The Impacts of Globalization on the Growth of Chinese Movie Industry - Report Example

NORTHUMBRIA Working in Mass Communication Industries Afeiyate Mutalifu number: 14028348 Ibrahim ShawWord count: 2932 words Corrected full Draft date of submission: 09/01/2015 CONTENTS Introduction 2 1) Globalization. 3 2)Chinese movie industry. 3 History of Chinese movie industry. 4 The Chinese movie industry in modern China. 4 The impact of globalization on the growth of Chinese movie industry. 6 Foreign movies in China 6 Chinese movie in foreign countries: 6 Globalization has created opportunities for Chinese movie industry. 7 Chinese movie industry`s need to be faced with challenges brought about by globalization 7 1)The high level of competition in the global movie market as a result of globalization. 7 2)Some traditional concepts remain in China which slow the development of Chinese movie industry in the global market 8 Conclusion: 9 Reference list 9 The impacts of globalization on the growth of Chinese movie industry Introduction Globalization is the process of transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions. Over the years the media industry has grown to a global extent resulting into a closer knit between China and other countries. Competition between developing and developed countries has become more intense with developing countries facing more challenges than the more developed countries. . In order to adapt to globalization many countries have found the urge to undertake to corresponding changes, especially China. In the past many Chinese industries used to prosper in their local markets due to little competition, though there seems to be an uncertainty in their future prosperity at this age of globalization. An example is the movie industry in China which still faces many challenges. With the increased market base due to globalization, the Chinese movie industry has found itself in the dare need of great improvements to adapt the global market. As a result of the globalization effects on human daily life and culture, the movie industry has not been left behind either. This easy seeks to discuss the effects of globalization on the Chinese movie industry in the last few years. 1) Globalization. Joseph P. Danial describes Globalization as the increasing interconnectedness of people and societies and increasing interdependence of economies, governments and environments in his book, Global economic issues and policies, pg4. This means that developing and developed countries have a common effect to each other when it comes to culture and the human daily life. Cultures, manpower resources and material resources are exchanged amongst developing and developed countries and are highly competitive assets. In 2003, China took almost 10% of US $560 billion which is sum world global inflows of foreign investment (Dauderstädt et al., 2005). As a result, China retained almost all of her professionals in every field who had gained their knowledge abroad. This increased pressure on the traditional Chinese market resulting into more challenges. In the various policies support made overseas, foreign trained Chinese workforce come back and work in China and setting up companies. Such policies include the new ‘100 talents program’ announced by The Chinese Government. This program gives 2 million RMB to remarkable oversea scholars who will comes back and work in China（Zweig, Changgui and Rosen, 2004) There is no form of globalization that does not touch on or involve culture invasion. Globalization leads to constant exchange of different cultures from countries to countries. In the network information age, the media has played a significant role in improving the convergence of cultures. Every day American movies, Korean movies and all kinds of foreign movies are showed on the TV and internet, people connect with foreigners by click the button, and even the daily news reports the foreign news directly as a result of globalization.. 2) Chinese movie industry. History of Chinese movie industry. In 1905, China tried to make her first film which is called ‘Conquering Jun Mountain’. However, the Chinese movie industry tremendously kicked off with the movie called ‘The Difficult Couple’ which was filmed by Zheng Zhengqiu and Zhang Shichuan. Before the 1930s there was little reaction to movies in China. (Xiao, 2014). The Chinese movie industry experienced significant growth much later than western movie industries. The Chinese movie industry had two golden ages in history. First was the birth of Chinese movie industry in the 1930s. At that time the Chinese movie industry had already started to film a large number of Kung-Fu films which is the original form of today’s Kung-Fu film (Shaobai, 2006). The second was in the late 1940s, many famous movies like ‘San Mao’, ‘Crows and Sparrows’ and ‘The Spring River Flows East’ were made by Lian Hua Company at that time. These films are still famous in current China. At that time a form of movie known as, `The Heart Film` begun to spring up after the war of resistance against Japan. It was based on the war heroes and wishes of the civilians. The Heart Film is still used to promote the historical understanding. Some schools use this kind of film in history classes, because the Heart Film promotes nationalism which is needed when learning the history of China. In addition, many modern Chinese history movies were filmed by world famous directors who described the history in an attractive way. (Mungur, 2011). But the events of 1966 to 1976 commonly known as ‘The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ were a trying period for the Chinese movie industry (Donald W. Klein). For the first five years of ‘the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,’ China stopped filming movies and from 1972-1976 the Chinese government only allowed the shooting of films which described the spirit of the revolution. This decade changed the people’s perception of the Chinese movie industry though some people still have the whole idea wrong in the Chinese film industry to date. After the revolution, the Chinese movie industry opened a new page: During the period from 1980 to 1984 the Chinese movie industry produced almost 120 films per year with an average of about 25 billion audiences per year. (Shaobai, 2006). From then on the Chinese movie industry started to rise. From the above it is not difficult to see that China has a unique film pattern and subject matter which is a treasure to the Chinese movie industry. These treasures are crystals of long history and cultural traditions that no other country has experienced. The Chinese movie industry has made some considerable gains even with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and starting far much behind other countries. The Chinese movie industry in modern China. China has a large number of audiences in the world movie industry. In 2012, the Chinese movie industry surpassed the Japanese movie industry and become the second-largest cinema market in the world by earning US$2.69 billion. (Bettinson, 2013). Many of big and small cinemas have hence set up shop in China. For example in the province of Qingdao China, Wang Jianlin who is the owner of Wanda cinema is building a Movie City called Quindgao Oriental Movie Metropolis, it includes 20 studios, a film museum and a neighboring amusement park. The volume of investment is approximately $8.2 billion. (Coonan and McClintock, 2013). Today’s Chinese movie industry is much better and free than before. Modern Chinese movies not only inherited the history or Kung-Fu movie but have also been incorporated with new elements like Romanticism. For example, ‘My Kung-Fu girl friend’ this movie includes love, Kung-fu and comedy.(Shaobai.2006) In China, the movie industry does not only produce young fashion oriented action movies but also produce movies that reflect the Chinese history and the people’s daily life. These kinds of movies were brought about by directors known as China’s Fifth Generation. They include Chen Kaige, and Zhang Yimo amongst others, they came to the height of their careers in the 1990s.The content of their films were full of self-examination, responsibility and innovation. The Fifth Generation were good at finding the Chinese traditional culture and humanity.(Mungur ,2011). Their value as historical and sociological source material was also a factor. Their movies can be examined for portrayal of Chinese life and value, for the political or the social message that the maker (or the censors) wish to convey.’ said by Ralph C. Croizier. Although Chinese film industry has became much better than in the past, there still remains many problems which have slowed the pace of the Chinese movie industry development. To begin with, the export of good quality movies in large quantities is not enough except for the movies from famous directors. Most of the movies have poor camera qualities or unqualified content; as a result, they only have few audiences not considering the fact that the Chinese movie industry spends too much irrecoverable costs. As a report written by the Chinese Film Association noted that, 46.6% of the audiences thought of the Chinese movies to be of lesser quality, 64. 796% of the audiences thought of the Chinese movie themes as totally unreal and that the Chinese movie industry could not meet the demands of their audiences (Junpeng, 2006). Secondly, the Chinese movie industry is majorly under poor management. In China, the movie industry is under the control of The State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT). This department is tasked with jobs such as policy-making and supervising of the radio, film and television industries. This combination of all policy-making and supervisory duties under one state controlled department has slowed down the development of the movie industry in China (Huiqun, 2010）. The third factor is that the film shooting technique is not good enough. Most of the directors only focuses on the content of the movie and ignore the shooting and filming techniques. In china, only few cinemas can show 3D movies and only few movies are produced in 3D versions. Another problem is that most of the Chinese movies have no artistic value because the Chinese artists often value their own traditional art than any other artwork Croizier and Leyda, 1973). The modern Chinese movie industry has changed a lot compared to the Chinese movie industry in the past. The Chinese movie industry has been making progress though the progress has been slow. The modern Chinese movie industry inherited the traditional Kung-Fu movies and patriotic films. A combination of these subjects with modern emotion has made a fair amount of modern quality Chinese movies that have won some awards, but the good quality Chinese movies are still few. The impact of globalization on the growth of Chinese movie industry. Form the above the progress of the Chinese movie industry is very much clearly outlined though there are still many problems which obstruct the Chinese movie industry from adapting to