Hollywood’s New China Syndrome: The Country’s Enormous Audience Means Money For Movie Studios And Some Restrictions

People wait for tickets at a movie theatre in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, August 13, 2013. (Credit: Reuters/Darley Shen) How’s this for a good news-bad news situation? If you are in the business of making or selling movies, a market bigger than any you’ve ever dreamed of — a country of more than a billion people — has opened up, and its invigorated population is flocking to movies theaters in a way that Americans have lost their enthusiasm for. But the country is also a dictatorship (its constitution calls it a “people’s democratic dictatorship”) with an uneasy relationship to the West, a history of censorship, a government with no accountability or transparency and little tradition of the freedom of speech we take for granted here.