During a visit to Beijing several years ago, cinematographer and poet Colin Browne noticed the enormous three-storey portraits of Chairman Mao. When he returned a few years later to attend a film symposium, the portraits were still there, but they were no longer of the communist leader. Leonardo de Caprio had taken Mao's place.

Conjuring up this vision of multiple Leonardos glowering, Oz-like, over a bustling urban landscape of workers on bicycles, Browne noted that an "American actor was now the spiritual leader of China." He wasn't being entirely facetious; seeing images of the Titanic film idol usurp those of a totalitarian leader was, for Browne, a defining moment of Hollywood's global power.

Browne told this anecdote at another recent film seminar, on Cultural Survival In the Age of Hollywood, held at the close of the Vancouver International Film Festival.

"It seemed to me that the United States finds it difficult to conquer a small country," Browne noted at the seminar, " but they have managed to conquer China and it wasn't with an army, but with Hollywood."

Is Hollywood's colonization of the Asian imagination any more problematic than the previous colonization by western social philosophy via Marxism? Isn't this a more benign "cultural revolution" than one which cost thousands of Chinese lives?

It may be an improvement, but not one without its own dangers, say the critics. It's been said that MTV has penetrated places the CIA never could and in the view of Browne and his filmmaking colleagues, the US military-industrial-entertainment complex will stop at nothing less than full-spectrum dominance of the global film industry. The final victory will be when any stories on celluloid without the stamp of Hollywood will be unthinkable - literally.

The case of China is instructive. Its "conquest" by Hollywood took remarkably little time. Back in May of 2000, the film industry trade magazine Variety announced that the "movie business cheered the House of Representatives' passage...of permanent normal trade relations status for China, clearing the way for expanded investment in entertainment in the huge country."

"Today's vote marks a significant step towards a new era in global trade," said Jack Valenti, slick, silver-haired president of the Motion Picture Association of America. Prior to the victory for the free market in Asia, Valenti said China should have to open more theatres to American films if it wanted to secure a place in the World Trade Organization. The acceptance of the world's most populous nation into the trade body hung on its acceptance of greater penetration by the US film industry. The Chinese agreed, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Besides the colossal de Caprios, the other remarkable thing Colin Browne noted on his last visit to China was the noise from construction. "When I talked to the filmmakers and we were all sitting down like this listening to the panel, we couldn't hear each other speak."

"China was being torn down. The whole area of Beijing was transforming itself. The city was becoming Detroit...the noise was so deafening... these Chinese filmmakers were lamenting the loss of their country, and that so much of their culture was being obliterated."

Ironically, the Chinese film directors' concerns about threatened culture were now being echoed in Vancouver by Browne's colleagues - film directors from New Zealand, Argentina, France and Italy.

Apologizing for her jet-lagged state, prominent French screenwriter and director Coline Serreau offered the darkest assessment on Hollywood's domination of the global film market. (Serrau's very successful 1985 movie, Trois hommes et un couffin, was adapted by Hollywood in 1987 as Three Men and a Baby.)

After a 19 year absence the US has rejoined UNESCO, the UN's cultural organization. The reason, Surreau asserts, is to quash UNESCO's Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, a non-binding agreement proposed to offer tacit protection of member states' cultural industries from the predations of the free market.

With the exception of the separate deal cut with China in 2000, 1994's WTO treaty, adopted by much of the developed and undeveloped world, left out a huge and increasingly important area of international commerce - cultural products, including movies, television programming, music, books and magazines that are delivered to the consuming public through the new information technologies. The cultural czars of Hollywood are wary of any move that might restrict trade further in the cultural sphere.

"I think it's fair to say we'd oppose it," Valenti told the New York Times earlier this year about the US attitude to the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. "If all sectors are negotiated in the WTO, why single out one sector? Once you do that, the whole system unravels."

Ultimately, the US prefers that future debates on cultural industries are handled by unelected officials in trade bodies like the WTO. UNESCO's efforts, mediated by the members of foreign nations, make for a fly in the ointment.

With the declaration, says Surreau, "any country that has decided to protect its (film) industry will have the right to do that, and this is where the Americans are attacking. They say it's the past...the American position is to say this will be against the free market, and of course it's not true...the freedom of the market is the freedom of THEIR market."

Certainly if money talks, the US has a lot to say on the matter of culture and capital. According to a February article in the New York Times, American productions regularly account for 85 percent of movie audiences worldwide. As the omnipresent Jack Valenti told the US Senate, "The US movie industry alone has a surplus balance of trade with every single country in the world. No other American enterprise can make that statement." Entertainment is the United States' single biggest export, and Valenti and his associates in the film industry rightly consider the global penetration of American audiovisual products and services into foreign markets as a critical issue for the US economy.

For some officials, the culture / capital debate demonstrates the wrong-headed resistance of others to the American way. Bruce A. Lehman, assistant secretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, prefers to call the global reluctance to open up cultural markets "The New Cold War on American Culture."

"America's less successful competitors have been working overtime to create new barriers to US industry access to their markets," he wrote two years ago in a speech for the International Intellectual Property Institute. Lehmann specifically targeted France and Canada for the high crime of putting culture over the dollar, citing one Canadian villain at a 2001 UNESCO conference.

"One of the most strident voices at the conference was that of Ms. Sheila Copp, (sic) deputy prime minister of Canada. Ms. Copp, who also serves as heritage minister, directly attacked the United States as a threat to global cultural diversity. Her anti-American rhetoric was reminiscent of Soviet delegates at the UN in the 1950s."

Copp (Lehman's Freudian take on her protective stance toward Canadian cultural output, perhaps) apparently "called on other countries to follow the Canadian example of establishing quotas for broadcast and cable distribution of audiovisual product."

