Congress digs into Chinese influence over Hollywood

The leaders of the House Select Committee on China will huddle Wednesday with Disney CEO Robert Iger and take a closer look at Hollywood’s censoring its films to appease the Chinese Communist Party.

The committee chairman, Rep. Mike Gallagher, is taking a handful of lawmakers to Los Angeles for the sitdown with Mr. Iger and other Hollywood players, according to sources close to the committee.

The meetings are private and intended to give the entertainment industry a venue to speak candidly without fear of retribution from China over meeting with the lawmakers, according to a source familiar with the committee’s plans.  

Mr. Gallagher, Wisconsin Republican, is a prominent China hawk who has cosponsored a bill to ban TikTok and previously threatened to haul Hollywood up to Capitol Hill. His reelection campaign website said in 2020 if Hollywood executives, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and the NBA were not willing to have a conversation with Congress about Chinese influence then Mr. Gallagher believed lawmakers needed to subpoena them.

Mr. Gallagher is putting that rhetoric behind him and looking to establish new Capitol Hill relationships with Hollywood and Silicon Valley. He is also leading the lawmakers to a meeting Friday with Mr. Cook in Silicon Valley. 

“I think we can have a productive conversation with Disney, with the NBA, with Apple,” Mr. Gallagher said recently when pressed by PBS about his campaign comments. “I genuinely want to understand how they think about doing business in China. We have to have that conversation, difficult though it may be at times.”

Still, lawmakers are not going to Hollywood to point fingers but will look for ways to ensure American industry triumphs over their Chinese counterparts, said a source familiar with the committee’s plans. 

The lawmakers are looking for answers about censorship decisions and other concessions made by Hollywood to pacify China’s communist government to gain access to the foreign market.

Hollywood has a well-documented history of making changes to its work to avoid angering communist China: 

• Sony removed a scene from the 2015 sci-fi comedy “Pixels” where video game aliens blasted the Great Wall of China while keeping depictions of aliens hitting the Washington Monument and parts of Manhattan, according to Reuters.
• In 2013, Paramount Pictures removed a reference to China being the source of a virus sparking a zombie apocalypse in the movie “World War Z,” according to a 2020 speech by then-Attorney General William Barr.
• Disney’s 2020 live-action reproduction of “Mulan” included credits thanking government entities in China’s Xinjiang, according to the Harvard International Review. The Trump-era State Department formally determined in early 2021 that Xinjiang was the location of a genocide of Muslim Uyghurs.
• In 2009, Sony and its Chinese state-run partner submitted the script for “The Karate Kid” to China’s censors who were upset the film’s villain was Chinese, according to the New York Times. The moviemakers reportedly cut 12 minutes from the film and it was subsequently released in China.
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Studios changed national symbols for soldiers invading the U.S. in the 2012 film “Red Dawn” from Chinese to North Korean, according to the Los Angeles Times in 2011 citing movie producer Tripp Vinson. 

Some Americans are fed up and Hollywood appears to have taken notice. The film “Top Gun: Maverick” was accused of bowing to China when a 2019 trailer for the flick showed a Taiwanese flag missing from actor Tom Cruise’s jacket.

After the COVID-19 pandemic ripped through America, the film ultimately debuted in 2022 and the Taiwanese flag was back on the action hero’s jacket. 

Whether the 2022 blockbuster’s final cut represents a longer-term shift in how American filmmakers make changes to win over China remains to be seen. Disney did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday ahead of Mr. Iger’s meeting with Mr. Gallagher.