Where in the world is Fan Bingbing?

[GeneChing]

OCTOBER 27, 2018 9:12AM PT
Film Review: ‘Air Strike’
The myriad offscreen woes experienced by this controversial, expensive Chinese WW2 action epic overshadow the hectic, jumbled onscreen result.
By DENNIS HARVEY
Film Critic


CREDIT: LIONSGATE

Director: Xiao Feng With: Bruce Willis, Ye Liu, Rumer Willis, Seung-Heon Song, William Chan, Wei Fan, Wu Gang, Ma Su, Yongli Che, Feng Yuangzheng, Geng Le, Ning Chang, Nicholas Tse, Fan Bingbing, Chen Daoming, Adrien Brody, Lei Jia, Simon Yam, Ray Lui, Shibuya Tenma, Hu Bing, Huang Haibing. (English, Mandarin, Japanese dialogue.) Release Date: Oct 26, 2018
Rated R 1 hour 36 minutes

Few films can claim a bumpier, more public production ride or worse crash landing than “Air Strike,” purportedly the most costly Chinese feature ever when it was shot — which was three years ago. Since then, it’s undergone several title changes, delays, and most cripplingly become part of a wide-ranging tax evasion scandal in which actress Fan Bingbing was convicted for financial fraud. As a result, the film’s Chinese release was canceled outright. In the U.S., Lionsgate scaled its primary distribution plans back to on demand, with subsidiary Grindstone handling a much-reduced theatrical launch. Oh, and a movie shot in 3D now appears to be showing nowhere in that format.

Of course, most viewers roped in by the promise of Bruce Willis in a WW2 combat movie (with Mel Gibson conspicuously listed as production “consultant”) will be oblivious to all that offscreen drama. What’s onscreen, however, is bound to make them suspect something went awry along the way. Eye-blink-brief appearances by prominently billed cast names are hardly the only truncated element in a hectic mishmash that reportedly ran five hours in an early cut, and now clocks in at just more than 90 minutes.

Conceived as an epic 70th-anniversary ode to “the Allied victory over fascism,” “Air Strike” retains elements of evident expanse and expense. Yet the final result is such a compromised jumble it’s hard to tell what its full original intentions might have been. Several main plot bones still stick out, however sawed-off, not to mention obscured by a barrage of barely contextualized spectacle. In one, U.S. military advisor Col. Jack Johnson (Willis) trains a squadron of Chinese pilots trying to fend off the Japanese invasion that started two years earlier in 1937. Seung-Heon Song, William Chan and Nicholas Tse play the chief flyboys he yells at between perilous missions.

Meanwhile, ex-pilot Xue Gangtou (Ye Liu) drives a military truck across treacherous terrain, carrying top-secret cargo. En route, he reluctantly acquires passengers including a teacher (Ma Su) and students whose school has been bombed; a resourceful but slippery possible spy (Gent Le); and a government scientist (Wu Gang) delivering specially bred piglets that might avert famine. At the same time, ordinary citizens in provisional capital Chongqing are under relentless attack by the Imperial Air Force — though somehow that doesn’t stop Fan Wei from presiding over a mahjong tournament that continues despite all adversity.

One suspects these strands were once meant to have a grand, interweaving old-school sweep under the direction of Xiao Feng (“Hushed Roar”). But “Air Strike” feels like a movie whose populist yet complicated narrative elements have been haphazardly pared to the nub, while the money shots — all things that go boom, as a great many do here — were left intact.

Unfortunately, they turn out to be more of a liability than a selling point. Though estimates of the film’s budget have ranged all over the map (from $22 million to three times that amount), the price tag was surely high enough to render surprising the shoddiness of the effects in myriad scenes of air combat and cities under fire. Such imagery’s video-game quality only trivializes scenes of mass destruction, which in turn often reach for a crude tear-jerking effect by throwing anonymous children in harm’s way.

