In April 2016, as Marvel Studios prepared to release Dr Strange, it ran into controversy. In adapting the source comic to screen, the studio had changed the ethnicity of a key character, the “Ancient One,” from Tibetan to Celtic, casting white British actress Tilda Swinton for the role. When the first trailers were released, American fans were horrified, accusing the studio of racism. In defence of the decision, scriptwriter Robert Cargill went on the record as saying the switch was necessary due to the sensitivities around Tibetan representation in the PRC. A non-Tibetan character would minimize potential offence to the Chinese government and guarantee access to the Chinese box office. The move seems to have worked: eight months later, Dr Strange earned US$44.4 million in its opening weekend in China. The consequences stateside were less salubrious. In July 2020, then-US attorney general William Barr gave a speech on Hollywood's capitulation to Chinese censorship at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum. Dr Strange was one of his prime examples.

This debacle nicely illustrates the multiple geopolitical, cultural and financial interests the US film industry must juggle as it negotiates access to the world's largest film market. But, as Hollywood in China makes clear, Dr Strange is, historically, a far from exceptional example of the compromises required to sustain this transpacific relationship. Instead, the film's production and its reception bring into focus not simply the Chinese and US film industries’ primary stakeholders, but also, crucially, the central conundrum – to resist, collaborate or co-opt – that has underpinned the Sino-Hollywood courtship for over a century. Marshalling industrial analysis and individual character sketches alongside vignettes of key releases, Ying Zhu maps how both parties have responded to this challenge, from the early-20th century to the present day.

Structured chronologically, Hollywood in China falls roughly into two halves. The first four chapters cover the period up to the 1990s; the latter five focus on the relationship from the 1990s to the present. A brief, personal portrait of the Paris Theatre – a famous Shanghai landmark that became the Huaihai Cinema after the revolution but now lies beneath a shopping mall – sets the scene before we move directly into the first two chapters, on the American and Chinese film industries to 1949. Hollywood both dominated the early Chinese film market and served, through the privately run studio system, as its model. Yet the 1920s also saw the earliest arguments for cinema as a tool of education and nation building, alongside initial attempts to resist this dominance through industrial consolidation and censorship regulations. Tensions between emulation and resistance sharpened across the 1930s and 1940s, as the Japanese invasion, China's entry into the Second World War and, after 1945, civil war and hyperinflation further marginalized Hollywood's influence. But it was not until the start of the Korean War that the Communist government fully committed to the nationalization of the film industry along Soviet lines. As chapter three shows, post-1949 plans for a Beijing Cinema Village – a centralized production site along the lines of a Hollywood back lot – were only officially quashed in October 1952, while local audiences were initially ambivalent about watching Soviet and Soviet-style cinema. Even after the industry pivoted fully to a socialist model, Hollywood lived on through the shadow archives of “internal reference films” – foreign movies amassed for elite private viewing – the influence of which is explored in chapter four.

If the first half of Hollywood in China is, broadly speaking, a studio history, the second focuses on policy shifts, individuals and significant films. Chapters five and six discuss the PRC's co-option of Hollywood imports to stimulate the domestic industry during its transition to a market-driven model in the 1990s; the revival of concerns about resisting Hollywood in the run-up to WTO accession; and the subsequent growth of, and battle for dominance over, the Chinese domestic market after 2001 – a battle in which collaboration and resistance were intimately entwined. Chapter seven shifts to popular Chinese film genres of the 2010s, mapping how the rise of New Year films, leitmotif blockbusters and comic franchises like Xu Zheng's Lost in… series helped limit Hollywood's incursions into the domestic box office. Chapter eight then considers both the Chinese film industry's investments in Hollywood, and the challenges posed to these investments by the re-politicization of the cinematic relationship in the Xi–Trump era. The final chapter takes stock of the present, asking whether we are really seeing a Sino-Hollywood decoupling while identifying what Zhu considers will be the relationship's key impediments in the near future.

With its focus on the longue durée, this book effectively contextualizes current dynamics in relation to longer trends. While focusing primarily on policy, production and distribution, it also considers questions of exhibition and reception. Its later, contemporary sections are inevitably less focused than its earlier chapters, reflecting the difficulty of assessing present-day volatility. Nonetheless, Hollywood in China folds an unusually broad range of industry data into an over-arching historical narrative: as a one-stop shop for facts and figures about the Chinese film market, and Hollywood's presence therein – about what happened, where and when – it is therefore invaluable.