China's Entertainment Industry

At the core of the entertainment industry is so-called show business, which includes theater, motion pictures, and television. The arrival of digital media adds new layers to the traditional ways of entertainment creation and distribution for popular consumption. In China, entertainment industry mostly refers to film, television, and online media that creates entertainment for mass consumption. This chapter provides a bird’s-eye view of China’s film, television, and online video industry. China’s entertainment industry has been booming in the past decade and has become one of the core revenue-generating economic engines in China. The Chinese film market is expected to surpass North America in both revenue and viewership to become the world’s largest. In television, China produces the largest quantity of TV dramas and is eyeing the global market for exports, though there is little demand for Chinese entertainment contents in the rest of the world, a cultural deficit that China is eager to overcome. The rise of China’s Internet companies is rapidly transforming traditional media in speed and scale.