The team-credited script piles on a Westernized series of popcorn action-flick perils, credulity-stretching stunts, and protagonists’ attempts to out-macho one another via fistfights and noble sacrifices. In the English-language version reviewed, awkward ESL dialogue clichés (one Chinese pilot earnestly entreats Willis with “Sir! Please allow us to go kick some ass!”) are not helped by the fact that individual actors sometimes seem to have been dubbed by multiple voices. (Willis gives a late pre-raid toast that sounds nothing like him.)

Other elements are less cluttered than simply arbitrary. If the “special appearances” by stars like Adrien Brody and Fan Bingbing are so abbreviated one wonders why they’re here at all, Rumer Willis has even less screen time — and third billing, nonetheless. The additions of comic relief and romantic interests could hardly feel any more inorganically stuck-on. An initially ubiquitous use of onscreen text to identify locations, characters, and even military equipment soon drops off to nothing. All this results in a film that is loud and busy, yet lacks any tonal consistency or narrative center — we’re never quite sure where whatever’s going on at present fits into an ill-defined bigger picture.

Yet certain aspects are polished and impressively scaled enough to suggest a movie that was perhaps never going to be inspired, but at least once had a coherent, ambitious scope. Many sequences on the ground involve imposing crowds and sets (Huaiqing Mao is the production designer), though they’re seldom glimpsed for long. The only thing here that doesn’t feel curtailed is the eight-minute closing credits crawl, no doubt featuring many names whose work is no longer much in evidence onscreen. (Evidence that “Air Strike” continues to suffer editorial indignities was provided this week by an online U.K. DVD review listing a runtime 20 minutes longer than the U.S. cut.)

In addition to Gibson’s ambiguous contribution (in some advance publicity he was curiously listed as the art director), there are also “consultant” credits for other luminaries, including late cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. One assumes these are more honorary designations than evidence of real input, as despite some handsome aerial shots and a very wide aspect ratio, the overall look (beyond those sub-par effects) is pedestrian.

Veteran stunt coordinator Bruce Law is billed as “action director,” and the non-CG physicality is indeed splashy, yet of an ilk that would be more appropriate in a Jackie Chan caper than a WW2 epic based on real historical events. (Too many vehicles crash into too many buildings simply so we can see things get smashed.) One design contribution that is at least conventionally appropriate is Wang Liguang’s score, which is duly performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.

The starry Chinese cast, many among them barely utilized, works hard to dimensionalize roles that remain stubbornly, sometimes cartoonishly one-note. The three Americans each manage to be bad in entirely different ways: One local pilot’s snipe that “This Yank thinks he’s a hard-ass” pretty well sums up Willis Sr.’s Sgt. Rock-like turn, Brody sports the appalled, disheveled look of a man who has no idea what he’s doing here, and Ms. Willis makes an appearance so brief and irrelevant you might wonder why her role wasn’t edited out entirely.

Film Review: 'Air Strike'

Reviewed online, San Francisco, Oct. 26, 2018. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 96 MIN.

PRODUCTION: (China) A Grindstone Entertainment Group release (U.S.) of a Lionsgate Films, Grindstone Entertainment Group, China Film Co., Origin Films, Shanghai Nanchuo Co., Hollywood International Film Exchange presentation. Producers: Xiao Feng, Yang Buting, LA Peikang, Fu Jijun, Ren Zhonglun, Jiang Haiyang, Ling Hong, Li Hong. Executive producers: Wang Yianyun, Jiang Ping, Xiao Zhiyue, Zhao Haicheng, Yu Xingbao, Barry Brooker, Stan Wertlieb, Jimmy Jiang, Kimberly Kates.

CREW: Director: Xiao Feng. Screenplay: Chen Ping, Yang Hsin-Yu, Zhang Hongyi, Zhang Hongyi, Yushi Wu, Xiaoqi Li, Qiao Wa. Camera (color, widescreen, HD): Yang Shu. Editors: Chi-Leung Kwong, Robert A. Ferretti. Music: Wang Liguang.

WITH: Bruce Willis, Ye Liu, Rumer Willis, Seung-Heon Song, William Chan, Wei Fan, Wu Gang, Ma Su, Yongli Che, Feng Yuangzheng, Geng Le, Ning Chang, Nicholas Tse, Fan Bingbing, Chen Daoming, Adrien Brody, Lei Jia, Simon Yam, Ray Lui, Shibuya Tenma, Hu Bing, Huang Haibing. (English, Mandarin, Japanese dialogue.)

