China wants soft power. But censorship is stifling its film industry

 "The Wandering Earth" is a Chinese sci-fi film released on the New Year holiday which has taken the country by storm.

Beijing-based film director Huang Han has had one of the worst weeks of his life, courtesy of the Chinese government's strict censors.

He says his independent, low-budget romance flick, set for an online domestic release in 2019, has been hit by an insoluble problem: how to show the male protagonist smoking without giving the cigarette screen time.

It might seem like a bizarre problem but a crackdown on "excessive smoking scenes" is just one of a growing number of restrictions imposed by the Chinese Communist Party on the country's film and television industry.

Will smash hit 'The Wandering Earth' change China's film industry?

"The government's inspection of films has been getting stricter," says Huang, 30, who spoke under a pseudonym to avoid damaging his career. "Only the really famous directors might get a pass. All the rest of us have to follow strict protocol."

In 2014, President Xi Jinping called for a stronger national effort to boost China's global popularity in proportion to its economic rise. "We should increase China's soft power, give a good Chinese narrative and better communicate China's message to the world," he said.

Last month, China had an unexpected win in this arena, after Netflix announced that it would stream Chinese sci-fi blockbuster "The Wandering Earth," which grossed nearly $700 million at the global box office, in more than 190 countries.

But that's a rare case of a Chinese hit at home making it abroad.

Unless the Communist Party relaxes its censorship of domestic films, experts say Beijing's dreams of wielding Chinese soft power globally through its film industry could stall.

Matthias Niedenführ, media specialist at the University of Tubingen's China Center, says a top-down government-dictated approach is unlikely to produce popular international hits.

"French film, Korean TV and Japanese anime are all creative products that are the result of a creative environment and bottom-up processes," he says. "The irony is that China desperately wants international recognition."