Chinese Cinematic Visions: Popular Film, Strategic Ontology, and Prospects for Conflict

The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) re-emergence as a major world power has prompted substantial questions regarding its aims and the potential for future global conflict. While many studies have approached these questions through the traditional lenses of foreign and security policy analysis, this study undertakes an analysis of contemporary Chinese popular cinema. The core premise is that popular media like cinema are important components of social systems of meaning making, informing everyday strategic ontologies of the international system. Film offers insight into how societies understand themselves as political actors in relation to others on the world stage, both reflecting and reinforcing dominant strategic ontologies. Our discourse analysis of 20 recent box office hits in the PRC thus provides clues into potential future policymaking logics. Within the article, we place particular emphasis on how representations of self and other enable and bound PRC agency on the world stage. Among multiple findings, we argue that the films reveal that the PRC understands itself as, above all, a status quo power with great respect for both international law and other actors’ sovereignty—a positive sign for those hoping to avoid military conflict. Nevertheless, the films also highlight deep and longstanding grievances over foreign interference in the PRC’s regional sphere of influence that have the potential to stoke conflict if aggravated in the future.