We definitely won't need an indie Air Strike review after this.

[GeneChing]

...someone else review it.

Fan Bingbing movie opens at last - in the US
PUBLISHED OCT 29, 2018, 5:00 AM SGT
SHANGHAI • Actor Bruce Willis knew he was not in Hollywood anymore.

When his private jet landed in China three years ago for the shooting of Air Strike, the film crew did not have the money to pay the deposit for his hotel room.

The plot - behind the film, that is - only thickened.

The original producer fled the country after his business got caught up in a peer-to-peer lending scandal, leaving director Xiao Feng, who retold the story of Willis' hotel deposit on his blog, to tap his own savings to finish the film.

Then Fan Bingbing, one of the top Chinese stars in the movie, went missing after becoming embroiled in a tax-evasion scandal that shook the industry.

Despite all that drama, the movie opened in select theatres in the United States last Friday through a partner of distributor Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.

In China, it is unclear whether the most scandal-plagued film in recent memory will be able to capitalise on the publicity - even if it was negative. It was supposed to debut in China on Aug 17, but the release was then postponed to last Friday before it was pushed back indefinitely.

The movie's initial producer Shi Jianxiang had other problems as well.

In 2016, he seemed to hit pay dirt when Ip Man 3 (2015), a gongfu drama he backed starring Donnie Yen and Mike Tyson, had some success in theatres.

The problem was the movie's box-office figures were found to have been inflated, which led shares in companies affiliated with Mr Shi to crater.

Mr Shi also ran peer-to-peer lending operations under his Shanghai Kuailu Investment Group, which failed to pay investors. As scrutiny over that business intensified, he fled the country with Air Strike still in production.

Last month, prosecutors told a Shanghai court that Mr Shi's companies illegally raised more than 40 billion yuan (S$8 billion), according to the Shanghai government-run Xinmin Evening News.

Then there's the tax scandal surrounding Fan, one of China's highest-paid actresses.

Her woes began when a former talk-show host posted contracts on his social media feed that allegedly showed the actress had concealed some of her income.

Fan then disappeared from public view. After months of speculation in China, she reappeared only after the government said she had been found guilty of under-reporting income - including from Air Strike.

Tax authorities imposed one of the biggest fines in China's entertainment industry. Fan apologised publicly and agreed to cover her fines and back taxes.

It is unclear how the incidents involving Fan and Mr Shi would have affected the box office of Air Strike in China had it opened there as scheduled.

But one thing is certain: Chinese moviemakers will draw lessons from the film's scandals.

"China's film industry is still undergoing a rectification that will last well into 2019," said Dr Stanley Rosen, a University of Southern California political science professor who studies China.

[GeneChing]

If Fan plays her cards right, she could parlay this into an international career boost. She'd probably have to leave PRC to do that though.

Oct 31 2018 at 10:48 AM
Updated Oct 31 2018 at 4:07 PM
Swisse China sales jump despite ambassador Fan Bingbing tax strife


One of China's most popular actresses Fan Bingbing, an ambassador for the Swisse brand, was in serious hot water with Chinese tax authorities. AP

by Simon Evans

The Swisse vitamins brand has shrugged off the tax scandal which enveloped one of its high-profile ambassadors in China, actress Fan Bingbing, with robust demand for its products lifting total revenues by 41 per cent in the three months ended September.

Swisse has also made solid headway in the Australian market, with the company saying its market share in vitamins and mineral supplements had increased to 18.9 per cent over the past year, up from 16 per cent as sales gathered pace in the big supermarket chains of Coles and Woolworths. Swisse is the major competitor to ASX-listed Blackmores.

The Swisse business has been owned for two years by Hong Kong-listed Health & Happiness International, which has just reported a fresh set of sales revenue figures to the market.

Health & Happiness chairman Luo Fei said the Swisse China business "continued to demonstrate vigorous growth through new product launches and the leverage of comprehensive branding and marketing campaigns and collaborations with new celebrities and key opinion leaders".