globalization. It is well-known that globalization means the relationship between countries. As globalization becomes more significant the movie industries also get to share a lot in common. In March 2013, the administrators of the Chinese movie industry had a meeting about expanding the Chinese movie market and two reports were made. They were, `The Selling and Branding of Chinese-language’ and ‘Challenges, Opportunities and Partnership for Asia’s Film Industry’ (Bettinson, 2013). Some of the aspects of globalization as noted by Mark Lorenzen in the film industry are, namely globalization of 1) involvement in filmmaking; 2) film consumption; 3) film production; and 4) organization of filmmaking. According to Robins (1993), the film export is shifting in nature from being step-by-step internationalization of films produced for home audiences and released in subsequently windows abroad, to being a global phenomenon, where products produced for global audiences are released on many national markets simultaneously. Foreign movies in China In 1995, the Chinese government started to allow foreign movies into China, before that, the Chinese people had not seen much of the foreign movies (Lixiao, 2004) and because of globalization more and more foreign movies have been shown in China. Since China joined the WTO in 2001 and the effect of globalization, the Chinese audience seems to like to watch foreign movies and the rate of the box office of foreign movie rose every year. In 2013, the Chinese movie industry earned a total of 21.769 billion Yuan from the box office, from that 9.002 billion Yuan was earned by imported movies which was a rise of 2.30 % from 2012.(Donghong, 2014). From these rates it is clear that the Chinese movie industry earnings from foreign movies took all most half of the total amount of box office movie earnings in 2013. Thus globalization has made the Chinese movie industry to gain a fair amount of profit. Not only do the Chinese movie industry and the foreign movie imports into China own the Chinese movie market, in 2004, The Motion Picture Association of America established itself in Shanghai and Beijing. This is a big move that shows that the American film industry has started to pay a close attention to the Chinese movie industry and the Chinese audience in general. The Chinese movie industry has become a world famous industry over the past decades. Chinese movie in foreign countries: In the recent years, China has not only imported many foreign movies but has also released quite a number of outstanding movies. About fifty years ago, in 1966, a man named Bruce Lee shocked America and China due to portrayal of good Chinese Kung-Fu in his movies. In 1973, America and Hong Kong co-produced the movie Enter the Dragon that was a huge success (Bowman, 2013). From then on Chinese movies are well-known for their Kung-Fu techniques. In 2001, the movies Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon produced by a Chinese movie director Ang Lee won an Academy Award (Kenneth Chan, 2004). Besides these two movies, lots of Chinese movies have won intentional prizes and exported overseas, which means more and more Chinese movies have attracted foreign audiences because of globalization. Globalization has given many opportunities to the Chinese movie industry though there remain a lot of challenges that the Chinese movie industry needs to face. Globalization has created opportunities for Chinese movie industry. 1. Chinese movies can introduce and disseminate Chinese culture and history to foreigners. China is a country with 5000 years of histories and ancient cultures. Foreigners can learn these cultures and histories by watching the Chinese films, since movies are more visual than books. The movie To live which was produced by Zhang Yimou teaches audiences about modern Chinese history. To live has been highly recommended and has won lots of international prizes (Mungur, 2011). These two examples have showed us that some Chinese movies are much more meaningful and successful than common Chinese movies. This is an advantage for the Chinese movie industry which can be used to win the global markets. 2. Globalization gives Chinese actors and directors chances to develop their careers to become world famous. Apart from Bruce lee and Ang Lee there are many Chinese movie stars who have became popular globally in the movie markets. The American movie industry cooperation with the Chinese industry has achieved a lot of success. In 2012, the movie, Life in Pi won numerous awards both in China and America. This film combined the narrative techniques of American movies with the Chinese subject matter which helped it to gain the global success (Bettinson, 2013). This example shows that the Chinese movie industry still has many artworks in the film industry and that there is the need to discover or develop these artworks. Chinese movie industry`s need to be faced with challenges brought about by globalization 1) The high level of competition in the global movie market as a result of globalization. Many Chinese movies earned large amounts of money in the local movie market, but when they were exported to the overseas market it was the other way around. In 2011, Wu Xia, the film produced by famous director Peter Chan earned USD $1032857 in Hong Kong, but in America it only earned US$ 11,137(Bettinson, 2013). Like the Bruce Lee’s Kong-Fu movie, Wu Xia didn’t capture the attention of audiences from overseas. Apart from the movies from Hollywood there are also some movies from other Asia