Cinema of China
The cinema of China is the filmmaking and film industry of the Chinese mainland under the People's Republic of China, one of three distinct historical threads of Chinese-language cinema together with the cinema of Hong Kong and the cinema of Taiwan.
"Chinese Cinema" redirects here. For the book, see Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949.
China is the home of the largest movie and drama production complex and film studios in the world, the Oriental Movie Metropolis[5][6] and Hengdian World Studios. In 2012 the country became the second-largest market in the world by box office receipts. In 2016, the gross box office in China was CN¥45.71 billion (US$6.58 billion). China has also become a major hub of business for Hollywood studios.
In November 2016, China passed a film law banning content deemed harmful to the "dignity, honor and interests" of the People's Republic and encouraging the promotion of "socialist core values", approved by the National People's Congress Standing Committee.[7]
Early Communist era[edit]
At the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, there were fewer than 600 movie theaters in the country.[49]: 102 The government saw motion pictures as an important artform and tool for mass propaganda. The Soviet-led collaborations Victory of the Chinese People (1950) and Liberated China (1951) were among the biggest film events in the PRC's early years.[12]: 17 Victory of the Chinese People depicted re-enactments of four of the communist party's major military victories and was filmed using real ammunition with the participation of the People's Liberation Army.[12]: 15
The private studios in Shanghai, including Kunming, Wenhua, Guotai, and Datong, were at first encouraged to make new films. They made approximately 47 films during the next two years but soon ran into trouble, owing to the furor over the Kunlun-produced drama The Life of Wu Xun (1950), directed by Sun Yu and starring veteran Zhao Dan. In an anonymous article in People's Daily in May 1951, the feature was accused of spreading feudal ideas. After the article was revealed to be penned by Mao Zedong, the film was banned, the Film Steering Committee was formed to "re-educate" the film industry, and the private studios were all incorporated into the state-run Shanghai Film Studio.[50][51]
After the establishment of the PRC, China's cultural bureaucracy described American films as screen-opium and began criticizing American film alongside anti-drug campaigns.[8]: 225–226 The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to tighten control over mass media, producing instead movies centering on peasants, soldiers, and workers, such as Bridge (1949) and The White-Haired Girl (1950).[50] One of the production bases in the middle of all the transition was the Changchun Film Studio. American films were banned as part of the Korean War effort.[8]: 225–226
The Communist government solved the problem of a lack of film theaters by building mobile projection units which could tour the remote regions of China, ensuring that even the poorest could have access to films. The vast majority of China's people lived in rural areas, and most people in China had not seen a film until mobile projectionists brought them.[8]: 148 Mobile projection teams during the Mao era typically included three to four workers who physically transported film infrastructure through a large geographic area mostly not covered by any electrical grid.[49]: 102 Yuan Muzhi was important in developing the Communist government's theories and practices of rural film exhibition.[8]: 46 Yuan and Chen Bo'er transformed the post-Second Sino-Japanese War remnants of the Manchurian Motion Picture Association into the Northeast Film Studio and when Yuan became Film Bureau chief in 1949, he applied its model to help institute a film exhibition network around the country.[8]: 46 The Northeast Film Studio also trained the first generation of communist Chinese documentary filmmakers.[12]: 103
In 1950, 1,800 projectionists from around the country traveled to Nanjing for a training program.[8]: 71 These projectionists replicated the training program in their own home provinces to create more projectionists.[8]: 71 Nanjing was later termed a "Cradle of People's Cinema."[8]: 71 The PRC sought to recruit women and ethnic minority projectionists in an effort to more effectively reach marginalized communities.[8]: 72
Until the profusion of mobile projectionist teams in the 1950s, most rural people had not seen a film.[49]: 103 The number of movie-viewers hence increased sharply, partly bolstered by the fact that film tickets were given out to work units and attendance was compulsory,[51] with admissions rising from 47 million in 1949 to 4.15 billion in 1959.[52] By 1965 there were around 20,393 mobile film units.[50] During the course of the Mao era, the majority of films were shown by such units, with only a minority watched in theaters.[49]: 103
Work as a mobile projectionist was physically and technically demanding.[49]: 104 As a result, women projectionists and all-women mobile projection teams were promoted in Chinese media as examples of advancing gender equality under socialism.[49]: 104–105
In the 1950s and the 1960s, the Communist Party built cinemas (among other cultural buildings) in industrial districts on urban peripheries.[8]: 148 These structures were influenced by Soviet architecture and were intended to be vivacious but not "palatial."[8]: 148–149