He didn't mention Fan, an ambassador for Swisse, who in early October resurfaced suddenly after China's tax authorities announced she had agreed to pay back almost 800 million yuan ($162 million) in fines and back taxes.

While she avoided going to prison, Fan was forced to issue a grovelling apology to her millions of fans on social media, saying "I'm so ashamed of what I've done".

Fan, China's most highly paid actors, had been missing since allegations she had avoided paying taxes triggered a government investigation three months ago. It has been unclear if she was detained by authorities or went into hiding voluntarily to escape public attention.

Mr Luo said two new product ranges, Swisse Ultinatal and Swisse Lifestyle, had been launched to capture momentum in two of the fastest-growing segments of the vitamins market.

Revenues in the adult nutrition and care products division, which is basically the Swisse business, climbed by 40.8 per cent to 1.26 billion yuan from 894.7 million yuan. In Australia, Swisse sales have been particularly strong in the supermarket channel, through Coles and Woolworths. Swisse Australasian sales director Nick Mann said new product lines in the grocery range along with extra promotions had helped spur strong growth in that segment, while the pharmacy market was also strong. "Sales in Chemist Warehouse continue to grow at double-digit pace," Mr Mann said.

For the nine months ended September 30, revenues from the Swisse business increased by 29.3 per cent. Mr Luo said the strong momentum was mainly achieved by the rapid growth in the China market, while the Australian market continued to "grow steadily". Swisse uses other ambassadors, including actress Nicole Kidman and former Test cricket captain Ricky Ponting.

Last week, Blackmores announced that shifts in the daigou market in Australia, where big retailers like Chemist Warehouse were doing deals directly with the entrepreneurs selling large volumes of vitamins on e-commerce sites in China, and a step up in advertising in Australia had helped its Australian business gain extra momentum.

The country's biggest vitamins company lifted revenues by 15 per cent to $154 million in the three months ended September 30, while net profit after tax increased by 7 per cent to $16.5 million, as chief executive Richard Henfrey said Australian sales were up by 19 per cent. Blackmores hired Chinese actor Shawn Dou as a new ambassador in China last week.

Health & Happiness in February 2017 acquired the remaining 17 per cent of Swisse that it didn't already own. It was the second step in a two-phase buyout for a total of $1.7 billion in late 2015 when demand for "clean and green" Australian vitamins soared and pushed rival firm Blackmores to a record share price on the ASX of $220 in January 2016. Blackmores shares are now at $123.

Health & Happiness in November, 2017 spent $131 million to regain full control of the brand in a buyout of a distribution deal struck in 2013 with two global giants, Procter and Gamble and Israel's Teva Pharmaceuticals for Asia and Europe in which it would have given up a large chunk of future profits in the booming China market from 2020.

[GeneChing]

Column by Nicolas Groffman
Top Gun was twice remade in Chinese, why didn’t anybody notice? Clue: PLA
Chinese fans loved the original so much there just had to be a remake. But, writes Nicolas Groffman, that’s when the military got involved
PUBLISHED : Monday, 29 October, 2018, 8:02am
UPDATED : Thursday, 01 November, 2018, 4:41pm
Nicolas Groffman



In the summer of 1986, my friend Charles and I saw a trailer for the most amazing film conceivable, with F-14s landing on carriers.

They crashed down amid the steam in super-modern all-grey livery. The film came out a few months later and only those with large reserves of intellectual snobbery failed to enjoy it. It was Top Gun.

In mainland China and Hong Kong, the movie was called “Zhuang Zhi Ling Yun”, a good metaphorical name implying reaching for the clouds. It is a perennial favourite in China, and many know the movie scene by scene, as became apparent when in January 2011 the PLA Air Force released footage of aerial combat exercises, including a scene of a successful attack on a drone.

Except it wasn’t.

It was a clip from Top Gun. Chinese internet users spotted this immediately, exposed the trick, and humiliated the air force, which removed the clip from its website and presumably told off whoever was responsible – but the seed of an idea had been planted. China must have its own Top Gun!

