Here's a funny little story. BBC News has reported that China has renamed its "Southern Sky Column" mountain (in Zhangjiajie, of the Hunan province) "Avatar Hallelujah Mountain." This comes after the phenomenal success of Avatar, which contained a prominent mountain modeled after China's Southern Sky Column and called the "Hallelujah Mountain."

BBC further explains, "The [Chinese] municipal government website has also adopted the slogan 'Pandora is far but Zhangjiajie is near,' while tourists are being offered tours of the locations which allegedly inspired the film." So, clearly China's just trying to make a few bucks off Avatar-loving tourists. Nothing wrong with trying to amp up tourism revenue.

However, things get strange from here. /Film has since reported that the director of Zhangjiajie's tourism bureau, Ding Yunyong, has come under (unsurprising) criticism for the name change and is now trying to claim that ... well, it's hard to tell exactly what Yunyong is trying to claim. Here is the statement:

The civil spontaneous action to rename the peak just shows that Zhangjiajie is protecting its own authority and special value as a World Natural Heritage. ... They are using the facts to protect our mountains' authority and promote the tourism brand. It is definitely not giving up our cultural roots for blind faith in a foreign movie.

I have to imagine there is a lot lost in translation here, especially in the clause, "They are using the facts to protects our mountains' authority," which doesn't seem to have any discernible meaning. But, judging by the use of phrases like "protecting its own authority and special value" and "promote the tourism brand," the move seems to be an attempt at some sort of retroactive inverse-trademarking (for great lack of a better term) and is certainly motivated by money. Essentially they're renaming the mountain so that it is recognized as the inspiration for the mountain in the film. Thus the remark that, "It is definitely not giving up our cultural roots for blind faith in a foreign movie." They're trying to stress that they aren't renaming the mountain in honor of the one in the film but rather are effectually causing the movie's mountain to be named after theirs.

Either way, it boils down to cash. Again, there's nothing wrong with making money off the fact that one of your landmarks is so beautiful that it was used as the model for a prominent element of a film based on looking beautiful. However, you have to wonder how much thought the decision-makers here gave to the renaming. Even if their intention was simply for the city to get credit for their mountain being the movie mountain's inspiration, it would seem inevitable that the move would be viewed by virtually anyone as China "giving up [their] cultural roots for blind faith in a foreign movie." (And the website's line about Pandora certainly doesn't help them out in that regard, either.) Why not just advertise it as a mountain that inspired geographical aspects of Avatar?