Co-productions are no guarantee

If there is such a thing as an ideal co-production, examples should include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Kung Fu Panda. On the surface, the Ang Lee martial arts epic is completely Chinese, but it somehow found a global audience. The DreamWorks animated fest combines two of China's cultural mascots - the panda and kung fu - but it did not have any Chinese input, at least not for the first installment. The results in both cases were artistic integrity, which led to total embrace by the global audience and the Chinese market respectively.

Had these two films been co-productions, would they have been better or worse? Of course, this is a hypothetical question, but certain parts of the stories would have been dumbed down - maybe not even for censorship reasons.

I'm not categorically discounting the potential value of co-productions. Some stories have universal appeal. Others have very little cultural specificity. If you make a film about a cat and a dog, the only cultural trace could be the language on the soundtrack.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you make a movie out of a news story that resonates with a narrow strip of society, say, a cluster of villages, the film may not be able to travel very far. Of course, you can mine the human emotions common in all such stories and use the local coloring as a form of exotica.

We must be sure of why we desire co-productions. Do we want the enlarged market or do we crave the so-called "soft power"? Kung Fu Panda makes China look good, but Chinese companies did not have financial equity in it. If you invest in a Hollywood blockbuster, you'll make money but accrue little influence. The standard way of measuring the export value of China's film industry conceals rather than reveals the whole picture.

The value reported in the media includes the taking of foreign partners regardless of how much Chinese companies actually rake in. If your sole benchmark is this figure, all you'll need to do is give co-production status to those projects with marginal Chinese input and, voila, your overseas box-office figure looks as bright as the burning sun.

Another misnomer is co-production between the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong or Taiwan. The three industries have long been integrated. And with few exceptions, money, talent and even stories mingle to the point of blurring.

If you take away all those dubious entries, the category of co-production is a sparsely populated land with few standouts. But that is not cause for concern. As the Chinese film industry gains momentum, it should first focus on its domestic market.

Only when the size of the home audience stops growing will Chinese filmmakers feel the urgent need to expand overseas. And even then, co-production will remain just one of many ways of breaking into the global arena.