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guard unmasks the warlord, marries the princess, and becomes the heir to the
throne. In the Chinese version, the guard turns her over to the warlord — usu-
ally standing in a snowstorm, bereft, with tears in his eyes, accepting that this
is the way things were meant to be. The most head-scratching example of this,
which I heard from a young Chinese filmmaker in about 2008, was a story about
a Beijing police detective who moves to a rural town where a heinous murder has
been committed, believing the killer must live somewhere near the scene of the
crime. After 25 years of obsessive investigating — losing his wife and job in the
process — he learns he was right. The killer did live nearby. But he had died in a
car accident on his way home, 10 minutes after the murder.
Sometime after 2010, we started to notice a difference in the pitches we
were hearing from young filmmakers, and the movies we were seeing on Chi-
nese screens. The number of “fate” stories diminished, and we began to see more
narratives where people became the masters of their own destinies. Young wom-
en who took charge of their dating lives; athletes who overcame insurmountable
odds; nerdy computer geeks who got the girl — or sometimes the guy.
What caused this change? On one hand, I’m sure the young Chinese film-
makers were influenced by the audience reaction to the movies they were seeing
and making. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but feel the changes reflected
a larger shift in Chinese society as a whole: The emergence of a huge, upwardly
mobile middle class. China is now a country with more than 100 billion-dollar
startups, where an English teacher at a modest engineering school — Jack Ma,
from Hangzhou, whose parents were shunned during the Cultural Revolution
— created the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba, and became a national folk hero.
Whatever the cause, Chinese filmmakers were now using one of the key
storytelling tools in the Hollywood toolbox. The Wall Street Journal reported
in October 2013, “China’s domestic filmmakers have stepped up their game,
producing better-quality movies.” They were taking a larger share of the overall
(and ever-growing) box office, while the U.S. share had dropped by 9 percent.fea
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