"She quoted glowingly from government statistics showing that Canada's $200 million subsidy for program production, combined with quotas reserving broadcast time for these subsidized productions. The subsidy, she advised her fellow ministers, was in large measure paid for by taxes on cable television systems retransmitting American programming."

Lehman then shifts into the ever-helpful metaphor of total war. "The UNESCO conference was a typical battleground in the Franco-Canadian war against US cultural workers and industries." He added that growth in the US film industry would require access to the emerging markets in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. "If France and Canada have their way, US access to these opportunities will be barred in any future trade agreement... Politicians and bureaucrats in Paris and Ottawa must not be permitted to win any battle in their wrong-headed war on American culture."

Like Valenti, Lehman opposes the creation of "soft laws" which will undercut the United States in future trade negotiations. UNESCO's introduction of a Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity is one such "soft law."

"It's only a declaration, it's not something that has the strength of law," film director Coline Serrau notes, adding that " culture is a human right, you cannot sell human rights."

In its battle for global film market share, the US is opposed even to token gestures of cultural nationalism from others. Last February, Mexico introduced a one-peso tax on cinema admissions. The revenues were meant to foster the local film industry, but the ever-vigilant Valenti wrote Mexican president Vicente Fox in protest. Several major Hollywood studios also lodged legal objections.

Alan Franey, director of the Vancouver International Film Festival, told Common Ground the US response was "an astonishing thing, because a one-peso (12¢) levy is extremely modest."

"This is absolutely galling to people, because it shows how they (the US) will go for the least symbolic, thin end of the wedge, that might interfere with fairly absolute control over so many markets."

Mexico is not the only recipient of strong-arm tactics from the US when it comes to promoting a national film industry. A Canadian minister of culture once had an interesting run-in with Valenti.

Flora MacDonald, communications minister in the Mulroney cabinet, was a "Red Tory" and considered something of a cultural nationalist. She had every intention of following up on the plans of her predecessor, Marcelle Masse, to protect and promote the Canadian film industry. But what Canadians called "culture," Americans considered "the entertainment industry," and when the head of the Motion Picture Association of America sensed that Canadians didn't understand this fine distinction, he came calling to Ottawa.

"Before the meeting, MacDonald had been apprehensive," writes former Maclean's correspondent Marci McDonald in her biography of Brian Mulroney, Yankee Doodle Dandy.

For months, aides had regaled her with tales of Valenti's legendary clout. "I'd heard all this great build-up about this man who could talk the ear off a brass monkey - how he could persuade anybody to do anything," MacDonald admits. "Well, I almost laughed when he walked in. He came up to my shoulder. I had to look down at this little man, I must say, it was a great psychological boost."

"For 20 minutes, Valenti delivered a lecture that set her seething with its condescension." The US entertainment industry's silverback argued that American culture was now global culture, and scoffed "at the notion of etching a national identity on celluloid."

MacDonald reportedly gave as good as she got with a lecture of her own to Valenti. In the end her efforts proved to be in vain.

Canadian culture is never on the table in our dealings with Americans, or so we're told. Valenti, working behind the scenes while the Free Trade Agreement was hammered out, finessed the negotiators. In a subsequent memo which was leaked to a Washington trade newsletter after the conclusion of the pact, a US bureaucrat noted that Mulroney's government had "promised to solve Jack Valenti's problem on film distribution within the next two weeks." In an interview later, US trade negotiator Peter Murphy acknowledged that Reagan aide James Baker had worked out a secret deal with Valenti apart from the actual text.

"Like other elements of the deal, Canadian film policy appears to have been quietly taken care of at another table far from public sight," writes the Maclean's correspondent. She quotes Murphy: "It was just an agreement between Baker and Valenti, but Mulroney had to go along with it. Everything that was signed was signed at the very top."

Valenti got what he wanted, the defeat of a plan for Canadian distribution of film. And today he and his colleagues want much more, although it is usually benignly referred to as no more than fair and open access to foreign markets for the American entertainment industry. Filmmakers outside the US, noting the huge difference in scale between their local film industries and the Hollywood monolith, regard it as leaving the door wide open for an 800 pound gorilla. In France, the growing hegemony of Hollywood is seen as a "cultural Chernobyl."

"The whole idea of culture is a very soft idea," observed British Columbia filmmaker Coline Browne at the Vancouver conference. "I don't think we really understand how important it is."

"I believe that next to food, people need story-telling more than any other thing. As soon as a child is old enough to speak, he starts begging for a story. People say we are what we eat; that's only half the equation. We are what we experience."

Browne points out that we have two ways of experiencing; directly and vicariously. "And we have vicarious experiences all the time, all of us watch television, read and listen to stories all the time because these experiences are what form us and change us."

The narrative about cultural identity is fundamentally different when Leonardo de Caprio sits in for Chairman Mao. Who will get to tell the stories in the new millennium? Who will get to form us and change us? For Browne, this is what the cultural diversity debate is all about.

Nineteen years ago, the US left UNESCO, citing mismanagement and an anti-American bias. Earlier this month, Laura Bush presided over the raising of the American flag over the headquarters of UNESCO in Paris, signalling the nation's return to the cultural body. A photo in the Weekly Guardian showed French President Jacques Chirac kissing the first lady's hand.

It all looks very nice and diplomatic, but for French film director Coline Surreau, "it is a very dangerous time."

"They're going to fight hard. They don't want the convention. We have to fight... it's a matter of survival for French, for Canadian, for South African, South American popular culture, and it (the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity) has to be supported by everybody right now."

Geoff Olson can be reached at gefo@telus.net