KICK THE CHICKEN, KOWTOW TO THE MONKEY: Forget about North Korea and The Interview: For decades Hollywood has been censoring its own output to protect access to the Chinese market.

It’s no mystery why Washington plays down Beijing’s cyber-transgressions in this realm. The Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” strategy depends on “pragmatic cooperation,” as the president puts it. There’s nothing wrong with this; engagement is necessary with a nation as large and powerful as China. But when the President also says it is time to discard “outdated zero-sum thinking” with regard to China, one wonders what he means. Not since President Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing have U.S.-China relations been dominated by zero-sum thinking. Is Obama naive? Or has the meaning of “pragmatic” changed, so that now there is no balance between security concerns and commercial self-interest?

Here’s the real difference between the chicken and the monkey—or maybe we should say gorilla. North Korea, with its paltry population of 28 million and its impoverished, closed society, is not a tempting market for U.S. companies. Nor does Pyongyang have a team of lobbyists defending its image in the United States. China, on the other hand, has more than a billion consumers hungry for everything that America produces, and its lobbyists, if you can call them that, are everywhere.

That brings us to The Interview. Two-thirds of the revenues for Hollywood blockbusters are generated from overseas markets. China is far from being the most lucrative of these—according to Ben Fritz of the Wall Street Journal, it is fifth on the list, after the UK, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. But it is already a cash cow for Hollywood, with revenue hitting $3.55 billion this year, up 32 percent in the first nine months of 2014. Transformers: Age of Extinction took the lead with $320 million in profits.

Measure this against the potential of a Chinese market completely open and friendly to U.S. entertainment products, and you have all the explanation you need for why American movies feature so many North Korean villains and so few Chinese.

This is the same reason why, back when the “solid South” was a Democratic stronghold, you got a lot of Confederacy-friendly or at least South-friendly stuff from Hollywood and academia, and now that it’s gone solidly GOP it’s a different story.