Red Carpet

Channel, a twenty-four-hour network that introduced shows like Darkwing Duck and characters like Pluto in short order. Once families grew attached to the characters, Disney would open toy stores where they could express that love by buying stuffed animals and action figures. Only then would the company consider spending billions of dollars to build a theme park, which families wouldn't visit if they hadn't been seeded with affection for the characters in the years-long campaign. China would get its park, but on Disney's time line.

Like China's ruling party, Disney operated in five-year plans, and in the mid-1990s, a crucial part of that plan was generating more business overseas. Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola and Ford were selling soda and cars to the Chinese, while Disney remained heavily weighted in the domestic sphere-about 80 percent of its revenue came from American consumers during this time. The Chinese, though, "had a lot of money under their mattress," as Lawrence Murphy, then Disney's chief strategic officer, told his colleagues. The one-child policy, enacted in 1980, had spawned a generation of only children in Chinese homes; for the first time in recent history, Chinese parents had money to spend on their children. Just a few decades earlier, Western entertainment had been banned in China, and only top officials had TV sets. The 1990s would be a decade in which China, in the eyes of American business, turned from a country into a market.

All of that promise and ambition were suddenly endangered in 1996, when Murphy received a phone call to his Los Angeles office. It was the Chinese embassy in Washington. An official there had called Disney's general line and been directed to Murphy.

"You started, in the last forty-eight hours, shooting a film in Morocco about the Dalai Lama called Kundun," the embassy official said.

Murphy was dumbstruck. He had never heard of a movie called Kundun. He barely paid a

take that risk, you won t be disappointed by following Schwartzel down this particular rabbit hole. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Fascinating and disturbing. . . . Avid viewers will be surprised by this exposé of the seedy partnership between Hollywood and the Chinese government. Kirkus (starred review)

Schwartzel makes an eye-opening debut with this accomplished account of how soft power namely, entertainment helped China become one of the most influential players on the global stage. . . . An illuminating look at what China learned from Hollywood, and why Hollywood needs China to survive. It s a fascinating take on the crossroads of film and global politics. Publishers Weekly

Schwartzel s narrative emphasizes the trajectories of specific films and is leavened by interviews with directors and studio executives as well as a sophisticated understanding of internal Chinese political dynamics. Booklist

China s growing influence on Hollywood has been one of the biggest, and least understood, stories in the world. Erich Schwartzel brilliantly blends groundbreaking reporting, riveting stories, and brave analysis to reveal the enormous stakes involved for American popular culture and democracy itself. Like a great movie, this book is hugely entertaining and changes the way you look at the world.   Ben Rhodes, author of After the Fall
 
Wow. It s no secret that, for years, Hollywood moviemaking has been in a substantive free-fall. But saying so would get you called a Cassandra because you re ruining so-and-so s dinner party with your slanderous conjecture. Well, now Erich Schwartzel s written a whole book a lucid, engrossing, rigorously, adventurously reported book; a shocking book, honestly about one industry s acquiescent collapse in the face of another s ascent. For money. The studios might now be flush with cash. But this book reveals the ways in which the American end of the business is near its end. It illustrates how there is no American movie industry if in greedily seeking to conquer China it just wound up conceding to it. Here s the rare feat of investigative culture journalism that doesn t aim for gossip yet, somehow, is all the juicer for it. Every couple of pages holds another jaw-dropper. It s made me smarter about both Hollywood and China. No more conjecture from me. Next dinner party, I m making the skeptics eat Schwartzel s receipts. Wesley Morris, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism
 
What s the Hollywood version of the U.S.-China relationship? A story in which John Wayne plays Genghis Khan, and Kung Fu Panda inspires great angst among Communist Party officials, and Avatar, the highest-grossing movie of all time, gets pulled from Chinese theaters and is replaced by a biopic about Confucius. The fact that all of these things really happened is what makes Erich Schwartzel s Red Carpet so vivid and entertaining. By examining the history of Hollywood and China in unprecedented detail, Schwartzel illuminates the larger geopolitical culture clash that is likely to shape the world for years to come. Peter Hessler, author of Oracle Bones and The Buried
 
In the ongoing ideological struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, popular entertainment has emerged as an unlikely but critical battleground. Epic in scope and meticulously researched, Red Carpet reads like dispatches from the front lines of this war, whose outcome will help to determine our future. Always compelling and often chilling, Erich Schwartzel's invaluable work shows how the power of narrative continues to change the world. David Henry Hwang, Tony Award winner for M. Butterfly and Pulitzer Prize finalist for Soft Power

It's often presumed that American companies have to toe the Communist Party's line to access China's markets. Erich Schwartzel's new book offers us a commanding and fly-on-the-wall account of how Beijing has come to own Hollywood and change a hallmark of the American culture. Lingling Wei, co-author of Superpower Showdown

Erich Schwartzel sheds fresh light and understanding on the evolution of Hollywood s fraught relationship with the Chinese Communist Party as well as the nature of this century s high stakes competition between totalitarianism and democracy. The story in Red Carpet demonstrates how, in art and in life, the Party coopts and coerces leaders across the free world to support its violent self-conception as a one-party nation with no room for plurality except on its own rigid terms. Please read this book and demand that those who sit in Hollywood s board rooms stop sacrificing principle on the altar of profit. Lt. General H.R. McMaster (Ret.), former National Security Advisor and author of Battlegrounds and Dereliction of Duty

In this highly entertaining but deeply disturbing book, Erich Schwartzel demonstrates the extent of our cultural thrall to China. His depiction of the craven characters, American and Chinese, who have enabled this situation represents a significant feat of investigative journalism. His narrative is about not merely the movie business, but the new world order. Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon

In the ongoing ideological struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, popular entertainment has emerged as an unlikely but critical battleground. Epic in scope and meticulously researched, Red Carpet reads like dispatches from the front lines of this war, whose outcome will help to determine our future. Always compelling and often chilling, Erich Schwartzel's invaluable work shows how the power of narrative continues to change the world. David Henry Hwang, Tony Award winner for M. Butterfly and Pulitzer Prize finalist for Soft Power

Erich Schwartzel has told a hugely entertaining and deeply revealing story about China s disturbing aspirations. Red Carpet is juicy and quietly damning, a brilliant anthropology of both Hollywood and Beijing. It s one of the most fun books about global politics I ve ever read. Franklin Foer, author of World Without Mind and How Soccer Explains the World