The examples are legion-and many are ridiculous.
The studios, eager to maintain access to the biggest box office in the world, were all too willing to accommodate Communist Party censors. China was on its way to becoming the most powerful foreign market for American movies-and those movies were becoming a proxy battleground for the ideological rivalry between Washington and Beijing. When Erich Schwartzel moved to Los Angeles in 2013 to cover Hollywood for The Wall Street Journal, he started seeing Chinese influence everywhere he looked. (Paramount Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)
