[While China’s film industry has long sought both to emulate and compete with Hollywood, the runaway success of “Dangal” has prompted Chinese production companies to turn their gaze from West to East. Suddenly, Chinese companies are racing to snap up all things Bollywood — partnerships and distribution rights, but also Indian directors and screenwriters. And that has led to some unease.]
By
Amy Qin
 |
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Chinese
women posed in front of a poster for the Indian film “Dangal” at a Beijing
theater
in May. The movie was a big hit at the Chinese box office.
Credit
Andy Wong/Associated Press
|
BEIJING
— One of the most popular
movies in China over the summer ran 161 minutes, so long that it was sometimes
shown with an intermission. Unlike Hollywood blockbusters, there were no
special effects, speeding cars or epic battle scenes. Nor was the film a
Chinese production with a Chinese cast.
Instead, it won over audiences with a simple
but powerful tale: the true story of a man’s quest to train two daughters to
become world-class wrestlers — in India.
Featuring the Bollywood star Aamir Khan,
“Dangal” was India’s first big hit at the Chinese box office. It took in more
than $194 million in two months, making it one of the 20 highest-grossing films
of all time in China. In cinemas across the country, moviegoers cheered and
grew misty-eyed in one particularly moving scene as the Indian flag was raised
to the tune of the Indian national anthem.
While China’s film industry has long sought
both to emulate and compete with Hollywood, the runaway success of “Dangal” has
prompted Chinese production companies to turn their gaze from West to East.
Suddenly, Chinese companies are racing to snap up all things Bollywood —
partnerships and distribution rights, but also Indian directors and
screenwriters. And that has led to some unease.
China and India are engaged in a wary
competition for regional influence and leadership. For much of the summer, the
two nations were locked in a border standoff over a remote mountain pass in the
Himalayas.
But more and more, the two Asian giants are
also competing to project soft power — or cultural influence — outside their
borders. And “Dangal” has revived concerns in China that it is falling behind.
“China’s development has been very
comprehensive in terms of politics, economics and military,” said Jiang
Jingkui, director of the Southeast Asian Research Institute at Peking
University.
“But in terms of soft power, India has done
better than China,” Mr. Jiang said. “Although India’s economy is not as
developed, they have put a huge emphasis on promoting their culture, including
things like Buddhist traditions and yoga.”
China’s anxieties about India are colored to
an extent by widespread stereotyping. People here often invoke India as an
example for why China, with its even larger population, is not ready for
democracy.
Some call Indians “a-san,” a derogatory term
that was once used to refer to the Sikh guards who worked in Shanghai’s British
settlement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In more recent years, the
public perception of India has largely been shaped by Chinese state media, which
tends to highlight stories on India’s caste system and the treatment of women
in Indian society.
At times, those state media reports have
taken on blatantly racist overtones. In August, Xinhua, the official news
agency, released a short video exhorting India to retreat from the continuing
standoff at the Sikkim border. The three-minute clip featured someone wearing a
turban and a fake beard in an apparent attempt to mock Sikhs, who make up a
religious minority in India.
Experts say that underpinning such views is a
belief widely shared among Chinese that while India may be a regional force to
be reckoned with, it also lags behind China in terms of development. According
to a survey by the Pew Research Center published last year, just 26 percent of
Chinese hold a favorable view of India, down from 33 percent in 2006. (The
feeling is apparently mutual: Another Pew Research Center survey from last year
showed that just 31 percent of Indians view China favorably.)
Even today, the word that most often comes up
in discussions about India is luan — or chaos.
“There’s a perception among Chinese that
India is dirty and unsafe,” said Tansen Sen, a history professor at New York
University Shanghai. “Even though Indian movies have been popular, Chinese
tourists still don’t go to India. They would rather go to Sri Lanka or Nepal.”
Indians, for their part, are also less than
enthusiastic about China. Ever since 1962, when the two countries engaged in a
brief but bloody border war, India has been highly suspicious of China and its
intentions.
While both countries have made overtures
toward friendship over the years, touting their 2,000 years of contact and
shared Buddhist traditions, in last year’s Pew survey, many Indians expressed
concerns about a number of topics, including China’s economic impact on India
(70 percent), China’s growing military power (69 percent), China’s relationship
with Pakistan (48 percent), India’s main rival, and Chinese and Indian
territorial disputes (69 percent).
“The newspapers in India all tend to
reinforce the same view,” said Mr. Sen, who was born in India and moved to
China at the age of 14. “That is: The Chinese cannot be trusted.”
Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has
made it a priority to increase its cultural influence around the world. The
country has sought to burnish its spiritual image by promoting itself as the
birthplace of Buddhism and yoga. Indian novelists and poets have gained global
name recognition around the world, even in China. There is also Bollywood,
which has put Indian filmmaking on the map, while global hits like “Slumdog
Millionaire” and, more recently, “Lion,” have given a prominent platform to
Indian actors and stories.
Similarly, China has made no secret of its
soft power ambitions. The outcome of its most ambitious soft power project to
date — President Xi Jinping’s $1 trillion One Belt, One Road initiative —
remains to be seen. Official news outlets like China Central Television and
Xinhua have ramped up overseas operations as part of a broader effort to report
global news “from a Chinese perspective.”
Some of China’s attempts to project cultural
influence have stumbled. An ambitious initiative to set up Confucius Institutes
on university campuses, for example, has attracted widespread criticism. And
despite having made huge investments to build up its film industry, China has
struggled to produce a big crossover hit since Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon” in 2000. Even Zhang Yimou’s “The Great Wall”, thought to be
China’s best shot in recent years at making a global blockbuster, mostly
flopped at box offices outside China.
Some have come out in defense of the Chinese
film industry, arguing that it is still relatively young. But the discussion
around “Dangal” came at a time when many Chinese are expressing concerns that
their film industry — in its quest to catch up with Hollywood — has become too
narrowly focused on profit and entertainment over quality and substance.
“In China, the decisions are made by the
people who have money,” said Gu Wancheng, senior vice president at Peacock
Mountain Films, which specializes in Chinese and Indian collaborations. “But
these people typically don’t have a feeling for a good story. They would rather
invest in big stars or special effects.”
Perhaps going back to basics and taking
lessons from Bollywood, some say, could mitigate that problem.
“In Bollywood it’s different,” Ms. Gu added.
“People there have the self-confidence to say that ‘we can tell this story
well.’”