Rural mobile projectionist teams and urban movie theaters were generally managed through the PRC's cultural bureaucracy.[8]: 47 Trade Unions and PLA propaganda departments also operated film exhibition networks.[8]: 47
In 1950s China, a common view of film was that it served as "socialist distance horizon education".[8]: 24 For example, films promoted rural collectivization.[8]: 24 Cinema also sought to develop the proletarian class consciousness of rural workers, encouraging the industrialization and militarization of their labor.[8]: 50 Film projection teams operating in rural China were asked to incorporate lantern slides into their work to introduce national policies and political campaigns.[8]: 82
In the 17 years between the founding of the People's Republic of China and the Cultural Revolution, 603 feature films and 8,342 reels of documentaries and newsreels were produced, sponsored mostly as Communist propaganda by the government.[53] For example, in Guerrilla on the Railroad (铁道游击队), dated 1956, the Chinese Communist Party was depicted as the primary resistance force against the Second Sino-Japanese War.[54] Chinese filmmakers were sent to Moscow to study the Soviet socialist realism style of filmmaking.[52] The Beijing Film Academy was established in 1950 and officially opened in 1956. One important film of this era is This Life of Mine (1950), directed by Shi Hu, which follows an old beggar reflecting on his past life as a policeman working for the various regimes since 1911.[55][56] The first widescreen Chinese film was produced in 1960. Animated films using a variety of folk arts, such as papercuts, shadow plays, puppetry, and traditional paintings, also were very popular for entertaining and educating children. The most famous of these, the classic Havoc in Heaven (two parts, 1961, 4), was made by Wan Laiming of the Wan Brothers and won the Outstanding Film award at the London International Film Festival.
Films such as The White-Haired Girl and Serf were part of a genre of redemptive melodramas, which sought to encourage audiences to "speak bitterness".[8]: 183
The thawing of censorship in 1956–57 (known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign) and in the early 1960s led to more indigenous Chinese films being made, which were less reliant on their Soviet counterparts.[57] During this campaign the sharpest criticisms came from the satirical comedies of Lü Ban. Before the New Director Arrives exposes the hierarchical relationships occurring between the cadres, while his next film, The Unfinished Comedy (1957), was labeled as a "poisonous weed" during the Anti-Rightist Movement, and Lü was banned from directing for life.[58][59] Other noteworthy films produced during this period were adaptations of literary classics, such as Sang Hu's The New Year's Sacrifice (1956, adapted from a Lu Xun story) and Shui Hua's The Lin Family Shop (1959, adapted from a Mao Dun story). The most prominent filmmaker of this era was Xie Jin, whose three films in particular, Woman Basketball Player No. 5 (1957), The Red Detachment of Women (1961), and Two Stage Sisters (1964), exemplify China's increased expertise in filmmaking. Films made during this period are polished, exhibiting high production value and elaborate sets.[60] While Beijing and Shanghai remained the main centers of production, between 1957 and 1960 the government built regional studios in Guangzhou, Xi'an, and Chengdu to encourage representation of ethnic minorities in films. Chinese cinema began to directly address the issue of such ethnic minorities during the late 1950s and early 1960s in films like Five Golden Flowers (1959), Third Sister Liu (1960), Serfs (1963), and Ashima (1964).[61][62]
On 9 March 1958, the Ministry of Culture held a meeting to introduce a Great Leap Forward in cinema.[12]: 149–150 During the Great Leap Forward, the film industry rapidly expanded, with documentary films being the genre that experienced the greatest growth.[12]: 150 Trends in documentary film included "artistic documentaries," in which actors and non-actors reenacted events.[12]: 15 Film venues also expanded rapidly, including both urban cinemas and mobile projection units.[12]: 150
As part of the Socialist Education Movement, mobile film projectionist units showed films and slideshows that emphasized class struggle and encouraged audience members to discuss bitter experiences onstage.[8]: 184 New films termed "emphasis films" were released to coincide with the campaign, and the film version of The White-Haired Girl was re-released.[8]: 185
In 1965, China launched the Resist America, Aid Vietnam campaign in response to the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.[63]: 29 To promote campaign themes denouncing U.S. imperialism and promoted Vietnamese resistance, the communist party used film exhibitions and other cultural media.[63]: 29
Films of the Cultural Revolution[edit]
During the Cultural Revolution, the film industry was severely restricted. Almost all previous films were banned, and only a few new ones were produced, the revolutionary model operas. The most notable of these was a ballet version of the revolutionary opera The Red Detachment of Women, directed by Pan Wenzhan and Fu Jie in 1970.
