We’ve rarely entered a new year with a greater sense of uncertainty about what the days and months ahead will bring.
On the brink of an unexpected and entirely unpredictable presidency, Hollywood is looking over its shoulder and asking: Should we be worried?
Hollywood has been worried about its future for the better part of the past decade, as technology has stolen its thunder and disrupted a once-flush business model.
The layering-on of reality show huckster Donald Trump as our new president — something that was unimaginable a year ago — creates an entirely new level of complication.
Also Read: Donald Trump’s Sour New Year’s Tweet Gets Slaughtered on Social Media
Will Trump be bad for politics but good for stock prices? So far the stock market is decidedly up. But that doesn’t seem to be based on anything concrete. “Stock rises based on feel-good optimism have a history of hitting a factual air pocket, and dropping suddenly and precipitously,” writes Forbes contributor John Tobey.
And what about the news business? The disruption of traditional journalism took a quantum leap forward with a president elect who bypasses normal channels to offer the world his news-bomblettes via Twitter.
Short-term, Trump has been good for CNN, Fox, MSNBC — and CBS, as Les Moonves said earlier in 2016. Viewership and advertising has soared. But Moonves may well live to regret his famous remark: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS” as the new president abandons tradition, avoids press conferences and continually attacks journalists who criticize him. We’ve also started to watch him play favorites with Joe Scarborough and TMZ. This is not good.
Also Read: 2016 In Review: Everybody Loves Content, China and Other Lessons From the Year in Deals
From a business perspective, the uncertainty is biggest when it comes to foreign affairs. China is the most important new market for Hollywood movies and television shows. It is the main source of new investment capital and the single most important engine of growth in a mature industry.
China is not an easy partner, and it took years for the industry to work to slightly ease the quotas limiting foreign productions from distribution. A multi-billion-dollar production facility and theme park is set to be built in Guangzhou in the next decade, an important outlet for Hollywood talent.
So Trump’s provocation of China throws a wrench into any media company planning for 2017, that is certain.
The high-priced purchases of content companies of late — Yahoo by Verizon, Time Warner by AT&T, Legendary and Dick Clark Productions by Dalian Wanda — suggest that storytelling remains a desirable business.
But the power center has shifted. It seems that distribution companies now hold the key to where content is headed:
Also Read: Hulu Strikes First Theatrical Features Licensing Deal With Disney
This leaves Fox and Disney as the main freestanding major entertainment companies. Outlier Sony is still owned by a Japanese-based computer hardware company (but for how long?), and Viacom and CBS are the ripest question of the day as Sumner Redstone steps down and daughter Shari steps up. Billions of dollars of shareholder value are on the line as crown jewels MTV and Comedy Central teeter in the void of leadership and creativity. Paramount, another jewel in the Viacom crown, magically manages to produces some important movies this season, even as the studio shrinks year by year.
Whew. Well THAT’s over! Yay. It can only get better now.
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) January 1, 2017
The tectonic shifts of the past decade driven by technology are now well in place. With the addition of a new president whose core ideology is unclear, whose priorities are still emerging and who has the open contempt of the artistic community, it’s fair to say that 2017 will be a rocky path.
Let’s all buckle up.
Read original story Hollywood In 2017: So, Should We Be Worried? At TheWrap

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Britain voted to leave Europe, and the United States voted to elect Donald Trump. Now, could China be facing a populist backlash of its own?
Some China watchers say a growing populist movement will test the nation’s leadership ahead of the 19th Party Congress in late 2017, set to be one of the year’s biggest political events.
The Congress is essentially a three-week long meeting in which the ruling Communist Party selects and announce the country’s next leaders. President Xi Jinping is widely expected to be given a second term. However, his ability to manage rising socio-economic pressures will be a major theme in the lead-up to the Congress, Nicholas Consonery, senior Asia-Pacific director at FTI Consulting, told CNBC last week.
Although the world’s number two economy doesn’t hold free elections, citizens are ensuring their voices are heard in other ways.
Cynicism with Beijing’s economy-first policies has created a new political movement known as the New Left, or neo-Maoism, that supports the egalitarian ideas preached by dictator Mao Zedong.
«The New Left is characterized by an emphasis on the state power to redress the problems of injustice and other negative effects of privatization, marketization and globalization. It argues for more emphasis on economic justice, not just economic growth at any price,» explained Chinese academic Li He in a 2008 paper.
As such, China hasn’t remained totally immune to the pronounced anti-establishment wave, a key political leitmotif of 2016 that’s upended the political consensus across the globe.
«We tend to see China as a country that has benefited enormously from globalization,» Consonery said. Still, «what we see today, in an environment of widening socioeconomic inequality, is a lot of skepticism within China about orientation towards free trade and open markets. »
Some economists expect China to overtake the U. S. as the world’s largest economy within a matter of years, and its poverty ratio—defined by the World Bank as people living on less than $2 per day—among China’s nearly 1.4 billion population has fallen steeply over the last three decades. Yet according to nonprofit advocacy group The Borgen Project, at least 82 million Chinese still live below the poverty line, while millions more subsist on an annual income of less than $400.
In other countries, a similar tableau of problems have reverberated at the ballot box. In Europe and the U. S., complaints that globalization and open immigration have widened socio-economic inequality and resulted in fewer jobs resulted in a nationalist-tinged backlash that led to the United Kingdom’s historic Brexit vote, and the ascendancy of President-elect Donald Trump .
In South Korea, voters sick of crony capitalism and political scandals are warming up to a politician who likens himself to U. S. independent politician Bernie Sanders.
China’s New Left movement’s origin dates back to the early 2000s, when intellectuals became concerned about economic inequalities resulting from the government’s market-oriented reform. «The New Left was shocked by how polarized society had become, and decided to defend the interests of the poor,» He noted.
The group remains underground but while the size of its supporter base is hard to come by, experts say New Leftism is enormously popular among students, ordinary peasants and workers.
Indeed, more people are questioning the benefits of the government’s pro-growth programs over the past decade, said Consonery. And as backlash spreads, Xi’s administration appears to be listening.
Beijing is trying to be responsive to socioeconomic pressures that have resulted from rapid economic growth, so hence we’re seeing a crackdown on environmental degradation and increased concern about asset bubbles in the aftermath of government stimulus, Consonery noted. «This is a story happening across Asia, but China is a big part of it. «

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A novel take on a common steamed bun is holding Hong Kong’s culinary stage by storm, and scooping adult awards for a creator.
May Chow is reinventing a bao – customarily filled with beef or fish – and has only been voted Asia’s best womanlike cook by a row of over 300 experts.
Reporting: Helier Cheung. Video journalist: Yashan Zhao

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