BRIGHT FUTURE
How have ‘Dangal’ and ‘Secret Superstar’ impacted Indian films’ prospects in the Chinese market?
for yoga-related businesses has enjoyed a rapid rise in recent years, which has created more than one million jobs in the industry.
“Many Indian Yoga teachers have come to China since 2003, and the number will keep increasing in the future,” said Lin.
In an effort to promote yoga in China as well as encourage further bilateral cultural exchanges, Yunnan Minzu University, in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) co-founded in 2015 the first specialized Chinese yoga school.
Lang Gongxun, vice president of the IndiaChina Yoga College, told the Global Times that ICCR dispatched teaching faculty to Yunnan Minzu University, including professors with doctoral degrees in Indian Yoga.
“As two bright pearls of the Oriental civilization, Chinese and Indian cultures share common ground… our school is a new platform for bilateral exchanges. Aside from yoga, students can also know more about Indian history, culture and its languages,” Lang said.
He added that the university offers majors for Hindi languages and also launched personnel exchanges with institutes, enterprises and universities in India.
The Indian Embassy in China has also taken active measures to promote yoga in China.
According to an email sent to the Global Times by the Embassy of India to China, it organized week-long celebrations in June of 2017 to commemorate the 3rd International Day of Yoga, during which around 300 Chinese yoga enthusiasts came together at the Juyongguan section of the Great Wall in Beijing to practice various styles of Yoga.
“To carry forward the success” of previous yoga events, the Indian Embassy is scheduled to organize more events, festivals and movies, and is also working with various Chinese universities to hold Indian Cultural Weeks to further popularize Indian art among Chinese youth.
Bollywood’s charm
Yoga is not the only card India is playing to expand its soft power into China.
“Chinese audiences used to see fewer Indian movies, but India has strengthened efforts on exporting its films and TV series in recent years in an effort to promote its culture, especially to China,” Zhao Gancheng, director of the Center for Asia-Pacific Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, told the Global Times.
More Bollywood producers are being lured by the lucrative Chinese film industry, finding that it is not hard to entertain a Chinese audience, Zhao said.
Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan’s family wrestling drama Dangal, small-budget by Bollywood standards, was released in China on January 19, topping all imported films with a total of $109 million in revenue in just 24 days, according to data from Ent Group.
“Different from American or European movies, Bollywood avoids exporting its values and usually focuses on social issues, which makes it easier for Chinese audiences to identify with it,” Zhao said.
The success of Indian movies in China could be attributed to its mature business model. The latest popular Indian movies reduced their traditional dancing and singing numbers, focusing more on discussing social ills – such as discrimination against women and the wealth gap – but in an upbeat, joyous way.
Bollywood, considered a living example of cultural openness, has all the traits to emerge as India’s “soft power” in the future, the Economic Times cited a Deutsche Bank chief economist as saying.
Zhang Zhi’an, an associate professor with the School of Communication and Design at Sun Yat-Sen University, agreed, telling the Global Times that Bollywood has truly played an important role in stretching Indian soft power into China via its movies, which can help erase past misunderstandings and lay a foundation for positive trade and cultural exchanges.
Zhang’s remarks were echoed by Chinese netizens on the popular social networking site douban.com, where the most popular Indian movies in China (Dangal, Three Idiots and PK) have an average score of 8.0. Many netizens commented that they feel personally touched by these Indian films.
“Indian movies never try to burnish the image of their country, but they do dispel some misunderstandings about India. My impression of India has been unconsciously influenced by these movies,” netizen lucydaniu, commented.
Zhang said that China’s film industry is not yet as influential as Bollywood, but China’s internet technology, including WeChat and Xiaomi phones, have surpassed pandas and kung fu to become the new force of China’s soft power into India.
Shortage of hard power
“Despite the tense military and political situation along the border, India has done better work in stretching its soft power, which is partly because of their pride in their culture and their efforts in protecting their traditions,” Hu Zhiyong, a research fellow at the Institute of International Relations of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
However, India should not ignore the fact that it has been left far behind by China in terms of economic and military developments as well as comprehensive national strength, Hu said.
“The graceful gesture of yoga will help burnish India’s friendly, harmonious and inoffensive image. When ‘Asian Century’ is becoming trendy nowadays and India’s economic growth rate has surpassed China, Modi wants to display India’s resolution by promoting yoga-related events,” read a commentary on ifeng.com.
“Modi wants to make India a country of yoga and use that soft power to attract more investment, technologies and assistance… and the stretching of soft power also aims to make up for the shortage of India’s hard power,” the commentary continues.
“But China should still learn from India, as its ways of showing off its soft power are more acceptable than some of China’s government-support programs overseas,” said Zhao.
