Soft Power Matters
How Screen Power Contributes to Australia’s China Strategy
January 2026
Screen Power Is Strategic Infrastructure
Australia’s screen-makers already compete on the world stage. The capability exists: talent, craft, and stories that resonate internationally. What remains underdeveloped is the infrastructure that converts creative capability into sustained presence in the markets that shape global perception.
Nowhere is this absence more consequential than in China.
Film and media do not determine policy outcomes. But they shape the interpretive environment in which policy actions are read. Long before diplomacy or conflict enters the frame, screen culture establishes familiarity, narrative context, and emotional baseline. In a world organised by screens, nations that do not circulate their own stories are interpreted through the stories of others.
China’s domestic screen ecosystem is now one of the most influential in the world, shaping public imagination at home and increasingly across Asia and the Global South. Australia has almost no sustained presence within that system.
The consequence is not misunderstanding but non-recognition. Australia appears in Chinese public consciousness primarily during moments of friction — trade disputes, security tensions, geopolitical alignment with third parties — with little everyday narrative counterweight. This produces a structurally hostile interpretive environment in which Australian actions are read through the narrowest possible lens.
Absence is not neutral. It carries cost.
Why Australia Remains Outside the System
Australia often explains its limited screen presence in China as the result of regulation, censorship, or political sensitivity. These constraints are real. But they are not decisive.
The decisive barriers are structural and relational.
China’s screen industry operates on long-cycle partnerships built through sustained presence, institutional continuity, and professional credibility accumulated over years. Australia approaches the market transactionally: short-term co-productions, ad hoc initiatives, and project-by-project negotiations that dissolve when political conditions tighten.
This signals impermanence.
Australia funds individual projects but has never built the pathways that allow stories to circulate consistently. Engagement remains episodic rather than systemic. Withdrawal is framed as prudence, rather than as the forfeiture of accumulated capital.
Countries that succeed do not rely on episodic access. They maintain permanent creative, industrial, and institutional presence. Storytelling is treated as infrastructure, not output. Australia has never made that decision.
Access Is Conditional, Not Impossible
China’s screen system is not open, but it is not impermeable. Access is not granted abstractly; it is accumulated relationally. Creative participation depends on trust, continuity, and demonstrated competence within constraints.
Participation is not endorsement. Co-authorship is not capitulation.
The greater reputational risk lies not in engagement, but in absence — in allowing Australian perspectives to disappear from one of the world’s most consequential narrative ecosystems. Disengagement does not preserve values; it simply ensures they are inaudible.
The Cost of Conceptual Confusion
Australia’s failure is compounded by a persistent conceptual error: the conflation of soft power and commercial engagement.
Soft power is a state-supported function. Its purpose is presence — the normalisation of a country’s stories within another society’s cultural bloodstream over time. Commercial engagement is market-driven. It concerns financing, distribution, professional exchange, and sustainability.
The two should reinforce each other. They cannot substitute for one another.
Australia currently does neither with intent. Soft power efforts are fragmented and symbolic. Commercial producers are left to navigate opaque systems alone, without long-term institutional backing. The result is minimal continuity and no accumulated influence.
This is not a failure of talent.
It is a failure of design.
Why This Matters Now
China’s screen ecosystem is consolidating. Domestic platforms dominate. International access is becoming more selective, not more open. Entry costs rise sharply for those without existing relationships, credibility, and presence.
Waiting for more favourable conditions is not caution; it is abdication.
Once narrative systems mature without you, absence hardens into irrelevance. Re-entry becomes exponentially more difficult. Australia is already late.
What a Serious Strategy Requires
Treating screen power as strategy requires institutional commitment, not messaging.
At minimum, it requires sustained, China-literate screen capability; multi-year engagement insulated from short political cycles; separation of diplomatic risk management from creative development; and acceptance that individual project failure does not invalidate the strategy.
For practitioners, this means backing projects designed for long-term partnership rather than one-off access, and committing to continuity even when conditions are difficult.
Conclusion: Presence Is Policy
Australia’s relationship with China cannot rest on trade, diplomacy, and defence alone. It also depends on narrative capital — the capacity to be seen, contextualised, and remembered beyond moments of conflict.
Film and media are how that capital is built. They shape the conditions under which national actions are interpreted.
Soft power does not begin with messaging.
It begins with presence.
Presence, once surrendered, is far harder to rebuild than it is to maintain.
This perspective reflects work undertaken by Legend Media Group in long-term Australia–China screen collaboration.
