Cultural Security and Cinema diplomacy in Europe-China relations

Amid overlapping crises since the mid-2010s, from the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine to escalating geopolitical and economic tensions, UK and EU’s relations with China have increasingly been reframed through the language and practice of security, which has also affected the sphere of cultural relations (Shi and Liu, 2025). This paper examines how cultural security affects and what it implies for cinema diplomacy in EU-China and UK-China relations. It traces and compares three configurations of cultural security. In China, cultural security is an explicit policy priority, articulated in terms of ideological control, discourse power, regime security against external influence (Johnson, 2017). In the United Kingdom, cultural security is not named as such but emerges implicitly and in ad-hoc, reactive measures, for instance in responses to perceived political influence and threats to creative and academic freedom (Pamment, 2018). In the EU, cultural security has been defined primarily through heritage and diversity, encompassing the destruction and protection of cultural heritage in armed conflict, post-war cultural heritage management, restitution, illicit trafficking, cultural diversity, and intercultural dialogue (Shi and Liu, 2025). These different understandings sit in tension with each other, as well as with ongoing cultural diplomacy initiatives on all sides. Using film co-production treaties and between China and European countries up to 2018 and selected Europe-China film projects, the paper interrogates how cultural security intersects and exists in tension with cinema diplomacy. It asks how securitising moves reshape the ambitions and governance of co-production and festival cooperation, and what this reveals about the evolving place of culture in the EU and the UK responses to a perceived turn in relations with China. Grounded in qualitative data about UK-China co-productions, UK, PRC and EU policy documents, the paper contributes to debates on crisis-induced change in European executive governance by foregrounding the cultural and audiovisual domain.