In spite of the darkening global growth prospects and the unexpected plunge in the domestic stock market on the first trading day of this year, Chinese consumers will no doubt demonstrate their growing importance to the global movie industry when Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens in this country on Jan 9.
This latest installment of the blockbuster series has already earned more than $1.5 billion worldwide so far, and there are anticipations that Chinese moviegoers will give the film a shot in the arm big enough to allow this space opera sequel to finally shoot past the record $2.8 billion box office returns of Avatar.
The filmmaker has expressed worries that, with the movie-going demographic in China becoming increasingly younger, the seventh film in the "Star Wars" series might not attract an adequately large number of Chinese viewers. That is a fair concern given the considerable cultural differences and preferences between Chinese and Western cinemagoers.
But the latest statistics of China's box office are more than reassuring.
According to the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, films screened in China raked in more than 44 billion yuan ($6.78 billion) in 2015, jumping by 48.7 percent over the previous year when the country's box office soared by one third to about 30 billion yuan. It is estimated that the Chinese box office may surpass $10 billion annually in a few years.
The highest growth of box office since 2011 will certainly neither guarantee that the pace of growth will continue or accelerate in coming years, nor make the huge success of The Force Awakens a sure bet.
Nevertheless, it is another sign that Chinese consumers are rising to assert their increasing influence at home and abroad as a key driving force for growth.
Other such signs include that the 4 trillion yuan that Chinese consumers spent online last year to purchase all kinds of goods from domestic and international retailers and the one-fifth jump, to 120 million, in the number of Chinese tourists who have travelled overseas in 2015.
It is true that all these consumption-led growth stories happened in a year when the Chinese economy probably saw the slowest growth in about a quarter century. As the world's second-largest economy is shifting away from its decades-old dependence on investment and exports for growth, many industrial sectors with serious overcapacity or significant exposure to the turmoil of global markets have felt the pain of China's necessary economic transformation towards more self-sustaining growth driven by consumption and innovation.
The latest Caixin/Markit China Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index index fell from 48.6 in November to 48.2 in December, indicating that Chinese manufacturing had contracted for 10 straight months.
It is a real cause for concern that China's traditional growth engines are losing steam and becoming a drag on the country's overall economic growth. But it is not a sufficient reason to cast doubt on the long-term prospects of the Chinese economy, particularly given the increasing signs that Chinese consumers are awakening and their spending is taking up the slack created by these cooling industrial sectors.
In terms of per capita GDP and their preference for saving over spending, Chinese consumers still fall far behind their counterparts in developed countries and can only contribute to a smaller share of their country's overall economic growth. Yet, with their incomes continuously rising, Chinese consumers are showing they are more eager than ever to spend.
But before China's consumption-led growth someday becomes the leading story for global media, let's first wait to see how far Chinese moviegoers can move The Force Awakens up the all-time global box office charts.
The author Zhu Qiwen is a senior writer with China Daily.
zhuqiwen@chinadaily.com.cn
