A perspective on China film

Professor Huang Yingxia is President of the Beijing Film Academy. China is now the world’s fastest-growing film market, with a feature film being released into this enormous market at a rate of nearly two a day. The recent blockbuster that you will never have heard of - 'The Mermaid' - is now set to be the highest grossing film in Chinese history. Box office receipts in 2015 were almost $6.8bn. Western blockbusters are shown but over 60% of the market is domestic blockbusters which you have never heard of. Professor Huang was at primary school in Western Beijing during the Cultural Revolution where every morning they would proclaim together outside the windowless and empty classrooms, ‘Long live Chairman Mao’. “I remember we had to out newspapers over the windows and then a felt and cotton curtain in winter to keep out the cold.”

Professor Huang grew up through the turbulent years of the Revolution and survived the post revolution despatch to the fields as well as numerous moves and resettlements. He has been involved in the Chinese film industry all his life. Indeed he is one of the main influencers of the industry. He speaks candidly of propaganda and censorship, now as well as in the early days. Now it is as much self-imposed, to meet the demands of the ‘happy-ending’ hungry theatre goers, as it is by the government censors. The Chinese cinema world is a fast and fickle one with investors spreading their risk across ever more divergent topics in the hope of making money on one of the bets. Predicted to be the biggest entertainment business in the world by 2018 this is a fascinating industry, every bit as fluid and star fuelled as Holly and Bollywood.

Notes from a Beijing Coffee Shop is a collection of personal stories which allows the reader to listen in to the truths of modern China, whilst gleaning valuable insights on its language, culture and history.

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