Shang Chi and Hollywood vs China
Hollywood has been making strong efforts to appeal to the Chinese market. How will the new Chinese censorship laws affect these efforts?
SPOILER WARNING if you haven’t seen the film!
Shang Chi was a blast, of course. Most Marvel movies are fun. But Shang Chi stands out from the others in the same way that Black Panther does: it has more heart and more genuine feeling than most other Marvel films. The reason for this is obvious. Shang Chi and Black Panther are for and about other people and cultures that the white patriarchy has systematically marginalised for centuries, which gives both films a deeper sense of meaning and identity.
In the case of Shang Chi, perhaps this is due to the great efforts put in by the studio to include authentic cultural elements to court the significant Chinese market. After all, the Chinese market has steadily grown to constitute about 20% of Marvel's box office revenue. Yet, in an ironic twist, China recently banned Shang Chi from playing in the country, and will possibly ban Marvel's upcoming The Eternals as well. Reportedly, the ban is due to the fact that Shang Chi's comic origins are extremely racist, with Shang Chi's father being the original Fu Manchu that later on epitomised racist portrayals of Asian people. Naturally, China objected to the character's history, even though Marvel head Kevin Feige desperately did his best to explain that Fu Manchu was in fact not Marvel any more. Said Feige, “Definitively, Fu Manchu is not in this movie, is not Shang Chi’s father, and again, is not even a Marvel character, and hasn’t been for decades.”
But China has also been cracking down on its own entertainment industry recently in an attempt to recontextualise its image, moving more towards conservatism and further from the more liberated image of foreign entertainment figures (including K-Pop stars such as BTS, which China has banned for having an "effeminate image" that no longer fits with their move towards more traditional masculinity). So what does this mean for films like Shang Chi, which are targeted specifically at Chinese audiences? This weeding out of media that does not fit with China's push for more conservative moral values is likely to hurt Hollywood. Last year, for example, China enacted a total media blackout when Mulan was released, leading the film to completely flop in a market that Disney had been specifically targeting with that film, much like with Shang Chi.
Yet, Marvel and Disney probably had high hopes for Shang Chi, having brought in legends such as Tony Leung and Michelle Yeoh to buff up its cast. And considering that the highest grossing film in China is Avengers: Endgame, Marvel even had good reason to put its faith in Shang Chi. Not to mention that the Chinese theatrical market bounced back strongly from the pandemic, as opposed to the American one, which is still struggling miserably. But ultimately, considering the political shift in China's entertainment industry, it seems that no matter what Hollywood does to appeal to Chinese viewers, there is no longer much space for foreign entertainment in China. This begs the questions: will we continue to get movies like Shang Chi, Mulan or Crazy Rich Asians? And if we do (because the Chinese market is too valuable to lose at this point), how will Hollywood adapt to China's strict censorship? Is the content of Hollywood films going to change to suit these new restrictions?
Shang Chi is the best film Marvel has produced since Black Panther, and this is largely because of Marvel’s need to appeal to Chinese viewers. If Hollywood decides to commit to the Chinese market, even despite the new restrictions, would that mean we get more films like Shang Chi? Because if so, then one has to wonder whether Hollywood catering to China would really be the worst thing in the world. Black Panther worked well, after all, because it did not cater to what is conventionally viewed as the principal target audience of the superhero genre, which is white American heterosexual men. Instead, it catered to black men and women, their history, and their heritage. If catering to Chinese audiences means we get more varied storytelling and more active inclusion of other cultural traditions and histories, then why not? Hollywood is hardly going to lose its commitment to American capitalism anyway, so its compromise with China might yield some creative storytelling with strong potential.
At the very least, catering to China is doing something that would have otherwise been a wild fantasy: it is giving representation to Chinese minorities in the US and other parts of the world in much the same way that Black Panther did for black people. That is, it is forcing films to not settle for ‘token diversity,’ but rather to go the extra mile in embracing the breadth of cultural history and the collective experience of the people in question. Were it not for Hollywood’s need to appeal to Chinese viewers, how long would Chinese communities throughout the rest of the world have had to wait for a rich, layered, and authentic hero to represent them in films?
We must admit that it is refreshing to watch a big blockbuster film that has people other than white (heterosexual and middle-aged) American men at its core. The wuxia element of Shang Chi, as well as the fact that the characters speak in Chinese for a considerable portion of the film, gave the film a sense of cohesiveness and of cultural identity that is simply lacking in other Marvel films. Ant-Man was funny, sure. And Avengers: Infinity War and Engdame were huge, expensive spectacles. But none of them had culture. And none of them had an identity, or a soul. Black Panther and Shang Chi do, and what they have in common is that they are decidedly not about or for the conventional target demographic of superhero media. (Which is also another reason why it's long past time Hollywood realised that straight white boys are not the main consumers of action films any more, and that they haven't been in a long time, according to multiple studies).
Shang Chi and Black Panther are what happens when Hollywood makes an actual effort to embrace other peoples and other cultures. And they're not even perfect films! The CGI in both is abysmal, even. But they're so much more memorable than Doctor Strange or Ant-Man. China's new restrictions will be an obstacle for Hollywood (and other foreign entertainment industries), but if Hollywood decides to continue what it started with Shang Chi and Black Panther, then perhaps the Marvel franchise could occasionally be peppered with meaningful films in the future.
By R. Jordan Ortiz