Wanda chief: China must create channels for culture export

Creating communication channels and famous brands are two key factors that will help Chinese culture to be better understood by the rest of the world, says China's richest businessman, Wang Jianlin, chairman of Dalian Wanda Group.

Wang says China's movie industry, television and print media all have a shortage of delivery channels for communicating with the overseas market and making themselves understood. He spoke during the 2016 China Entrepreneur Summit, hosted by China Entrepreneur magazine earlier in December.

"It is just as if you want to drive, you need first to build highways," he says. "If you want the outside world to understand more about Chinese culture, you need to build the communicating channels first to send the cultural products overseas. "

Wanda has been aggressively seeking acquisitions and partnerships with Hollywood studios in the past few years, and its overseas business has been focusing mainly on the cultural industry. It already owns AMC Theaters, and it purchased Legendary Entertainment for $3.5 billion (3.2 billion euros; 2.7 billion) early this year.

Wang expanded on the movie industry example, noting that there are a large number of movie companies in the world. In the US market there are more than 3,000 independent film production companies, but only six of them have global distribution channels and well-known brands.

Does the ability of China's movies to go overseas depend on the channels of these six companies? Wang's answer is no. China needs to build its own channels, he says. The Chinese movie box office has doubled where it was three years ago in the domestic market, but in overseas markets it has been rare to see an up-tick over the past few years, he says. He attributes it to a lack of global distribution channels.

But good channels are not enough, he says. China needs to cultivate big leading companies in the cultural industry that have brands that are famous globally, such as Disneyland.

"The US is not only strong economically, but also culturally. Its biggest export is culture," he says. "Cultural industry output accounts for about 24 percent of the US GDP."

In China, the cultural industry's output accounted for only about 4 percent of GDP last year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Wang says that at present China is still far away from being able to put a label on its culture, and it will take a long time before people understand that. The sizes of Chinese companies are quite small, and there are no big companies with a famous name.

"If China could cultivate about 10 cultural companies with annual income of tens of billions dollars, maybe our culture would play a leading role in world cultural exchanges," he says.

He adds that Chinese companies like Wanda could be a primary force in taking Chinese culture global.

Wang says the central government should be more supportive of the cultural industry, as in China most are small and find it difficult to compete with global companies.

Wang says he conducted some research in France because he was confused why French movies could be influential in the world - for example, its Cannes International Film Festival is both famous and prestigious worldwide.

"I came to understand that this is because the French realized a long time ago that if they don't support French movies, then their market will be occupied by English movies. So when they shoot a French movie, the government provides a lot of subsidiaries," he says.

chenyingqun@chinadaily.com.cn