countries. The Indian movie, Slumdog Millionaire made a huge success in China and earned more than any other movies from Asia countries from the boxing-office (Huiqun, 2010). It can be said that the competition in the Asian movie industries is sometimes even harder than in western movie industries. For these kinds of situations, the Chinese supervisory departments established laws to protect the Chinese movie industry. For example, China limited the import of foreign movies and only allows import of 20 foreign movies per year. In order to protect the Chinese movie industry, foreign movies can only be given a two-third screening time. Many Chinese filmmakers are afraid of limiting of foreign movies because they can’t win movie awards like the Hollywood’s movies (Coonan, 2011). These kinds of policy are like double-edged swords which help the movie makers who are less famous or young to develop in the Chinese movie industry. On the other hand the limits of foreign movie will lighten the pressure from global movie markets and slow down development of Chinese movie industry. 2) Some traditional concepts remain in China which slow the development of Chinese movie industry in the global market In today’s Chinese movie industry, there remains a problem which is that not much directors have the spirit of self-examination. Some directors think much of earning from the box-office and ignore the feeling of the audience who keep copying the blockbuster movies from Hollywood. Since the Chinese filming techniques can’t catch up with the blockbuster Hollywood movies, their movies hence neither earn the money nor attract the audience. Conclusion: In general, the impacts of globalization on the growth of the Chinese movie industry are enormous and obvious. The relationship between China and other countries has become closer than in the past. Meanwhile, due to the expanding Chinese movie market, the producers, actors and related organizations need to adapt to the global movie market which is full of competitions and opportunities. The Chinese movie industry has made some good progress over the years, but it appears that it has not achieved the high level of expertise shown in the worldwide movie industry so far, not even in the Asian movie industry, let alone that in Hollywood. In order to adapt to the high levels of development in the global movie market, the Chinese movie industry needs more young movie makers and actors to let go some old traditions and rigid thoughts from the old movie makers. Secondly, the State Administration of Radio Film and Television should succeed some powers to other departments so that Chinese movie industry can be managed more precisely. Thirdly, the Chinese movie industry should increase the import volume of foreign movies. This is because the Chinese movie industry needs more pressure from overseas movie markets. Finally, the Chinese government should appropriate more funds to rebuild some cinemas and update film screening techniques in order to allow more cinemas play 3D or IMAX movies. The Chinese movie industry has made some achievements over the years, but when compared to the western movie industry it still has got long way to go. Reference list 1. Bettinson, G. (2013) ‘Journey to the West: Chinese movies in the global market’, Asian Cinema, 24. pp. 259 – 270 2. Bowman, P. (2013) Beyond Bruce Lee: Chasing the Dragon Through Film, Philosophy, and Popular Culture. United States: Columbia University Press. pp. 4–5 3. Chan, K. (2004) ‘The Global Return of the Wu Xia Pian (Chinese Sword-Fighting Movie): Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, Cinema Journal, 43(4), pp. 3–17. 4. Coonan, C. (2011) ‘Biz sticks to status quota.’ Variety, 422. p. 29http://jr3tv3gd5w.search.serialssolutions.com 5. Coonan, C. and McClintock, P. (2013) ‘China’s $8.2B Movie Mystery’, Hollywood Reporter, October. http://jr3tv3gd5w.search.serialssolutions.com 6. Croizier, R. and Leyda, J. (1973) ‘Chinese Movies and Modern Chinese History’, The Journal of Asian Studies. Association for Asian Studies, 32(3), pp. 501–505. 7. Daniels, J. and VanHoose, D. (2003) Global Economic Issues and Policies with Economic Applications: College Edition. United States: South-Western, Division of Thomson Learning. 8. Dauderstädt, M., Head, Unit, I. P. A., Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, Germany, Stetten, J., Head, Project, G., Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Berlin and Germany (2005) ‘China and Globalisation’, Intereconomics. Springer, 40(4), pp. 226–234. 9. Donghong, H. (2014) ‘The research of Chinese movie industry development’, Media.http://media.people.com.cn/n/2014/1126/c390954-26099447.html 10. Huiqun, L. (2010) ‘Opportunities and challenges of globalization for the Chinese film industry’, Global Media and Communication, 6.pp. 323 – 328. 11. Mungur, A. (2011) ‘Chinese Movies and History Education: The Case of Zhang Yimou’s “To Live”’, History Compass, 9(7), pp. 518–524. 12. Shaobai, L. (2006) A Historical Development of Chinese Cinema. China: Higher Education Press. 13. Xiao.L,(2014)‘FilmIndustryinChina’.http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/film/84966.htm 14. Zweig, D., Changgui, C. and Rosen, S. (2004) ‘Globalization and Transnational Human Capital: Overseas and Returnee Scholars to China’, The China Quarterly, 179, pp. 735–757. 15. Mark Lorenzen, (2008). Globalization of the Film Industry. 16. Robins, J.A. (1993). Organization as strategy – restructuring production in the film industry, Strategic Management Journal Read More