When Propaganda Sells: Private Production of Propaganda Movies in China

• In Event: Authoritarian Propaganda & Censorship

Abstract

As China’s market economy develops, citizens can find more entertainment that allows them to tune out state propaganda. Despite that, many propaganda movies gained great box office successes in China in recent years. Existing explanations attribute this rise of propaganda blockbusters to the audience’s taste. In this paper, I argue that their popularity instead follows from the increased involvement of private companies in the production of propaganda movies--behavior instructed and incentivized by the government. Using web-scraping, I construct an original database of around 40,000 movies released in China over the last 20 years, including data on box office, rating, reviews, and viewers’ demographics. I show that the Chinese audience, holding all else constant, has a slight aversion to propaganda movies; revenue-driven private companies, however, overcame this disadvantage by including other marketable features into these movies. I also show that privately produced propaganda movies reach audiences that otherwise consumed less propaganda, such as youth and female.

Author

• Linan Yao, Columbia University