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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION THURSDAY, AUGUST 8, 2019 | 3
World
For more than half her life, the actress
Fan Bingbing was an icon of China’s
booming film and television industry,
who evolved from girl-next-door roles
into an international star and fashion ce-
lebrity.
Then last year, her career was con-
vulsed by a tax scandal that precipitated
her spectacular fall from public grace
and tarnished an entire industry — one
that the Chinese government is eager to
put under even tighter creative control.
“No one can have smooth sailing
throughout the journey,” Ms. Fan said,
her aphorism voiced with a calm — if
perhaps practiced — resignation during
a rare interview, the first to touch on the
scandal since it erupted.
For four months last year, Ms. Fan dis-
appeared, and the unexplained absence
of China’s most famous movie star dis-
tressed millions of her fans and spread
fear among her filmmaking colleagues.
No one knew it then, but she was be-
ing held under a type of house arrest
while the tax authorities scoured the
records of her long and lucrative career
as an actress, a luminary of the red car-
pet, a face of luxury brands and a suc-
cessful businesswoman.
Now Ms. Fan, who turns 38 next
month, is dipping her toe back into the
waters of a society that once revered
her.
“It may be a trough I encountered in
my life or in my work, but this trough is
actually a good thing,” she said. “It has
made me calm down and think seriously
about what I want to do in my future
life.”
She recently posted her first updates
to her 62 million followers on Weibo, Chi-
na’s version of Twitter, promoting char-
ity events and announcing her breakup
with her fiancé, Li Chen, an actor and di-
rector.
She also appeared last month in a
teaser on Instagram for “355,” a film
shepherded by the American actress
and producer Jessica Chastain. Ms.
Fan’s role in the film — an action thriller
featuring women playing foreign agents
from around the world — had been in
limbo since the scandal. Many of her
projects still are.
One of her last movies, “Air Strike,”
was blocked from Chinese theaters and
has languished in on-demand obscurity
elsewhere. Luxury brands that dropped
or distanced themselves from her have
been slow to come calling again.
After she participated in a poetry
reading in Beijing last month, reaction
online was harsh. “Our country should
not let these types of people affect our
next generation,” one commentator
wrote.
As her comeback attempt unfolds, the
damage done to her own reputation, and
to an industry China wants to use to
project soft power around the globe, can
start to be calculated.
In October, China revealed that Ms.
Fan had been fined nearly $70 million in
unpaid taxes and penalties, while the
studio bearing her name was hit with a
tax bill exceeding $60 million. That
same month, in her first public state-
ment since June 2018, Ms. Fan ex-
pressed her remorse.
She was spared criminal charges, but
her manager at the time, among others,
was arrested. Despite her celebrity, or
perhaps because of it, the authorities
made an example of her at a time when
the government is also cracking down
on the internet, on investigative journal-
ists and even earrings and tattoos
judged to be in conflict with “core social-
ist values.”
When the fines against Ms. Fan were
announced, the government warned the
entire film industry to come clean. Giv-
en the pervasiveness of tax evasion in
China, virtually everyone fell under
scrutiny.
“A lot of people in the industry have
had to pay back taxes,” Raymond Zhou,
a film critic, said. “I’ve heard lots of
numbers floating around, though you
can never confirm them.”
Producers have since retrenched. Re-
gions that set up special economic zones
to lure filmmakers suddenly stopped of-
fering incentives. International invest-
ors appear to have been rattled, with-
holding support that not long ago
flooded in.
What made Ms. Fan’s legal troubles —
and her unwanted role as an industry
scapegoat — so surprising was her im-
age.
She is no dissident artist, but rather
the scion of a family of performers and
Communist Party members. Her last
major film role was in “Sky Hunter,” an
homage (to put it politely) to “Top Gun”
that was made with the cooperation of
the People’s Liberation Army.
After her detention ended, she said
that she would have been nothing “with-
out the party and the state’s good poli-
cies.”
Born in 1981, she was raised in Yantai,
a port on the Yellow Sea. Her parents en-
couraged her to attend music school and
become a music teacher, but at 14, she
decided to become an actress instead.
She studied acting in Shanghai and at
16 landed a role in an 18th-century tele-
vision drama, “My Fair Princess.” It
made her a household name.
With legions of young fans who grew
up alongside her, Vanity Fair recently
described her as “a sort of Emma Wat-
son for Chinese millennials.”
It was her breakthrough role on the
big screen that planted the seeds of her
downfall 15 years later.
In 2003 she played the mistress of a
television host in a film called “Cell
Phone.” An actual television host, Cui
Yongyuan, accused the director of slan-
der because the plot bore striking, if in-
accurate, parallels to his own career.
After Ms. Fan announced a sequel in
May 2018, an infuriated Mr. Cui posted
photographs online showing her con-
tracts for the new film: one with a salary
of $1.6 million to be reported, and a sec-
ond with the actual payment of $7.8 mil-
lion.
The practice of having “yin and yang”
contracts is a common means of avoid-
ing taxes in China, but Mr. Cui’s accusa-
tion was “a match that lit the fuse,” as
Mr. Zhou, the critic, put it.
The authorities ultimately charged
Ms. Fan with falsifying contracts four
times. Another case involved her role in
“Air Strike,” a Chinese production star-
ring Bruce Willis that was first known in
English as “Unbreakable Spirit.” It is
about the Japanese bombing of China’s
wartime capital.
The troubles that followed the disclo-
sure have not only taken a toll on Ms.
Fan, but also appear to have had an im-
pact on China’s box office. Attendance in
the first half of the year has plummeted,
ending years of heady growth.
“The film and television industry has
been languishing,” said Hao Jian, a re-
tired professor from the Beijing Film
Academy.
