National Review Online
Wednesday, May 26, 2021
Action-movie star John Cena’s fulsome and
abject apology for having offended China by referring in passing
to Taiwan as a “country” while promoting his new movie F9 may
have set a new low for cringing cravenness in Hollywood. As the celebrated wit
David Burge said on Twitter, “I can’t blame John Cena, he can’t risk his career
by being hauled up before the Beijing House Un-Chinese Activity Committee.”
These days Hollywood is so obsessed with growth in the
Chinese marketplace that studios have routinely granted Chinese interests 75
percent of every box-office dollar its films generate there, edited storylines
to please Chinese censors (bye-bye, Tibetan character in Doctor Strange),
and, in Disney’s case, even badgered a U.S. magazine to scrub an eight-year-old
reference made by its Oscar-winning Nomadland director Chloé
Zhao to the lies and repression back in her native country. Movies such
as 2012 and The Martian reek with flattery
for the ingenuity and humanitarianism of red China. That Cena has spent more
than ten years studying Mandarin Chinese is a clarifying detail: Hollywood
types are willing to go to stupendous lengths to please the world’s
soon-to-be-biggest movie market.
The movie business fancies itself a fierce opponent of
racism, sexism, and excessive carbon emissions, even as it habitually
prostrates itself before a regime that subjugates Muslims, perpetuates female
infanticide on a breathtaking scale, and burns so much coal that its carbon
emissions are more than double those of the U.S. Every Academy Awards ceremony
bristles with disgust for the supposed pervasiveness of injustice in America,
and at any given moment, Hollywood is threatening to boycott this or that state
over some allegedly intolerable legislative act. Yet it’s hard to picture just
what level of obsequiousness Hollywood might not consider in exchange for the
right to continue to claim one out of every four dollars its movies generate in
China. Last year, in the credits of the remake of Mulan, Disney
thanked the “security agency” that persecutes Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.
Hollywood folk are far from alone in endangering their
kneecaps in servility to Beijing; self-styled “King” LeBron James proved a
vassal to Xi Jinping when he spouted CCP propaganda in rebuttal to the support
for Hong Kong’s democracy movement expressed by the Houston Rockets general
manager Daryl Morey. Mark Zuckerberg, who is desperate for Facebook to be
unblocked in China, has given unctuous speeches there in Mandarin in an effort
to seem like a friend of the regime. Apple lobbied against a bill that would
punish forced-labor factories in China by preventing their goods from being
exported to the U.S.
Yet Hollywood’s taste for Chinese shoe leather sets the
standard. When Chinese censors demanded Quentin Tarantino remove from Once
Upon a Time in Hollywood a (hilarious) scene that mocked Seventies
Hong Kong action star Bruce Lee, Tarantino told China to stuff it. Tarantino’s
willingness to defend his work was so wildly uncharacteristic of his industry
that it made headlines, so don’t hold your breath expecting any of his peers to
stick up for the principle of saving art from authoritarians. Hollywood, that
great American institution, is well on its way to being a wholly owned
subsidiary of China, Inc.
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