The release of filmed versions of the revolutionary model operas resulted in a re-organization and expansion of China's film exhibition network.[8]: 73 From 1965 to 1976, the number of film projection units in China quadrupled, total film audiences nearly tripled, and the national film attendance rate doubled.[8]: 133 The Cultural Revolution Group drastically reduced ticket prices which, in its view, would allow film to better serve the needs of workers and of socialism.[8]: 133
In addition to films deemed laudatory, from the middle of 1966 to 1968, the expanding film distribution network screened films characterized as "poisonous weeds" to hundreds of millions of audience members for the purpose of criticizing the films.[8]: 232 These criticism screenings were sometimes accompanied by struggle sessions.[8]: 233
Sent-down youth were a major subset of China's rural projectionists during the Cultural Revolution period.[8]: 75
Feature film production came almost to a standstill in the early years from 1967 to 1972. Movie production revived after 1972 under the strict jurisdiction of the Gang of Four until 1976, when they were overthrown. The few films that were produced during this period, such as 1975's Breaking with Old Ideas, were highly regulated in terms of plot and characterization.[64]
In 1972, Chinese officials invited Michelangelo Antonioni to China to film the achievements of the Cultural Revolution.[65]: 13 Antonioni made the documentary Chung Kuo, Cina.[65]: 13 When it was released in 1974, Communist Party leadership in China interpreted the film as reactionary and anti-Chinese.[65]: 13 Viewing art through the principles of the Yan'an Talks, particularly the concept that there is no such thing as art-for-art's-sake, party leadership construed Antonioni's aesthetic choices as politically motivated and banned the film.[65]: 14 Jiang Qing criticized Premier Zhou Enlai's role in Antonioni's invitation to China as not only a failure but also treasonous.[66]: 121 Since its 2004 release in China, the film has been well-regarded by Chinese audiences, especially for its beautiful depictions of a more simple time.[65]: 14
Because China rejection most foreign film importation, comparatively minor cinema like Albanian cinema and North Korean cinema developed mass audiences in China.[8]: 207 Through Albanian films screened during this period, many Chinese audience members were introduced to avant-garde and modernist storytelling techniques and aesthetics.[8]: 206-207
Post-Cultural Revolution[edit]
Box office boom after the Cultural Revolution[edit]
In the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution, the film industry again flourished as a medium of popular entertainment. Production rose steadily, from 19 features in 1977 to 125 in 1986.[67] Domestically produced films played to large audiences, and tickets for foreign film festivals sold quickly. The industry tried to revive crowds by making more innovative and "exploratory" films like their counterparts in the West.
