Hollywood in China

Friday, 24 February 2023, 4:30pm (HKT) at CVA 1022

China surpassed North America to become the world ’s largest movie market in 2020 amidst the Covid woe in the North America market. Formerly the focus of exotic fascination in the golden age of Hollywood, today the Chinese are a make-or-break audience for Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. The talk parallels, in a broad stoke, the origins and evolutions of the American and Chinese film industries as it traces and tracks the ups and downs of Sino-Hollywood entanglement under the sway of the larger political, economic, and cultural forces, domestic and international. Blending cultural history, business, and international relations, the talk charts multiple power dynamics and teases out how competing political and economic interests as well as cultural values are manifested in the art and artifice of filmmaking on a global scale, and with global ramifications.

YING ZHU is the founding editor and editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed academic journal Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images (University of Michigan Publisher). Her research areas encompass Chinese cinema and media, Sino-Hollywood relations, serial dramas on TV and via streaming, and youth digital culture. She is the author to four research monographs including Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market (2022) and Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television (2013), six co-edited books including Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds (2019) and Art, Politics and Commerce in Chinese Cinema (2010). Zhu is the recipient of a US National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship. Her writings have appeared in major academic journals including Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and Screen as well as major media outlets such as The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, etc. She reviews manuscripts for major publications and evaluates grant proposals for research foundations in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Sweden, and the U.K. Previously a faculty at the City University of New York, Dr. Zhu is currently a professor in the Academy of Film, The School of Creative Arts at the Hong Kong Baptist University.

For enquiries: mkcheung@hkbu.edu.hk

Organised by Centre for Media and Communication Research and Research Postgraduate Studies Program, School of Communication