Film Industry in China: Development and Opening-up

Date: 2 August 2012, 4:15 pm

Place: 22 Kelburn Parade Room 104, Kelburn Campus, Victoria University

Speaker: Dr Kang Xuejun, China Centre Visiting Fellow, Associate Professor at the College of Humanities, Hebei University of Economics and Business

As an important part of China’s cultural industry, the film industry is a symbol of the national soft power. The recent years have witnessed a rapid increase in the quantity of film products, sales at the box office, the number of film companies and cinemas. In comparison with well developed film industry in other countries, particularly the United States, there are concerns in the development of the film industry in China. Despite the increase in the total film products and sale at the box office, the average box office revenue is still low. The market for domestic produced films is relatively small and audiences are smaller compared to those for foreign films. The international influence of Chinese films overseas is also limited. They are internationally not competitive. Moreover, ratio of revenue over cost in production of Chinese films is very low. Most of them have high capital input but little return in revenue.

Dr Kang will first look at issues in the development of China’s film industry: content creation, art design, technology and production, and argue that China’s film industry experiences insufficient content creation, constraints in quality art work and technology, and low degree of industrialization which seem to be the main challenges to the industry’s further development. The seminar will then explore how the film industry faces the competition of foreign films in Chinese cultural sector in the expansion of foreign film import quotas, co-production with foreign film makers, censorship, and intellectual property protection.

About the speaker

Dr XueJun Kang is an associate professor at the College of Humanities, Hebei University of Economics and Business, China. Dr Kang graduated from Soochow University and earned her PhD in Chinese Literature. Her current research projects focus on the development of cultural industry and intangible heritage protection in China. She is currently a visiting fellow at the NZ Contemporary China Research Centre, working on a project on film industry in China.