Chinese cinema grew significantly in the late 1970s. In 1979, annual box office admissions reached a peak of 29.3 billion tickets sold, equivalent to an average of 30 films per person. Chinese cinema continued to prosper into the early 1980s. In 1980, annual box office admissions stood at 23.4 billion tickets sold, equivalent to an average of 29 films per person.[68] In terms of box office admissions, this period represented the peak ticket sales in the history of the Chinese box office.[69] High ticket sales were driven by low ticket prices, with a cinema ticket typically costing between ¥0.1 ($0.06) and ¥0.3 ($0.19) at the time.[70]
By the early 1980s, there were 162,000 projection units in China, primarily composed of mobile movie teams which showed films outdoors in both rural and urban areas.[49]: 102
A number of films during this period drew box office admissions in the hundreds of millions. China's highest-grossing film in box office admissions was Legend of the White Snake (1980) with an estimated 700 million admissions,[71][72] followed by In-Laws (Full House of Joy) (1981) and The Undaunted Wudang (1983) with more than 600 million ticket sales each.[73] The highest-grossing foreign film was the Japanese film Kimi yo Fundo no Kawa o Watare (1976), which released in 1978 and sold more than 330 million tickets,[74] followed by the Indian film Caravan (1971) which released in 1979 and sold about 300 million tickets.[75]
In the late 1980s the film industry fell on hard times, faced with the dual problems of competition from other forms of entertainment and concern on the part of the authorities that many of the popular thriller and martial arts films were socially unacceptable. In January 1986 the film industry was transferred from the Ministry of Culture to the newly formed Ministry of Radio, Cinema, and Television to bring it under "stricter control and management" and to "strengthen supervision over production."[76]
Main melody dramas[edit]
During a period when socialist dramas were beginning to lose viewership, the Chinese government began to involve itself deeper into the world of popular culture and cinema by creating the official genre of the "main melody" (主旋律 zhǔxuánlǜ), inspired by Hollywood's strides in musical dramas.[82] In 1987, the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television issued a statement encouraging the making of movies which emphasizes the main melody to "invigorate national spirit and national pride".[83] The expression main melody refers to the musical term leitmotif, which translates to the 'theme of our times', which scholars suggest is representative of China's socio-political climate and cultural context of popular cinema.[84] These main melody films, still produced regularly in modern times, try to emulate the commercial mainstream by the use of Hollywood-style music and special effects. A significant feature of these films is the incorporation of a "red song", which is a song written as propaganda to support the People's Republic of China.[85] By revolving the film around the motif of a red song, the film is able to gain traction at the box office as songs are generally thought to be more accessible than a film. Theoretically, once the red song dominates the charts, it will stir interest in the film that which it accompanies.[86]
Main melody dramas are often subsidized by the state and have free access to government and military personnel.[87] The Chinese government spends between "one and two million RMBs" annually to support the production of films in the main melody genre. August First Film Studio, the film and TV production arm of the People's Liberation Army, is a studio that produces main melody cinema. Main melody films, which often depict past military engagements or are biopics of first-generation CCP leaders, have won several Best Picture prizes at the Golden Rooster Awards.[88] Some of the more famous main melody dramas include the ten-hour epic Decisive Engagement (大决战, 1991), directed by Cai Jiawei, Yang Guangyuan and Wei Lian; The Opium War (1997), directed by Xie Jin; and The Founding of a Republic (2009), directed by Han Sanping and Fifth Generation director Huang Jianxin.[89] The Founding of an Army (2017) was commissioned by the government to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the People's Liberation Army, and is the third instalment in The Founding of a Republic series.[90] The film featured many young Chinese pop singers that are already well-established in the industry, including Li Yifeng, Liu Haoran, and Lay Zhang, so as to further the film's reputation as a main melody drama.
Other directors[edit]
He Ping is a director of mostly Western-like films set in Chinese locale. His Swordsmen in Double Flag Town (1991) and Sun Valley (1995) explore narratives set in the sparse terrain of West China near the Gobi Desert. His historical drama Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker (1994) won a myriad of prizes home and abroad.
Recent cinema has seen Chinese cinematographers direct some acclaimed films. Other than Zhang Yimou, Lü Yue made Mr. Zhao (1998), a black comedy film well received abroad. Gu Changwei's minimalist epic Peacock (2005), about a quiet, ordinary Chinese family with three very different siblings in the post-Cultural Revolution era, took home the Silver Bear prize for 2005 Berlin International Film Festival. Hou Yong is another cinematographer who made films (Jasmine Women, 2004) and TV series. There are actors who straddle the dual roles of acting and directing. Xu Jinglei, a popular Chinese actress, has made six movies to date. Her second film Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004) landed her the San Sebastián International Film Festival Best Director award. Another popular actress and director is Zhao Wei, whose directorial debut So Young (2013) was a huge box office and critical success.
