Our problem isn’t too much buying from China — it’s too much selling to China.
There he goes again. Donald Trump, on Truth Social on Sunday evening:
The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death. Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States. Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated. This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda! Therefore, I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands. WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!
Of course, all things being equal, we’d like more movies to be shot in the United States, which requires competitive business and labor conditions. On the other hand, movie magic sometimes requires shooting on locations that just cannot be replicated in the U.S. Many classic Hollywood films were shot at least in part in foreign locales, including Lawrence of Arabia in Jordan and Morrocco, the Godfather films in Sicily and the Dominican Republic, To Catch a Thief on the French Riviera, the Lord of the Rings films in New Zealand, and the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films shooting in Tunisia and other foreign spots.
Moreover, as usual with his ideas about trade, Trump has one of the central problems precisely backwards. Hollywood may be full of homegrown bad political ideas, but for the most part (exceptions such as the live-action Mulan aside), we don’t get foreign propaganda in our movies because we are importing films shot in China or other foreign tyrannies. What the Chinese Communist Party has done to squelch dissent in the United States is, instead, to exploit our American film industry’s dependence upon exporting films to the Chinese market. Like the NBA, the more money that studios make exporting their product to audiences in China, the less they can offend the CCP. This has been an open secret for some time:
Even filmmaker Judd Apatow was stirring up tensions. In an interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber, he criticized Hollywood studios for bowing down to Chinese censors in American film and TV content for fear of tainting bigger business ties with China. “A lot of these giant corporate entities have business with countries around the world—Saudi Arabia or China, and they’re just not going to criticize them,” Apatow said. “And they’re not going to let their shows criticize them or they’re not going to air documentaries that go deep into truthful areas because they make so much money.” He went on: “So while we’re going, ‘Can we say this joke, can we not say that joke?,’ on a much bigger level they have just completely shut down critical content about human rights abuses in China, and I think that’s much scarier.”
Chris Fenton, author of the 2020 book Feeding the Dragon, Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma facing Hollywood, the NBA and American Business, has detailed a number of these controversies, such as the flap about Top Gun: Maverick removing a Taiwanese flag patch from Tom Cruise’s jacket. The 2012 Red Dawn remake famously substituted North Korea for China as the communist power invading the United States, which was comically silly. These sorts of decisions get made not just because a film might get censored or banned in China, but because the CCP will see to it that a studio’s entire output gets banned.
In short, China has leverage over our movie industry precisely because we have a trade surplus in exporting our films to China. That’s the exact opposite of the problem Trump claims to be fighting. If there’s good news to be had, it’s that American film revenues from China have been in sharp decline for several years now from their peak of a decade or so ago (and China is cracking down on them further in retaliation against Trump). But our problem isn’t too much buying from China — it’s too much selling to China.