PARTY CENTRAL

Two books tell how China built its movie business and sold its own - Communist Party-approved – stories to the world while neutering Hollywood and its Western democratic ideals.

- JEREMY REES

RED CARPET: Hollywood, China, and the global battle for cultural supremacy, by Erich Schwartzel (Penguin, $50 hb) AMERICA SECOND: How America's elites are making China stronger, by Isaac Stone Fish (Scribe, $37)

The former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott was once asked by Germany's Angela Merkel what drove Australia's policies on China. Fear and greed, he replied.

Fear has been the focus of many books on China recently. Bestsellers such as Graham Allison's Destined for War: Can America and China escape Thucydides' trap asked whether the conflict between a rising power like China and the reigning superpower is inevitable.

Two new books have turned their attention to the other pole. Erich Schwartzel's Red Carpet details how Hollywood is so in thrall to the money to be made from China's billion cinemagoers that there is nothing it won't compromise to keep in with the Communist Party. Isaac Stone Fish's America Second goes further. He criticizes Hollywood, business elites, political leaders, and universities for being ready to sell out America - out of greed, vanity, or even just access to China.

Of the two, Red Carpet is the more entertaining, as it details Hollywood's every step towards passivity. America Second is far more polemical and probably further-reaching. Together, they sketch the problem of the claimed: "anaconda in the chandelier" in dealing with Chinese