Even though Dangal and Secret
Superstar’s Chinese box office performances have been impressive, Indian films still have a long way to go before they can be considered a major force in the Chinese film market.
“Aamir Khan’s success surely helped boost Indian films’ popularity in China, but in my opinion, Dangal and Secret Superstar’s successes are more individual cases rather than a trend that can be applied to all imported Indian films,” Zhang Jin, CEO of Beijing Joy Pictures Co, Ltd – the Chinese distributor of the Indian comedy drama Bajrangi Bhaijaan that recently debuted in the Chinese mainland, told the Global Times on Friday.
Debuting to a mediocre box office performance of 14 million yuan ($2.2m) on Friday, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, which stars Bollywood star Salman Khan, ended up pulling in more than 54 million yuan by Sunday. While this figure is less impressive than the performances of Aamir Khan-led films Dangal (87 million yuan) and Secret
Superstar (170 million yuan), but the film has already become the highestearning non-Aamir Khan Indian film in China.
Cultural barriers
“Actually, the number of Indian films that have succeeded in the mainland, films that focus on love, family and feminist stories such as those from Aamir Khan, is still small,” Zhang said.
“What is popular in India might not necessarily be successful in China.”
For instance, the 2015 South Indian film Baahubali: The Beginning, which recorded the highest opening day gross worldwide for an Indian film, was released in Chinese mainland cinemas in July 2016 but only grossed 7.49 million yuan in total, not even close to the film’s opening day figure of 600 million rupees ($9.48 million) in India, according to a 2015 Variety article.
“Many Chinese audiences, who lack background knowledge about India, might have had a difficult time understanding Baahubali as the film contains a lot of traditional Indian cultural elements,” Fei Se, a Chinese film critic and long-time Indian movie fan, told the Global Times.
Around 57 percent of nearly 20,000 users on Chinese media review site Douban gave the film a four-star or above rating, praising its tremendous visuals, especially the film’s epic war scenes, while 43 percent gave the film a lower score. The main points of criticism come from audiences complaining about a cliché plot and the sudden appearance of dance routines, something that many Chinese audiences often find awkward when watching Indian films.
“Moreover, the film’s poor performance could also be simply because South Indian productions tend to feature a cruder aesthetic style compared with Bollywood films from North India and so the Chinese audience may not like them at all,” Fei explained, adding that the film’s twopart structure may have also confused the Chinese audiences.
New golden age?
The last time that Indian films experienced a golden age in China was during the late 1970s when Caravan (1971) and Awaara (1951) were first introduced into the mainland. The Chinese dubbed films were big hits and still remain unforgettable memories for many Chinese moviegoers now in their 50s and 60s.
But during the 1980s Chinese mainland audiences started having a larger variety of movies to choose from as more imported films from countries other than India came to cinemas. As competition increased, the performance of imported Indian movies fared badly.
Today’s Chinese moviegoers’ lack of familiarity with Indian films may also boil down to the fact that these films are only rarely found in the cinemas. A mere six Indian films have screen in Chinese mainland theaters over the past five years – an average of one or two a year.
This average hasn’t changed much, even after Dangal’s striking success in early 2017, when it earned a whopping 1.3 billion yuan. Among the more than 70 films imported on flat-fee (or buyout) terms in 2017 – a regular means to import an Indian film into the mainland in recent years, only one, Dangal, was from India.
But this may change in 2018, which has already seen the release of two Indian films in the first quarter alone.
According to Zhang, though there are few specific official limitations or quotas on the import of Indian films into the mainland, the selection of ideal candidates is often complicated and takes time, as not every Indian film that has been a hit in its home country may be a right fit for the Chinese market. Bajrangi Bhaijaan, however, was an exception. Two years ago, Zhang watched the film for the first time on a plane and had since been trying to bring the film to big screens in the mainland.
“Normally we have to go through a long selection process and cost analyses before reaching the decision to import a film, but I decided to import
Bajrangi Bhaijaan without worrying too much about business concerns,” Zhang told the Global Times.
While most of the Indian films imported into China in recent years have been hit films ranking high on the top 10 Indian box office chart, that might be changing in the future.
“We, as well as many others working in the industry, are trying to import Indian films from different genres rather than the ones we already familiar with,” Zhang explained.
The next big hit
When asked to name the latest Indian film that might have the potential to do well in the Chinese market, both Zhang and Fei chose 2017 comedy drama Hindi Medium. The story follows an Indian couple who go to great lengths to send their daughter to a good school. Zhang and Fei said they feel that this is very likely to resonate well with Chinese parents, many of whom are also struggling to provide their children with better education opportunities.
Moreover, co-productions between the two countries may also be ripe for success. The co-produced Kung Fu
Yoga grossed a stunning 1.72 billion yuan when it released in the Chinese mainland during the 2017 Spring Festival holiday.