A government’s contribution to its country’s creative industry can have instrumental effects in how the country thrives on an international market and how effectively and positively it is shown off to the rest of the world. With examples like the South Korean wave of popularity included K-Dramas and the international love of K-pop music, governments can create an image through their media as a method of presenting their culture in a positive manner as to warm others to their side, otherwise known as soft power (bringing people in through comforting and pleasing stuff as oppose to hard-core and aggressive stuff). China is a country that has increasingly used soft power to lessen their country’s more stand-offish presence and it has proved effective when looking at their economic growth and engagement with other countries, but how do they handle the creative industry and has it been effective when combining their efforts with other countries’  creative industries.

With China’s key industry being manufacturing as it has a past record of being a country that is well known for its creation and distribution of various material goods and services (dominating the bulk of the trade for over 13 years) , its pre-established creative industry is one that also has a lot of ground to stand on.  China is known for having one of the largest movie complexes in the world, the Oriental Movie Metropolis, as well as the third largest film industry by number of feature films produces annually in 2010, the second largest market in the world in 2013, and was expected to become the largest theatrical market in 2019. When movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero were released, it spawned various co-production films with other countries and there was a large scale demand for Chinese-language cinema on a international level. Since 1979, China had made 1,127 co-production films (mainly from countries like Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao), and has co-production agreements with countries like the U.K, France, Russia, New Zealand, Japan, and India.

But much like a lot of the industries in other countries, the politics and inner issues they are suffering from can impact the industry as well as the marketing and distribution around said market. China’s films were heavily motivated by the spread of leftist movements and Japanese Occupation during World War II, but it also affected the making of cinema. In the study, Re-nationalizing China’s film industry: case study on the China Film Group and film marketization, it brings up how China was also forced to reshape its system during the 1980s and 90s, ” gradually transforming from a state propaganda apparatus to a market-oriented, profit-driven enterprise”. This was similar to how other countries were handling their industries at the time and this convinced them to copy their ideals to keep in good favor with them, and China has used its ties to other countries as a method of using soft power to influence others on their image.

China took advantage of its industry power to create better connections with other countries and found a way to use that to further influence their content to other international markets.