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Why Hollywood Thinks Trump Was Right About China

A candid conversation about China’s cultural imperialism, the rise and fall of Wang Jianlin, and how Beijing learned to beat Hollywood at its own game.

Matthew Belloni
January 21, 2022

One of the biggest business bungles of the 2010s might be how badly Hollywood got played by China. It’s downright embarrassing. An industry full of people with supposedly acute bullshit detectors pinned its hopes on a repressive government that offered no reason to be trusted, and business tactics designed to extract the knowledge needed to clone the product and dethrone its originator. Everyone went along with it, seeing only potential dollar signs.