Cultural Revolution Finally Over

What could be more counterrevolutionary than a huge movie studio/tourist attraction?

Media titan AOL Time Warner Inc plans to invest $483 million to build an outdoor movie studio that is also expected to become a tourist attraction, the official Xinhua news agency said on Friday.

Company executives toured Linan city in China’s eastern province of Zhejiang and met its mayor during a trip aimed at finding a suitable location for the massive filming base, it said.

The big-budget studio would be the largest-ever foreign investment in the film industry, surpassing Rochester, New York-based Eastman Kodak Co’s $4 million stake in a Shanghai cinema.

AOL Time Warner, the world’s largest media firm, and government officials were not immediately available for comment.

China promised it would allow more foreign investment in its film industry when it joined the World Trade Organization last year.

Warner Bros film studio, an AOL subsidiary, said in July it had struck a deal to edge into the Chinese movie market by buying a stake in Shanghai Paradise Film Distributing Co, which owns a 1,400-seat theater in Shanghai.

Via the door of the WTO, bourgeoisie culture is now officially acceptable in China. I am guessing that the movie studio “tourist attraction” will involve some kind of theme park element, and coutries with theme parks are no longer “serious,” no longer ideologically pure: they are about entertainment, disposable income and other such frivolities.

There is a theory that countries with McDonalds don’t go to war with each other, but McDonalds is too ubiquitous for this to hold indefinitely. Besides, everyone has to eat: eating isn’t frivolous, although eating at McDonalds perhaps is. No, frivolous is building billion dollar movie studios/tourist attractions. Can you picture that in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia?

Mark my words: 50 years from now this announcement will seen as the day China became “one of us.”