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It is often said that cultures play an important role in the development of a given society as it reflects the overall capacities and abilities of a particular community at a particular period. This is why for instance, there are entire university departments that are dedicated to dissecting the cultures of the ancient civilizations. Indeed, only by understanding the culture of the Egyptian civilization or other cultures, that a historian or an anthropologist would be able to decode the secrets that led to the great achievements that were made in the past. Yet, cultures are not only a thing of the past. On the contrary, each community or group of people that are currently living on the planet has its own norms and customs that are being imposed on its members. These norms suffered the first backlash with the creation of the nation states where several cultures have been completely eradicated due to its opposition to the existing regimes in place back then and even nowadays. Not only that, but member states have also benefited from the dissemination of a particular culture in their territories in order to create a sense of shared identity between the different communities living on that territory. This shared identity allowed rulers over the years to use national rhetoric in order to achieve particular objectives or even to wage wars against other nations in the name of protecting the community and the culture. Even, currently, we are seeing a backlash against the increased globalization where communities in several places of the world are feeling threatened as a result of the fast diffusion of ideas and norms that constitute according to these particular communities the perfect recipe for the elimination of their cultures which was received from the ancestors and as such they have a responsibility to preserve it. The most important and obvious example of this backlash is the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom (UK) where citizens have decided after decades of being part of the European Union (EU) to withdraw from the union for many reasons among them the fact that these citizens are sensing a threat to their culture. In the chapter, “China Meets Hollywood at WTO: Janus Faces of Freedom: Standards of Right and Wrong Between National and International Moralities,” in the book “China´s Influence on Non-Trade Concerns in International Economic Law” the author Christophe Germann have examined the issue of cultural protection from a legal perspective. As such, the author has analyzed the international legal conventions that are in place and which aim at the protection of the different existing cultures worldwide. In this context, one could mention the UNESCO Convention on the diversity of cultural expressions of 2005 (UNESCO Convention) which plays a huge role in the protection of cultural diversity. Thus, the chapter will examine this issue while paying a particular focus on the approach taken by the Chinese state concerning culture in general and how the latter is being perceived by Beijing as a tool to reverse an imbalance in trade of cultural goods and services.
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