OK, we are in the middle of a pandemic that is hitting the United States harder than any other major developed country. Going to a movie theater, especially in major US cities, is either not a viable choice or simply not a possible choice for most Americans. Lockdowns and fear. Some exhibition chains are closing for the time being (like Regal), while most are at least reducing hours and marketing new COVID protocols to get folks to see the few movies in release. Multiplexes affiliated with old world traditional malls are unlikely to survive as those bricks and mortar businesses are being forced to close by online shopping and the pandemic. The few malls that have traction have reinvented themselves as destination experiences (dining, entertainment, upscale retail, etc.). Small exhibitors probably don’t have the financial wherewithal to survive.
The largest non-US marketplace for mass entertainment is China. China plays games, censors, makes it difficult for American entertainment companies to extract their profits and constantly erects barriers for US companies to compete and collect. It’s far worse now under Donald Trump’s “blame China for everything” policy, but China has never played fairly under any standard. The political tensions between the US and China are played out in media and entertainment, in addition to technology and the trade war complexities, from sanctions to tariffs to out-and-out IP theft. But China is a huge market for American content. They’re even obsessed with American NBA basketball. But recent events show how very much the US entertainment industry and China seem to have an increasingly unhealthy relationship.
“For anyone who hasn’t been keeping tabs on things, consider what went down in September alone. First a PR crisis erupted over the Disney film Mulan, when it was pointed out that the film’s end credits thanked a number of Chinese entities in Xinjiang for allowing the company to film in the area, a region where authorities have been accused of running ‘reeducation camps’ that detain minority Muslim Uighurs. It was the film’s second comms crisis. The first came last year when star actress Yifei Liu posted her support of Hong Kong police on Weibo (loosely analogous to Twitter) despite their excessive force against pro-democracy protesters resisting the mainland Chinese government.
“The end-credit scandal prompted Republican Senator Marco Rubio and a handful of his bipartisan peers to send a letter on September 11 to the Walt Disney Co. inquiring about the company’s decision to film in Xinjiang.
“A week later, another letter was dashed off by five Republican Senators, this time directed to Netflix co-CEO and CCO Ted Sarandos. At issue was Netflix’s upcoming series based on Chinese author’s Liu Cixin’s popular sci-fi trilogy The Three-Body Problem, which is being adapted by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. The letter said that Liu had ‘parroted’ China’s Communist Party talking points in regards to the Xinjiang region in a comment to The New Yorker.” FastCompany.com, October 7th. The First Amendment (and hence the entertainment industry) is taking a beating from within the United States, and the United States, particularly the entertainment industry, is taking a beating from China.
The cute vignette-driven user-content-driven, China-owned TikTok is under fire from the Trump administration, which had already ripped and torn at China-based smart-phone Huawei Technologies engineering and manufacturer, as a major national security threat. The Department of Justice has been attempting to shut down TikTok, even attempting to block sale of an ownership interest in that company to a US buyer (Oracle).
“The Trump administration faces ongoing court battles after two legal setbacks in its efforts to bar U.S. app stores from offering Chinese-owned TikTok or WeChat for download. [The case continues.]… US Federal District Court Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, anticipated further legal filings by both the government and TikTok before a final decision on whether to block other restrictions set for Nov. 12.
“Nichols also rejected the Justice Department’s effort to invoke the Espionage Act, which authorizes life imprisonment or the death penalty for those who share U.S. defense secrets… ‘It is not plausible that the films, photos, art, or even personal information U.S. users share on TikTok fall within the plain meaning of the Espionage Act,’ Nichols wrote.” Reuters, September 28th.
Paul Bracken, Yale Professor of Management & Professor of Political Science, adds his professional observations (in the October 5th Yale Insights) on whether there may, in fact, be some legitimate national security risks to both ordinary citizens and the underlying government-supported infrastructure:
“There are serious security concerns for several companies owned by China based in the United States. TikTok is often presented as a frivolous threat, showing the paranoid view of spying on teenagers and innocuous chit chat. But TikTok is right in the heart of U.S. technology networks. It thereby has very easy access to credit reporting, outsourced specialized companies, iPhone systems, and advertisers. It should be said that U.S. regulators were asleep when this penetration developed, and that most of what Chinese companies did here was perfectly legal.
“U.S. intelligence has been asleep on this issue—that is, to assess what’s going on, what the threat is. The wall between foreign and domestic surveillance had a lot to do with this. Right now the U.S. government is trying to sort all of this jumble out, and so it may overreact as happened in the Cold War. On the other hand, it may underreact as well.” Bottom line, multinationals and companies that rely on revenues from nations with less-than-friendly relations with the United States now have to up their political gamesmanship, both in terms of intensifying lobbying (the “swamp”) and litigation. It’s no longer enough to view the big challenge as “competition”; today the “enemy” is “the government”… theirs and ours!
The issue is often equally dramatic with other digital miscreants, especially Russia, but the Trump administration, which has been asleep at the wheel on everything “digitally intrusive” except China, is uniquely China focused. What makes this particularly tough to US entertainment companies, who wish to avoid Chinese retaliation for Trump administration directives, is that China is such a huge and obviously lucrative marketplace. In the end, we need a more business-pragmatic approach, but one designed on an overriding concern for cyber-security from all relevant threats… and that simply has not happened.
I’m Peter Dekom, and a government that runs on vendettas, a belief that bullying is an effective trade policy, changes its policies in shoot-from-the-hip governance and is woefully inconsistent in its economic directives, isn’t good
for anyone, foreign or domestic.
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