Chengdu, China – A decade ago, as China closed in on membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), key negotiators now say, it wasn’t talk of opening a huge market to grain or machinery that threatened talks: It was haggling over movies, the ultimate soft-power export.
Today, Chinese consumer confidence has soared. That has lifted movie ticket sales, which jumped 64 percent in 2010 to $1.5 billion, thanks partly to a 3-D craze and a mushrooming of cinemas in China. But what’s also grown is official wariness of the influence of foreign media, so much so that Beijing – a WTO member since 2001 – has all but ignored a March WTO deadline to open film distribution to greater foreign participation, and has refused to discuss the annual cap of 20 imported films.
MONITOR QUIZ: Weekly news quiz for May 23- 27, 2011
In late May, taking a page out of China’s 1972 playbook – when Beijing gave two rare black-and-white bears to Washington’s National Zoo after President Nixon’s historic visit – envoys from DreamWorks Animation went to Sichuan Province bearing “Kung Fu Panda 2,” part of DreamWorks’s effort to establish a paw-hold in the globe’s fastest-growing movie market. The China Film Group
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