How will we know when a new Cold War has truly begun?

我们如何知道一场新的冷战是否已经开始了？

There are, lately, plenty of signs to choose from. In the past few months, China undertook the largest military exercises in the waters around Taiwan in almost three decades, and Americans learned about major recent hacks of the Treasury Department and several of the country’s largest telecommunications companies. President Trump announced the nominations of China hawks for secretary of state, ambassador to Beijing and under secretary of defense for policy, among other positions in the new government, having made an escalating tariff war with China as central to his third campaign as a border wall had been to his first. This month in Foreign Affairs, the conservative historian Niall Ferguson suggested America’s second Cold War was already at least five years old.

最近，有很多迹象可供选择。过去几个月，中国在台湾周边海域进行了近三十年来最大规模的军事演习，美国人则得知财政部和美国最大的几家电信公司遭遇了重大黑客攻击。特朗普总统宣布提名一批对华鹰派担任国务卿、驻北京大使，以及负责政策的国防部副部长等职位，他在第三次竞选中把与中国的关税战升级作为核心议题，就像边境墙是他第一次竞选时的主题一样。本月在《外交事务》杂志上，保守派历史学家奈尔·弗格森提出，美国的第二次冷战至少已经进行五年了。

But if we are working through a strict comparison with the first Cold War, one big echo is conspicuously missing. For decades, part of how Americans made sense of their rivalry with the Soviet Union was through popular culture — movies and television and novels that dramatized and personalized the conflict, typically simplifying and mythologizing it as well. This time, there has been essentially none of that — no real effort in Hollywood to make use of high-stakes global conflict even as a narrative crutch, or by more auteurish creators to explore the layered human complexity of such conflicts.

但如果我们严格地将现在的状况与第一次冷战进行比较，有一个显著的回响却明显缺失。几十年来，美国人理解与苏联竞争的一部分方式是通过流行文化——电影、电视和小说，这些作品将冲突戏剧化并个性化，通常还会对其进行简化和神话化。而这一次，几乎没有出现这种情况——好莱坞没有真的努力利用高风险的全球冲突，即使是作为叙事支撑；更具个人风格的创作者也没有去探索这些冲突中复杂的人性层面。

Not only is there no “Hunt for Red October; there is also no “Dr. Strangelove” or real heir to John le Carré. That the United States is now engaged in some form of conflict with China has become a kind of commonplace among policy analysts and one of the few areas of consensus between the two political parties. But if there is a Cold War on, you wouldn’t know it from simply streaming movies or television, even if you left your favorite platform on auto-play forever. It’s not just that you can’t yet find a good movie about American rivalry with China on Netflix or Apple TV+. Outside of “3 Body Problem” and some historical documentaries, it’s hard to find anything new about China at all.

不仅没有《猎杀红色十月》(Hunt for Red October)，也没有《奇爱博士》(Dr. Strangelove)或真正继承约翰·勒卡雷的作家出现。美国现在与中国处于某种形式的冲突已成为政策分析师的共识，也是两党之间为数不多的共识之一。但如果冷战正在进行，你通过流媒体观看电影或电视是绝对无法察觉的，即使你把最喜欢的平台一直设置为自动播放。问题不仅仅是你在Netflix或Apple TV+上找不到一部关于美中竞争的好电影，除了《三体》以及一些历史纪录片，几乎很难找到任何关于中国的新内容。

Just as striking is that we all know the reason — and know how craven it is. Simply put, the stuff we watch these days is overwhelmingly produced by large corporations far too dependent on China, in one form or another, to risk offending its audiences or its leaders by even broaching the subject.

同样引人注目的是，我们都知道这背后的原因——而且甚至其卑劣。简单来说，我们如今观看的内容，绝大部分都是由那些在某种形式上过于依赖中国的大公司制作的，这些公司不敢冒犯中国的观众或领导人，哪怕只是冒险提及这个话题。

This isn’t exactly news. As far back as 2020, PEN America published a backward-looking report on the subject called “Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing,” and in 2022 Erich Schwartzel published “Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy.” Some of the most conspicuous instances of capitulation have become, if often small-stakes, nevertheless notorious: a Taiwanese flag on Tom Cruise’s jacket was removed from a trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick”; the Chinese villains in the 2012 remake of “Red Dawn” became North Korean instead. Even the NBA has been forced to bend the knee to the Chinese government, and conflict over China coverage reportedly helped end Jon Stewart’s show on Apple TV+.

