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Chinese cultural luminaries: whereas in
the 1990s the social contract for stars and
normal people alike was that you could
get rich quick if you stayed out of politics,
now, the equation has changed. For high-
profile figures, it is only by specifically
leaning into politics, by making your
enthusiasm for the government explicit,
that your star can continue to rise.
Fan is one of the few Chinese actors
who has gained some traction in Hol-
lywood. A Vanity Fair profile of her
tribulations noted that she was slated
to star in Universal-backed movie 355,
alongside Penélope Cruz and Lupita
Nyong’o, but that the Chinese dis-
tributor pulled out because of the tax
scandal. The film project is ongoing, but
the hiccup revealed the extent to which
Hollywood is tangled up with the capri-
cious Chinese film industry, a trend that
looks set to continue. Alibaba Pictures,
China’s largest film company – which
in 2015 was valued at $10 billion com-
pared to Paramount Pictures’ $4 billion
- has been involved with an increas-
ing number of Hollywood productions,
including the Mission Impossible and Star
Tr e k franchises. The company co-pro-
duced 2019’s The Wandering Earth, one
of the few Chinese films to be released
widely in the West. The music world is
similarly intertwined, with Tencent in
talks to buy a 10-per-cent stake of Uni-
versal Music Group.
Businesses in China are as beholden
as celebrities to government loyalty:
last year, to no-one’s surprise, Alibaba’s
founder Jack Ma announced that he was
a Communist Party member. Xi Jinping
has pushed for all major companies to
have CCP chapters. The effect on culture
is that one way or another, those wanting
access to Chinese finance or the 1.4
billion market of consumers, will have
to triangulate. The making of Iron Man
3 is a case in point – it is cited as one of
Fan’s Hollywood successes but, in reality,
she only appeared in the Chinese version
of the film. Her addition was to maxi-
mize the chances of it being one of the
34 foreign films approved for release in
China each year.
This was a compromise in place of
another compromise: the film was origi-
nally supposed to be a co-productionwith the Chinese company DMG Enter-
tainment, but Marvel decided against
this arrangement because of the creative
control it would give DMG, despite the
fact that co-production status would have
guaranteed a release in China – hence
the need for Fan.
While her addition may have
appeased the censors, critics were not
convinced. ‘The Chinese portion of the
film is just terrible,’ the reviewer at the
state-run People’s Daily declared. ‘It’s a
pointless commercial with a lot of plot
holes.’ Although the film was a com-
mercial success in China, raking in $64.1
million in its opening weekend, many
saw the added scenes as tokenistic. As one
Chinese news anchor put it: ‘A good way
to get Chinese on board is to just make a
good movie.’O
AMY HAWKINS IS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST WHO
WRITES ABOUT CHINESE CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY
AND SOCIETY FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES, THE
ATLANTIC, FOREIGN POLICY AND ELSEWHERE. SHE
TWEETS @XLHAWKINS.
1 May Jeong, ‘The untold story behind the dis-
appearance of Fan Bingbing...’, Vanity Fair, April
2019, nin.tl/fanbingbing36 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
THE BIG STORY