Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market
Ying Zhu
The New Press: 2022
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Movie stars and directors feel like second-degree personal friends, the kind you see at reunions and on Facebook. We keep up on their personal lives and wonder whether the current project is a reaction to a recent divorce or a new love interest. No one wonders those things about captains of industry or politicians, because the work those people do has a much more tenuous tie to their psychology. Film is very personal.

It’s that personal connection that makes a book like Hollywood in China satisfying. While it provides analysis of the economic development of China’s film industry, it also offers some of the dishy pleasure we look for from movie magazines, like how Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife) held private showings of Hollywood movies for her friends, that Mao himself liked Greta Garbo and Jiang Zemin, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, watched Titanic three times.

• Tags: Anne Stevenson-Yang, China, Issue 28, Ying Zhu