这并不是什么新闻。早在2020年，美国笔会就发表了一份名为《好莱坞制造，北京审查》的回顾性报告；2022年，埃里希·施瓦泽尔出版了《红毯——好莱坞、中国和全球文化霸权之争》(Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy)。一些最醒目的投降例子虽然往往是小事，但也声名狼藉：《壮志凌云2：独行侠》(Top Gun: Maverick)的预告片中去掉了汤姆·克鲁斯外套上的台湾国旗；2012年翻拍的《红色黎明》(Red Dawn)里的中国反派变成了朝鲜人。就连NBA也被迫向中国政府屈膝。而根据报道，围绕中国报道的冲突也在一定程度上导致“囧司徒”（即乔恩·斯图尔特，Jon Stewart——编注）在Apple TV+上的节目停播。

But even without these constraints, how much of a reckoning should we expect? As a streaming executive might tell you, Mandarin is forbidding, and China’s social mores foreign, and Americans are famously somewhat solipsistic in their tastes and culture. As many have lamented in recent years, the conditions of production in Hollywood also leave a lot to be desired these days, with what looked like a streaming gold rush drying up quite substantially. The new, grim horizon is lowest-common-denominator streaming content designed for falling asleep to. The nature of the conflict is different, too, with Americans dependent on China for our phones, pharmaceuticals and drones (to name just a few supply chains that bind the countries together).

但是，即使没有这些限制条件，我们又该期望得到多少成果呢？正如一位流媒体高管可能会告诉你的那样，中文令人望而却步，中国的社会习俗也很陌生，而美国人在品味和文化方面又是出了名的唯我主义。正如近年来许多人所感叹的那样，如今，好莱坞的制作条件也有很多不如人意之处，看起来像是一股源源不断的淘金热正在枯竭。令人沮丧的新前景是那些为迎合最广泛受众而被降低到最低水准的流媒体内容，只为催人入睡设计。冲突的性质也有所不同了，美国人的手机、药品和无人机都依赖中国（这只是将两个国家联系在一起的几条供应链而已）。

In fact, this is part of what makes it such a strange war, even a cold one — two global powers simultaneously at loggerheads and in bed together, presumably a combination that makes out-and-out hot war, if not impossible, certainly less easily imaginable. But as the years have worn on, with the strange conflict both deepening and expanding, what is more striking than the superficial adjustments made to blockbusters is simply how mute Hollywood continues to be about the conflict.

事实上，这也是这场战争如此奇特的部分原因，即便它是一场冷战也是如此——两个全球大国之间有着严重分歧，却又睡在一张床上，这种情况可能会使彻底的热战即使不是不可能，也肯定不是那么容易想象。但随着时间的流逝，随着这场奇怪的冲突不断深化和扩大，比大片表面上的调整更令人震惊的是，好莱坞对这场冲突依然保持沉默。

The first Soviet nuclear test was in 1949. That same year, Hollywood gave us “The Red Menace” and “The Woman on Pier 13” (a.k.a. “I Married a Communist”). “The Iron Curtain” (1948) had been released before, and the decade that followed featured dozens of major movies with explicit Cold War plots — “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951), “Big Jim McLain” (1952) and “North by Northwest” (1959), along with far too many others to list in anything but a numbing spreadsheet — and allegories like “High Noon” (1952) and “On the Waterfront” (1954). Those like “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms” (1953), “Them!” (1954) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) processed the story through science fiction and horror.

苏联第一次核试验是在1949年。同年，好莱坞给我们带来了《红色威胁》(The Red Menace)和《码头争锋》(The Woman on Pier 13)——又名《我娶了共产党》(I Married a Communist)。《铁幕》(The Iron Curtain, 1948)之前就已上映，之后十年里，有几十部带有明显冷战情节的主要电影——《地球停转之日》(The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951）、《檀岛歼谍记》(Big Jim McLain, 1952)和《西北偏北》(North by Northwest, 1959)，此外还有太多其他电影，无法一一列举，除非做一个让人麻木的表格——还有《正午》(High Noon, 1952)和《码头风云》(On the Waterfront, 1954)这样的寓言。《原子怪兽》(The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, 1953)、《它们！》(Them!, 1954)和《天外魔花》（Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956）通过科幻和恐怖手法处理这个题材。

Almost certainly, this wasn’t a particularly healthy way to process the arrival of a new kind of imperial rivalry on which the future of the country, global politics and possibly human existence seemed to hang. Plenty of undergraduate film theses have been written on the distortions, mostly propagandistic, of the Cold War film wave, which didn’t really abate before Sylvester Stallone was single-handedly defending the free world in “Rocky IV” and a Hollywood actor playing the role of the American president won the Cold War by speechifying to “tear down this wall.”

几乎可以肯定的是，这并不是一种特别健康的方式来应对一种新型帝国竞争的到来，这种竞争似乎关乎国家的未来、全球政治，甚至可能关乎人类的存在。许多本科电影论文都探讨了冷战时期电影浪潮中的扭曲现象，这种扭曲大多是政治宣传性质，直至史泰龙在《洛奇4》(Rocky IV)中单枪匹马捍卫自由世界、一位好莱坞演员出身的美国总统发表“推倒这堵墙”的演讲从而赢得冷战之前，这股浪潮并没有真正减弱。

But if we are even just tiptoeing into a new geopolitical era, defined partly by American rivalry with a rising superpower, it’s a bit strange that those looking for a cultural reckoning will have to look to the pages of Foreign Policy or Financial Times, having struck out scrolling their favorite streamer — where, this time, they’d find a void.

