If I had to prioritize, I'd say China should be looking to leap frog & dominate new form entertainment industries - video games, streaming video, and AI content being prime among them - not traditional mediums like box office films. This isn't to say box office films shouldn't be made or shouldn't get any attention, but allowing Hollywood films in just to fill empty theaters would be a mistake.
Not to mention, it wouldn't even work, because theater attendance in the West is similarly down - people's behaviors are just changing:
I introduced the term
entertainment power a while back to distinguish it from general
soft power, and I remain convinced that is a necessary distinction. South Korea being "cool" doesn't mean it has any real power to wield, and we can see this from how Western investors have basically taken over much of the South Korean entertainment industry and shaped it towards their ends.
Having said that, entertainment power as a
vehicle for cultural and ideological power (and thus general soft power) is a concept I admittedly under appreciated in the past. Recently, I've come to the realization that mediums such as TV shows and movies seem particularly influential in shaping the behavior of young people, particularly women, and that it is a contributing factor to the phenomenon of Western or "white" worship in global populations.
To this end, it is important to control the messages that are being carried through entertainment power. Where as you're not going to get much value out of pure propaganda entertainment (as audiences will largely laugh at / reject it), the sort that is particularly dangerous is content that implicitly promotes or reinforces foreign value systems without being very obvious about it, which can flourish particularly in an environment where there is no effective counter messaging.
For example, if you keep watching TV shows that glorify freedom and democracy, and there's no shows that ever criticize those ideologies, chances are you will eventually come to think those values are "correct" and in doing so, be brain washed into a liberal.
Once a converted liberal, you then become susceptible to genuine liberal soft power propaganda, which could inspire you to take actual political action. Entertainment power, in this respect, can act as an
entry way drug for whole sale ideological soft power, though whether it does or not, depends on the specific content being considered and whether there is counter messaging available in the larger media environment.