The most highly regarded Chinese actor-director is undoubtedly Jiang Wen, who has directed several critically acclaimed movies while following on his acting career. His directorial debut, In the Heat of the Sun (1994) was the first PRC film to win Best Picture at the Golden Horse Film Awards held in Taiwan. His other films, like Devils on the Doorstep (2000, Cannes Grand Prix) and Let the Bullets Fly (2010), were similarly well received. By the early 2011, Let the Bullets Fly had become the highest grossing domestic film in China's history.[101][102]
dGeneration-independent movement[edit]
There is a growing number of independent seventh or post-Sixth Generation filmmakers making films with extremely low budgets and using digital equipment. They are the so-called dGeneration (for digital).[103] These films, like those from Sixth Generation filmmakers, are mostly made outside the Chinese film system and are shown mostly on the international film festival circuit. Ying Liang and Jian Yi are two of these generation filmmakers. Ying's Taking Father Home (2005) and The Other Half (2006) are both representative of the generation trends of the feature film. Liu Jiayin made two dGeneration feature films, Oxhide (2004) and Oxhide II (2010), blurring the line between documentary and narrative film. Oxhide, made by Liu when she was a film student, frames herself and her parents in their claustrophobic Beijing apartment in a narrative praised by critics. An Elephant Sitting Still, considered one of the greatest film debuts in Chinese cinema, is also the only film by the late Hu Bo.[104]
New documentary movement[edit]
Two decades of reform and commercialization have brought dramatic social changes in mainland China, reflected not only in fiction film but in a growing documentary movement. Wu Wenguang's 70-minute Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990) is now seen as one of the first works of this "New Documentary Movement" (NDM) in China.[105][106] Bumming, made between 1988 and 1990, contains interviews with five young artists eking out a living in Beijing, subject to state authorized tasks. Shot using a camcorder, the documentary ends with four of the artists moving abroad after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.[107] Dance with the Farm Workers (2001) is another documentary by Wu.[108]
Another internationally acclaimed documentary is Wang Bing's nine-hour tale of deindustrialization Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003). Wang's subsequent documentaries, He Fengming (2007), Crude Oil (2008), Man with no name (2009), Three Sisters (2012) and Feng ai (2013), cemented his reputation as a leading documentarist of the movement.[109]
Li Hong, the first woman in the NDM, in Out of Phoenix Bridge (1997) relates the story of four young women, who moving from rural areas to the big cities like millions of other men and women, have come to Beijing to make a living.
The New Documentary Movement in recent times has overlapped with the dGeneration filmmaking, with most documentaries being shot cheaply and independently in the digital format. Xu Xin's Karamay (2010), Zhao Liang's Behemoth, Huang Weikai's Disorder (2009), Zhao Dayong's Ghost Town (2009), Du Haibing's 1428 (2009), Xu Tong's Fortune Teller (2009) and Li Ning's Tape (2010) were all shot in digital format. All had made their impact in the international documentary scene and the use of digital format allows for works of vaster lengths.
New models and the new Chinese cinema[edit]
Commercial successes[edit]
With China's liberalization in the late 1970s and its opening up to foreign markets, commercial considerations have made its impact in post-1980s filmmaking. Traditionally arthouse movies screened seldom make enough to break even. An example is Fifth Generation director Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Horse Thief (1986), a narrative film with minimal dialog on a Tibetan horse thief. The film, showcasing exotic landscapes, was well received by Chinese and some Western arthouse audiences, but did poorly at the box office.[112]
Tian's later The Warrior and the Wolf (2010) was a similar commercial failure.[113] Prior to these, there were examples of successful commercial films in the post-liberalization period. One was the romance film Romance on the Lu Mountain (1980), which was a success with older Chinese. The film broke the Guinness Book of Records as the longest-running film on a first run. Jet Li's cinematic debut Shaolin Temple (1982) was an instant hit at home and abroad (in Japan and the Southeast Asia, for example).[114] Another successful commercial film was Murder in 405 (405谋杀案, 1980), a murder thriller.[115]
Feng Xiaogang's The Dream Factory (1997) was heralded as a turning point in Chinese movie industry, a hesui pian (Chinese New Year-screened film) which demonstrated the viability of the commercial model in China's socialist market economy. Feng has become one of the most successful commercial director in the post-1997 era. Almost all his films made high returns domestically[116] while he used ethnic Chinese co-stars like Rosamund Kwan, Jacqueline Wu, Rene Liu and Shu Qi to boost his films' appeal.
