Book Talk: Hollywood in China

China surpassed North America to become the world ’s largest movie market in 2020. 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 book 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.

Please RSVP here. This event will be held in-person with an option to join via Zoom. For non-Stanford affiliates who wish to join in-person, please review the library visitor access page.

About the Speaker:

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, and streaming media and serial narrative. She is the author to four research monographs including 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). 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 at the Hong Kong Baptist University.