During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the Chinese film industry experienced severe political turmoil; regular film production was suspended, and instead, highly politicized “model revolutionary operas” were made into films. Fast-forward to the present. In 2023, North America (U.S. and Canada) topped the global box office with 9.1 billion U.S. dollars, but China positioned a close second with 7.7 billion U.S. dollars. In other words, the Chinese film industry has transformed from a “barometer of politics” to a “dream factory with Chinese characteristics.” Existing studies of the Chinese film industry have been divided into two approaches (for a review, see, e.g., Wing-Fai Leung and Sangjoon Lee. 2019. “The Chinese Film Industry: Emerging Debates.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13(3):199-202). The “state capitalism” approach stresses the state’s continuing role—including the preferential treatment of state-owned studios—and argues that politics, including censorship, is trumping the market mechanisms. The “market transition” approach emphasizes the laissez-faire notion of free market and predicts the declining role of the state and politics, as long as the film content does not engage with political issues. This project proposed an alternative to these two approaches by zeroing in on the role of organizations and institutions in the Chinese film industry. For instance, soon after China acceded to WTO in 2001, the distribution sector for Chinese domestic films, which had long been the monopoly of the state-owned China Film Corporation, was opened up for market competition by numerous private film distribution companies. At the same time, however, the government’s control in the distribution sector was strengthened for economically lucrative imported blockbuster films, when the government newly established the state-owned Huaxia Film Distribution in 2003 and created the state-owned duopoly of Huaxia and China Film Corporation. By meticulously process-tracing a number of institutional events and incidents in the film industry in the past four decades, the project argued that what matters the most was not whether the state or the market was winning, but how the state and the market were mutually “embedded” (Karl Polanyi) and creating the unique institutional dynamics of the Chinese film industry.