The 2017 film Kong Tian Lie, or Sky Hunters, which stars Fan Bingbing and her boyfriend Li Chen, was billed as being the first movie to have the full cooperation of the PLA Air Force. It was not.

That honour goes to Jian Shi Chu Ji, or Sky Fighters, released in March 2011. It did not get good reviews from ordinary cinema-goers, because it managed to strike that special blend of cliché and tedium that robs even potentially exciting situations of all passion.

You would think that filming J-10s in dogfight sequences would inevitably be thrilling.

But all suspense is removed; no one is ever in danger for more than 30 seconds, and scenes of the inquiries into dangerous flying last longer than the scenes of the actual dangerous flying.


Top Gun is a perennial favourite for many Chinese film-goers. Photo: Alamy

Sky Fighters does however have moments of comedy. At a press conference for obsequious civilians, the film’s hero, General Yue, answers a foreign woman who throws him a tricky question. “You are the bravest pilot I have ever seen,” she says, “but what do you think of George W Bush?” to which Yue replies, “I’m better than him, because he can’t speak Chinese, and I’m a better pilot.”

He also explains to another foreign reporter that “war is best avoided, but if it comes, it is better to be prepared”. The reporter is at first surprised but then nods as he slowly comprehends these sage words.

Other reviews of this film have noted its scene-by-scene mimicking of Top Gun – granted it has a motorbike-along-the-runway scene, and it has the two male protagonists at odds who are reconciled at the end.

But it’s definitely a movie in its own right – and one which is old-fashioned and uncool. It even has a scene where the general’s wife sneaks up behind her husband and covers his eyes to make him guess who she is, while he pretends to run through a list of other girls. What comedy!

Chinese people of a certain age will remember a popular song from 1991 with lyrics describing a similarly annoying event and a man who guesses Mary, Sunny, and Ivory.

Come on, air force guy who wrote the script for the 2011 movie. You had 20 years to think of something new. Even the bar scene seems struck in the 1990s, with people ordering coffee as if it’s a new invention, and there are fruit bowls holding cherry tomatoes and bananas. Very KTV.

Weirder still, when they move to a new base, the commander hands over a bag of “feminine products” to the two female officers. I’m not making this up. The women are delighted, of course.


The 2011 Chinese film Sky Fighters flopped. Photo: Handout

Cut to 2017 and the much flashier Sky Hunters. The heroes are too cool even to wear proper air force uniforms, having been issued with sunglasses and leather jackets. In the six years that have gone by, Chinese studios have learnt to flash cash and get Hollywood bigshots on board.

They have Hans Zimmer for the score; they have the guy who did the computer-generated effects for Game of Thrones; they have lots of foreign extras.

Sadly, however, the PLA, once again, insisted on controlling the script and the production. And once again, they drained it of any real suspense or innovation.

At one point the movie makers seem to realise this – when a Chinese fighter inverts above a US spyplane, the pilot yells, “I think I’ve see this in a movie somewhere.”

Of course he has – it’s from the first five minutes of Top Gun.


China’s J-10 fighters take a starring role in both films. Photo: Handout

But instead of having the foreigners spout nonsense as in the 2011 film, the Americans say things that sound Hollywood-like – “He’s cute. Cuter than you,” says the female spy-plane crew member to her male colleague, referring to the hero Li Chen.

And – I’m not sure if this is meant to be a joke – Islamic State-style terrorists have one member who roars pointlessly when angry and looks like a comedy version of BA Baracus.

Fan Bingbing doesn’t have much to do in this movie, but she has a key role in its most idiotic scene.

The hero is thought to have perished, and so she stands alone on the runway – until … oh, why are there hundreds of people running behind her with happy faces? What have they seen? She turns and sees his smoking damaged plane is limping towards them through the grey sky.

Her expression turns to joy as she realises he has survived. Meanwhile we, the audience, wonder why so many people are celebrating before he has even landed.

And indeed how can he land with the entire cast – and extras – cheering and dancing jigs in his flight path?


