Mr Xi in Hollywood: Basketball - and movies for China

By Andy Goldberg Feb 18, 2012, 2:06 GMT

Los Angeles - He was hosted at the White House, got a 19-gun salute at the Pentagon and sealed a massive soybean deal in Iowa.

But as the US trip of China's president-in-waiting Xi Jinping drew to a close in California Friday, the true highlights of the trip came firmly into focus: A 'historic' joint venture between Hollywood and some of China's most powerful media companies, and his scheduled visit to a Los Angeles Lakers basketball game.

As the Christian Science Monitor pointed out, China's vice president astutely wrapped up his visit with 'the two things that, perhaps, the Chinese people admire most about the US: films and basketball.'

But the Chinese politician, who is on track to take over as president of the People's Republic next year, was not just fawning to his future subjects.

His activities were also aimed at humanizing the face of the Chinese administration to the American public and help China build its own film industry into a global force, say US observers.

The 330-million-dollar deal ties Kung Fu Panda studio DreamWorks with China Media Capital (CMC) and Shanghai Media Group (SMG) - two of China's largest media companies, both of them state-owned - as well as with Shanghai Alliance Investment, Ltd (SAIL), which is owned by the city of Shanghai.

The joint venture will construct a new animation studio and will produce films, both animated and live action, as well as live entertainment, theme parks, interactive games and consumer products.

The deal appears to give Hollywood a greater crack at the Chinese market, where the Chinese government currently limits the number of foreign films to just 20 a year.

According to an analysis in Variety, the number of cinemas is booming in China and theatre owners need quality content to fill them.

'The Chinese are very frustrated that it was Hollywood and not them which came up with 'Kung Fu Panda',' Clayton Dube, associate director of the US-China Institute at the University of Southern California, told the Monitor. 'They said, 'Hey, Kung Fu is ours, pandas are ours. Why can't we do that?''

More importantly the deal reflects China's wish to emulate the US domination of cultural soft power through the use of its media around the world. 'Soft power refers to the ability to have people attracted to you, and that is what the US has in abundance and what Xi wants to know more about,' Dube said.

China's eagerness to ally itself with Hollywood's know-how could prod it to pay attention to one of the major US concerns about China: its lack of respect for intellectual property rights.

Both Xi and US officials have generally tried to gloss over any differences between the two countries during the visit. But the issue of official Chinese collusion in the rampant copying of movies, software and other US products was near the top of a list of grievances aired in a toast by US Vice President Joe Biden at a State Department dinner for the high-ranking guest earlier this week.

As Americans, we welcome competition,' Biden told a poker-face Xi. 'But cooperation, as you and I have spoken about, can only be mutually beneficial if the game is fair.'

Other issues mentioned by Biden included China's artificially depressed currency, limitations imposed on foreign technology companies, Chinese human rights and the country's stance on Syria.

Critics of the Obama administration accused it of soft-pedaling on China, with leading Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney accusing US President Barack Obama of being a 'supplicant to China.'

'On Day One of my presidency I will designate (China) a currency manipulator and take appropriate counteraction,' Romney promised on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

That will probably just turn out to be electoral bluster, blown away by the generally positive view most Americans have of China.

According to a recent Gallup Poll, most Americans see China as the world's leading economic power. Only 17 per cent viewed US-China relations as unfriendly; 13 per cent viewed China as an ally, while 63 per cent said it is friendly but not necessarily an ally.

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