Mainstream cinema as a tool for China's soft power

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the description and on the analysis of China’s soft power and takes into consideration cinema as a tool to promote it. China has experienced an unprecedented economic growth in the last thirty years, and along with it, in the past few years, the Chinese film industry and market have experienced an important development as well. This dissertation is developed in three chapters. The first chapter gives an overview on the definition of the concept of soft power proposed by the political analyst Joseph S. Nye Jr. Then, it focuses on culture as one of the most important soft power tools, and on the entry of the concept of soft power in China, emphasizing the country’s first steps towards it. The second chapter analyses the country’s investments in the domestic film industry and American film market, followed by the analysis of three films, “Amazing China”, “American dreams in China” and “Wolf Warrior II” as an example in order to find a correlation between main melody films and the “China dream” for the first two and as an example of a successful soft power strategy for the last film. The last chapter concentrates on the collaborations between China and the United States, and on the issues that international spectators might find when watching Chinese films.