Li Chen starred in Sky Hunters, but the air force insisted on having the final say. Photo: Handout

The film has its good points. It’s interesting to see all those new Chinese aircraft: the Y-20 airlifter, the J-20 stealth fighter and the H-6, as well as the J-10s and J-11s that we saw in Sky Fighters.

Li Jiahang is excellent as the dopey pilot who is taken hostage. And Tomer Oz, an Israeli actor sporting an Islamic-looking beard, is weirdly menacing as a Central Asian air force veteran who becomes a terrorist boss. And there’s a parachuting scene with a German shepherd dog which is just plain fun.

Chinese film-goers, not known for their polite reviews, generally panned the film.

It got two stars on Douban.com. About the most positive review was titled, “Is Sky Hunter so awful that you can’t watch it?” concluding generously that it wasn’t.

People were particularly rude about Fan Bingbing, of course, but it’s hardly her fault the movie was no good.

No one was bold enough to blame the military for meddling in the movie, but that is probably why Top Gun succeeded back in 1986 while Sky Hunter fails.

In 1986, the US Navy supported the movie studio but was smart enough not to tamper with the story and the production.

In China, the military made the movie, and expected everyone else to do as they were told. The result was what you’d expect from the military: discipline, technology, and no freedom of expression. Perhaps the 2023 version, which I predict will be called Sky Warriors, will be better.

Nicolas Groffman, who practised law in Beijing and Shanghai, is a partner at law firm Harrison Clark Rickerbys in London

THREADS
Where in the world is Fan Bingbing?
Chinese Counterfeits, Fakes & Knock-Offs

[GeneChing]

Of course she's pro-PRC now. Who knows what she went through during her disappearance? Now that she's back, she'll surely toe the party line.

Fan Bingbing is cheerleading for China over the South China Sea after the government disappeared her
Alexandra Ma 34m


A composite image showing Fan Bingbing before her disappearance, and the image she re-shared on social media, asserting Chinese dominance over the South China Sea and Taiwan. Getty Images/Weibo/Business Insider

China disappeared actress Fan Bingbing for three months earlier this year when she was accused of tax evasion.

She reappeared last month with a groveling apology to the Chinese government.

Over the weekend she published a post touting China's controversial claims to the South China Sea and Taiwan.

It marks a striking conversion for Fan from pariah to effectively being a mouthpiece for China's geopolitical ambitions.

Actress Fan Bingbing wrote a post touting China's controversial territorial claims to the South China Sea, in her first appearance on social media since issuing a humiliating apology to Beijing for evading tax.

The actress disappeared from the public eye for three months earlier this year after she was accused of tax evasion. She broke her silence in early October with a groveling message to the Chinese government, which found that she signed a secret contract to avoid paying her taxes.

On Saturday the actress published her first post since the apology on popular microblogging site Weibo, which featured a map posted by China's Communist Youth League of the country's mainland, Taiwan, and a demarcated South China Sea with the Chinese flag imposed on it.

Fan added the caption: "China, without a bit missing!"


A screenshot of Fan's Weibo post.Fan Bingbing/Weibo

China controversially claims to own both the South China Sea and the self-governing island of Taiwan.

China, Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam all have claims in the South China Sea, many of which overlap. About $3 trillion of shipborne trade passes through the area every year, making it a major economic and strategic prize.

Beijing's claim to the South China Sea is marked by a dashed line, as can be seen in Fan's post above. The more complicated web of territorial claims can be seen in this map:


A map showing the overlapping claims in the South China Sea. Reuters

China is extremely defensive of its territorial claims in the sea. After a British warship sailed through waters claimed by China in September, the state-run China Daily warned that it could derail a future UK-China trade deal over the slight.

Last week US Vice President Mike Pence told Southeast Asian leaders that the South China Sea "doesn't belong to any one nation," and reportedly flew through the area in a move that likely riled Beijing.

Beijing also insists that Taiwan is part of China, even though the island nation has been self-governing for decades and considers itself an independent nation.

Taiwan claims that China uses economic partnerships to pressure countries to cut off diplomatic ties with it.

[GeneChing]

Well, that's a good chunk of change. Curious who paid out.