但是，如果我们只是小心翼翼地踏入一个新的地缘政治时代——这个时代部分由与崛起的超级大国的竞争所定义，那么，有些奇怪的是，那些寻求文化清算的人只能去看《外交政策》或《金融时报》，而不是滚动浏览他们最喜欢的流媒体——这一次，他们会发现那个地方一片空白。

Instead, we seem to be making sense of things where we do everything else nowadays — on social media, which among other functions has become something like the world’s most popular reality television show. And there, over the past few weeks, one central drama has been the evolving and still unclear fate of TikTok — the video-based social media app owned by ByteDance, a Chinese tech company — and the American effort to shut it down.

相反，我们似乎像如今理解其他事情一样，在社交媒体上理解这些事——社交媒体除了其他各种功能外，还是世界上最受欢迎的电视真人秀。过去几周里，社交媒体方面的一个中心事件是TikTok的命运——这是中国科技公司字节跳动旗下基于视频的社交媒体应用，它不断演变，但目前仍不明朗，美国试图关闭它的努力也是如此。

A bipartisan law, passed last year, required TikTok’s sale or closing. Presumably this was in order to blunt its utility in information warfare, but the public justification was never all that clearly stated But as Joe Biden left office, it was reported that he would not enforce the law, perhaps in an effort to simply dump the problem on his successor — though Mr. Biden offered no real explanation.

去年通过的一项两党法案要求出售或关闭TikTok。据推测，这可能是为了削弱其在信息战中的作用，但公开的理由从来没有得到说明。但在拜登卸任之际，据报道，他将不会执行该法律，这或许是为了将问题简单地推给继任者——尽管拜登并未给出真正的解释。

But Donald Trump appears to see it as an opportunity, instead. The Supreme Court unanimously announced that the law — which had passed through the Senate with votes from 31 Republicans — must be upheld. But although Trump had called for the ban as early as 2020, he has since reversed positions, presumably persuaded by the Republican super-supporter and ByteDance investor Jeff Yass. He saved a seat for the TikTok C.E.O. at the inauguration dais and in his Inauguration Day signing spree delivered an executive order preserving access (at least temporarily) for the more than 100 million Americans who use the app.

但特朗普似乎将其视为一个机会。最高法院一致宣布，这项在参议院获得31名共和党人投票通过的法律必须维持。不过，尽管特朗普早在2020年就呼吁实施禁令，但他后来改变了立场，可能是被共和党超级支持者、字节跳动公司投资者杰夫·亚斯说服了。他在就职典礼上为TikTok首席执行官留了一个座位，并在就职日签署的一系列行政命令中，包括为使用该应用的1亿多美国人保留了访问权限（至少是暂时的）。

Chinese authorities are reportedly considering a way the law could be circumvented: a sale to Trump’s right hand Elon Musk, who blew up a congressional spending deal last year, seemingly in part to preserve his economic interests in China. Musk has already single-handedly reshaped American political discourse through X, and TikTok grew conspicuously more pro-Trump in the aftermath of the congressional vote. It’s not hard to imagine which direction things would go in Musk’s hands.

据报道，中国当局正在考虑一种规避该法律的方法：将TikTok出售给特朗普的左膀右臂埃隆·马斯克，马斯克去年破坏了国会的一项支出协议，部分原因似乎是为了维护他在中国的经济利益。马斯克通过X一手重塑了美国的政治话语，而在国会投票之后，TikTok明显变得更加亲特朗普。不难想象在马斯克手中事情会朝哪个方向发展。

ByteDance initially shut down American access ahead of schedule, perhaps to inspire user outrage, then reopened it, with no executive action in hand, confident enough that there was no real threat from the Trump administration. And loyal American users of TikTok fled to the Chinese alternative RedNote in such numbers that it became the most downloaded app on Apple’s U.S. App Store — alarming its corporate censors, who rushed to block Chinese users from seeing content produced by the new American arrivals. For their part, the Americans might’ve been wondering, as they looked around, who was a bot and who was a troll, who might be a stooge and who a censor, who could be a spy and who an operator.

字节跳动最初提前关闭了美国的访问权限，也许是为了激起用户的愤怒，随后，它又在没有采取任何行政行动的情况下重新开放，因为它有足够的信心认为不会有来自特朗普政府的真正威胁。忠实的美国TikTok用户大量涌向中国的小红书，后者成为了苹果美国应用商店中下载量最多的应用程序，这让该公司的司审查人员感到震惊，他们匆忙阻止中国用户查看新来的美国用户制作的内容。至于美国人，当他们环顾四周时，他们可能会想，究竟谁是网络机器人，谁是喷子，谁有可能是傀儡，谁有可能是审查者，谁可能是间谍，谁可能会是操作者。

I don’t know what the fight over TikTok ultimately means for freedom of speech — or, for that matter, for the country’s increasingly naked rule by self-interested billionaires or its evolving posture toward China. But in that one paragraph above I can see elevator pitches for six decent B-movies, at least.

我不知道围绕TikTok的斗争最终对言论自由意味着什么——或者说，对美国越来越赤裸的利己亿万富翁统治，或者对中国不断演变的姿态来说意味着什么。但在上面的一段话中，我可以看出一大堆电影宣传语，至少足够六部精彩的B级片使用。