers might see it twice - once in English, and then once again in a Mandarin version where they could focus on the precise lip movements. With a gross of $154 million, Kung Fu Panda 3 beat the record set by Monkey King one year earlier and became the highest-grossing animated movie in Chinese box-office history. The records were volleying back and forth between U.S. and Chinese releases, but Kung Fu Panda had won. Katzenberg, who had overseen a renaissance of American animation, appeared to have a business sequel on his hands.

It prompt Chinese officials to question why their nation’s filmmakers hadn’t conceived of the film first.

 

 

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