The study discusses China's film industry and related policies. First, I discuss China's film industry's rapid development and the policies that contribute to its growth. I also attempt to depict how the quality of China's domestic films changes over different periods. I group different policies that have similar effects together. However, I could not apply the difference-in-difference model to quantify and disentangle the impact of each policy. However, using regression models, I assessed the effects of China's film censorship and found that the censorship has little effect on film revenue and may even increase the viewers' perception of the film produced. However, this is not to say that censorships are a beneficial policy. As discussed, China's film censorship is mainly a political tool to control the cultural output and has been essential for the Party-state's ideology and has little economic intention. The censorship limited the creativity of the film producers, and films deemed too "political" would never survive the censorship. Overall, the results indicate that the censorship limited the theme of Chinese-produced films, leaving the user's perception and the revenue of the screened film intact. Over time, Filmmakers have developed ways to pass the censorship by painting a positive picture of the government in the films. Topic-modelling of the reviews from IMDB also found that reviews for China's films hardly discuss the effect of censorship. Overall, the study found that censorship's impact on the economic returns and viewers' perception of screened films in China is negligible, which may give existing filmmakers little incentive to fight against censorship.
Lingfeng Shan (Sat,) studied this question.