In the decade following 2010, owing to the influx of Hollywood films (though the number screened each year is curtailed), Chinese domestic cinema faces mounting challenges. The industry is growing and domestic films are starting to achieve the box office impact of major Hollywood blockbusters. However, not all domestic films are successful financially. In January 2010 James Cameron's Avatar was pulled out from non-3D theaters for Hu Mei's biopic Confucius, but this move led to a backlash on Hu's film.[117] Zhang Yang's 2005 Sunflower also made little money, but his earlier, low-budget Spicy Love Soup (1997) grossed ten times its budget of ¥3 million.[118] Likewise, the 2006 Crazy Stone, a sleeper hit, was made for just 3 million HKD/US$400,000. In 2009–11, Feng's Aftershock (2009) and Jiang Wen's Let the Bullets Fly (2010) became China's highest grossing domestic films, with Aftershock earning ¥670 million (US$105 million)[119] and Let the Bullets Fly ¥674 million (US$110 million).[120] Lost in Thailand (2012) became the first Chinese film to reach ¥1 billion at the Chinese box office and Monster Hunt (2015) became the first to reach CN¥2 billion. As of 2021, 9 of the top 10 highest-grossing films in China are domestic productions. On 8 February 2016, the Chinese box office set a new single-day gross record, with CN¥660 million, beating the previous record of CN¥425 million on 18 July 2015.[121] Also in February 2016, The Mermaid, directed by Stephen Chow, became the highest-grossing film in China, overtaking Monster Hunt.[122] It is also the first film to reach CN¥3 billion.[123]
Under the influence of Hollywood science fiction movies like Prometheus, published on 8 June 2012, such genres especially the space science films have risen rapidly in the Chinese film market in recent years. On 5 February 2019, the film The Wandering Earth directed by Frant Gwo reached $699.8 million worldwide, which became the third highest-grossing film in the history of Chinese cinema.
Industry[edit]
Box office and screens[edit]
In 1983, there were 162,000 projection units in China, up from less than 600 at the 1949 founding of the PRC.[8]: 1
In 1998, the Ministry of Culture revived the practice of mobile rural cinema as part of its 2131 Project which aimed to screen one movie pert month per village in rural China and upgrade analog equipment to digital projectors.[8]: 246 In 2003, the central government provided more than 400 film projection vans to Tibet and Xinjiang to show films in an effort to oppose what the government viewed as separatism and Westernization.[8]: 249
In 2010, Chinese cinema was the third largest film industry by number of feature films produced annually.[126] In 2013, China's gross box office was ¥21.8 billion (US$3.6 billion), the second-largest film market in the world by box office receipts.[127] In January 2013, Lost in Thailand (2012) became the first Chinese film to reach ¥1 billion at the box office.[128] As of May 2013, 7 of the top 10 highest-grossing films in China were domestic productions.[129] As of 2014, around half of all tickets are sold online, with the largest ticket selling sites being Maoyan.com (82 million), Gewara.com (45 million) and Wepiao.com (28 million).[130] In 2014, Chinese films earned ¥1.87 billion outside China.[131] By December 2013 there were 17,000 screens in the country.[132] By 6 January 2014, there were 18,195 screens in the country.[127] Greater China has around 251 IMAX theaters.[133] There were 299 cinema chains (252 rural, 47 urban), 5,813 movie theaters and 24,317 screens in the country in 2014.[2]
The country added about 8,035 screens in 2015 (at an average of 22 new screens per day, increasing its total by about 40% to around 31,627 screens, which is about 7,373 shy of the number of screens in the United States.[134][135] Chinese films accounted for 61.48% of ticket sales in 2015 (up from 54% last year) with more than 60% of ticket sales being made online. Average ticket price was down about 2.5% to $5.36 in 2015.[134] It also witnessed 51.08% increase in admissions, with 1.26 billion people buying tickets to the cinema in 2015.[135] Chinese films grossed US$427 million overseas in 2015.[136] During the week of the 2016 Chinese New Year, the country set a new record for the highest box office gross during one week in one territory with US$548 million, overtaking the previous record of US$529.6 million of 26 December 2015 to 1 January 2016 in the United States and Canada.[137] Chinese films grossed CN¥3.83 billion (US$550 million) in foreign markets in 2016.[3]
In 2020, China's market for films surpassed the U.S. market to become the largest such market in the world.[138]: 16