The Communist Party, led by Presi-
dent Xi Jinping, who has transformed
China’s media landscape since taking of-
fice by clamping down on independent
voices, has ramped up film censorship
ahead of the 70th anniversary of the
People’s Republic of China, canceling
the openings of several movies.
They include a big-budget war drama,
“The Eight Hundred,” which depicts the
battle against the invading Japanese in
- It was produced by Huayi Broth-
ers, one of the largest private studios,
which has been reeling since the tax
scandal.
In Ms. Fan’s view, the industry should
“calm down and ruminate” about where
it has gone wrong — as she says she has
done herself.
During the interview, held in a studio
in an industrial section of eastern Bei-
jing where she was posing for the Viet-
namese edition of Harper’s Bazaar, Ms.
Fan appeared relaxed and confident.
Wrapped in a crimson robe, her face and
hair still made up from the fashion
shoot, she sounded contrite but did not
dwell on the details of what had hap-
pened to her.
Ms. Fan said she was ready for the
next scene, no what matter it brings.
“There are regrets, pain and fragility,”
she said. “But I still feel that I need to
keep on living.”
Life after scandal: No smooth sailing
PROFILE
BEIJING
BY STEVEN LEE MYERS
Chinese actress is trying
for a comeback after an
arrest for unpaid taxes
Zoe Mou and Claire Fu contributed re-
search.
The actress Fan Bingbing in Beijing. She disappeared for four months last year amid a tax scandal that has tarnished China’s entire film industry. Ms. Fan was fined nearly $70 million in unpaid taxes and penalties.
YAN CONG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“This trough is actually a good
thing. It has made me calm down
and think seriously about what I
want to do in my future life.”
The mayor is offering a reward for the
missing. Scientists want to investigate
their absence. And television crews
have come searching for answers about
a small Polish village’s strange popula-
tion anomaly.
No boy has been born there in almost
a decade.
The detail first attracted the attention
of the Polish news media when the vil-
lage sent an all-girl team to a regional
competition for young volunteer fire-
fighters.
Since then, Mayor Krystyna Zydziak
said the situation in the village, Miejsce
Odrzanskie, had gotten “a little crazy
and out of hand.”
On a recent visit, four separate televi-
sion crews had been dispatched to the
one-road town, with 96 houses, to cover
the case of the missing males.
“Some scientists have expressed in-
terest in examining why only girls have
been born here,” said Rajmund
Frischko, the mayor of the commune of
Cisek, which includes the village. “I also
have doctors calling me from all over the
country with tips on how to conceive a
boy.”
He said he had just spoken to a retired
doctor from central Poland who said
that a baby’s sex depended on the wom-
an’s diet, which should be rich in calcium
if she wants to have a boy.
“And if that doesn’t work,” the mayor
laughed, “there is always the tried way
of the Polish highlanders: If you want a
boy, keep an ax under your marital bed.”
In the years since the last baby boy
was born, there have been 12 births in
the village, an agricultural community
on the edge of the smallest and least
populated province in Poland. Residents
do not know what accounts for the
anomaly, but many think it might all just
be a coincidence, like a run of coin flips
turning up heads.
Mr. Frischko has decided to offer a re-
ward for the next couple who have a boy.
“There has been so much talk about
us in the media that for a minute there I
was considering naming a street after
the next boy born here,” he said. “He will
definitely get a very nice gift. And we
will plant an oak and name it after him.”
Like so many other Polish villages,
this one has seen a steep decline in pop-
ulation. After World War II, it had about
1,200 people; now there are 272. Since
the collapse of Communism in 1989, emi-
gration has hollowed out the country’s
sparsely populated areas, a trend that
accelerated after the country joined the
European Union in 2004. More than two
million Poles now live elsewhere in Eu-
rope.
Every family here has someone living
abroad, said Ms. Zydziak, who has two
daughters, one of whom lives in Ger-
many. “Some villagers are concerned
who will fill the farming jobs in the fu-
ture,” she said.
Summer is a busy time here. The land-
scape in August is dominated by freshly
shorn fields of wheat, with hay neatly
formed into round, golden bales stand-
ing beside fields of corn waiting to be
harvested.
Many girls and young women labor in
the fields. Adrianna Pieruszka, 20, has
spent a chunk of her summer holiday
driving a tractor across her parents’
wheat fields, although it is the fire de-
partment that is her passion.
In a village with no schools, coffee
houses, restaurants or even a grocery
store — and where it can take hours for
the next car to appear on the horizon —
the volunteer fire department has be-
come the center of social life. At a recent
practice of the local youth volunteer fire
department, an all-girl team moved in
unison to extinguish a fake fire and tend
to victims. The youngest recruit, 2-year-
old Maja, had to be helped down from
the fire truck by an older girl.
Ms. Pieruszka, who studies early
childhood education at a university, was
the supervisor of the junior brigade for
four years. “We have hardly any boys on
the team, but we have been winning ma-
jor competitions in Poland ever since we
were founded six years ago,” she said,
sitting in the common room of the volun-
teer fire station with dozens of medals
and golden cups on display.
Malwina Kicler, 10, who has been
training to be a volunteer firefighter for
almost three years, said that most girls
did not mind the absence of boys on the
team.
“Boys are noisy and naughty,” she
said. “At least now we have peace and
quiet. You can always meet them some-
where else.”
Just maybe not in the village.
Polish village ponders why last boy was born a decade ago
MIEJSCE ODRZANSKIE, POLAND
BY JOANNA BERENDT
In the village of Miejsce Odrzanskie, Poland, the team of young volunteer firefighters is made up entirely of girls and young women. Right, one of the members, Adrianna Pieruszka, 20, driving a tractor in her parents’ fields.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY KASIA STREK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
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