“Mulan” and moolah: Hollywood in China

“MULAN”, DISNEY’S live-action remake of its animated film from 1998, is due to be released on September 4th. The tale of a plucky Chinese girl who sees off a foreign invasion is tailored for Chinese tastes as much as for Western ones, and with reason. China’s box office may emerge from the pandemic as the world’s biggest. But Hollywood faces two difficulties in this lucrative market. Home-grown studios are on the rise. And movies must be tweaked to satisfy censors, which is also causing ructions in America. (This week the American chief executive of TikTok, a Chinese video app caught in trans-Pacific political crossfire, quit after just three months.) Yet in important ways Hollywood studios are still better off than their Chinese counterparts. Chinese films do not do well abroad. And because Hollywood makes plenty from merchandise, TV rights and so on, it is less reliant on the box office—and thus better equipped for a world with emptier cinemas.

Technology companies have been equity markets’ brightest performers during the pandemic. No wonder that more of them are keen to list their shares on the world’s stock exchanges. On August 25th Ant Group, the financial-technology affiliate of Alibaba, a mighty Chinese e-commerce firm, filed for a share issue that may yield $30bn in Hong Kong and Shanghai. On the same day
Palantir Technologies handed in its paperwork for a listing in New York. The controversial software firm—its clients have included the CIA and the Pentagon, as well as corporations—will raise no new money, but will sell existing shares directly to public investors. The 17-year-old firm is yet to make a profit, though its losses narrowed last year and its venture-capital owners, who have valued it at maybe $26bn, have high hopes.

On August 31st five years ago, as more and more asylum-seekers headed for Germany, Angela Merkel declared: “Wir schaffen das” (“We can handle this”). Perhaps 1.2m people entered the country before border closures farther east and an EU agreement with Turkey stemmed the flow. The new arrivals’ experience has been mixed. They have fared better in the labour market than those who came from Yugoslavia in the 1990s. But less than half are in skilled work. And like other European countries Germany has struggled to deport those whose asylum claims have failed. As many as 200,000 are “tolerated”, with no right to be in Germany but at no risk of immediate removal. Another 50,000 have no legal status. Many are lost in a bureaucratic maze.

A jihadist insurgency that began in late 2017 has claimed more than 1,500 lives in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s northernmost province. The fighters carried out almost as many attacks in the first half of this year as in the whole of last, which was in turn bloodier than the year before. The government is hobbled by infighting within the ruling party. Its best soldiers are guarding facilities to liquefy and ship gas. The rest, few of whom are from Cabo Delgado, are poorly trained, poorly paid and accused of maltreating locals. The government has turned to foreign mercenaries, with little success. Neighbouring countries have done little to help, though South Africa is said to have sent a small contingent of special forces. They see the insurgency as Mozambique’s problem alone. It is getting worse.

Dementia affects more than 50m people worldwide, and the number is rising fast. Because incidence rises with age and because people are living longer, it is advancing with the inevitability of demographic change. Its full effects will not be felt for many years. But, as our special report this week explains, it is already a global emergency. More people live with it than can be cared for decently. There is no cure in sight. No country has devised a sustainable way of paying for the care of those afflicted. And most new cases will be in the developing world. Proper care, despite advances in robotics, requires human patience and compassion. Yet too often carers are regarded as poorly skilled, and paid accordingly. That, our leader argues, should change, even though it adds to the bill.