JANUARY 22, 2019 9:04PM PT
Chinese Stars, Entertainment Companies Pay $1.7 Billion in Back Taxes
By PATRICK FRATER
Asia Bureau Chief


CREDIT: INVISION/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK

Chinese film and TV stars and entertainment companies have forked over an additional $1.7 billion (RMB11.7 billion) in taxes in the wake of last summer’s scandal surrounding actress Fan Bingbing and a subsequent government crackdown. The figure was announced late Tuesday by China’s State Tax Administration.

Chinese authorities launched a probe into the tax affairs of the entertainment sector last October. Companies and individuals were asked to examine and, if necessary, correct their post-2016 tax payments by the end of December. Those who complied would be exempt from penalties for tax evasion, the tax administration said.

In July last year, Fan was accused of hiding a proportion of her income from a film production through the use of multiple contracts, only some of which were declared to the tax authorities. It also emerged that she had set up companies in various Chinese provinces that offered lower tax regimes.

In October, after vanishing from public view for months, Fan resurfaced. She apologized and was ordered to pay $130 million (RMB884 million) in back taxes and penalties on behalf of herself and her companies.

The huge amount collected from other stars and entertainment firms – the figure is roughly equal to 20% of China’s gross box office last year – reinforces the argument that the use of double contracts and tax loopholes was widespread throughout the Chinese industry. The number of productions initiated in China slowed sharply from last summer as production companies and talent reassessed their financial situation and relationships.

“Industry workers should practice socialist core values…and strive to be entertainment workers with belief, empathy and sense of responsibility in the new era,” authorities said, according to state news agency Xinhua.

[GeneChing]

FEBRUARY 14, 2019 4:27AM PT
China’s Web Series, Online Films Required to Register, Report Actor Fees
By REBECCA DAVIS


CREDIT: ALVARO BARRIENTOS/AP/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Most web series and online films in China must register with the government and report their budgets and actor salaries starting from this Friday, the country’s media watchdog has decreed, in a further tightening of official oversight of the entertainment sector amid an uproar over talent pay.

All live-action and animated series intended for online distribution with budgets of more than RMB5 million ($740,000) and all online movies with budgets exceeding RMB1 million ($148,000) must now register and pass approval twice before they are disseminated to viewers, China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) declared in a December directive posted Wednesday to its official website. Companies must report their project’s title, genre, content and budget before production begins, and provide an update on information including actual expenses and actor pay after completion. The new regulation goes into effect Friday.

Nearly all substantive online content projects will be affected since the budget cutoffs are quite low. Even mediocre web series cost about RMB1 million to create, a Beijing-based production company associate told the Global Times newspaper.

The measure is a follow-up to regulations on tax payments and actor salaries released last year, and shows that Chinese authorities are policing online content with equal attention as traditional TV and film production.

In the wake of last year’s tax-evasion scandal involving superstar Fan Bingbing, authorities set a cap on actor salaries, stating that talent fees cannot exceed 40% of a project’s total production costs and that leading stars cannot be paid more than 70% of a work’s budget for talent. Fan had been slammed for the widespread practice of using “yin-yang contracts,” in which only the smaller of two contracts drawn up for the same work is reported to the tax authorities as income.

The new regulation on web content is part of China’s growing effort to crack down on skyrocketing celeb fees. “Government regulation will re-balance the market that has been troubled by star worship over artistic appreciation,” the Global Times cited an industry insider as saying, though he stressed that it would take a long time before yin-yang contracts were actually be stamped out.

Chicoms tax the rich and regulate that. Interesting concept.

[GeneChing]

Scandal-Ridden Stars Must Compensate Studios for Money-Losing Films, Delegates Say
By Liu Shuangshuang, Shan Yuxiao, and Zhao Runhua / Mar 12, 2019 11:55 AM / Politics & Law


Fan Bingbing. Photo: VCG

A scandal in China could ruin a celebrity's career — and a company's business.

In 2018, star Fan Bingbing’s tax evasion scandal emerged. Soon after, the fiscal revenue and profit of Talent Television and Film, a producer behind Fan’s film “Legend of Ba Qing (巴清传),” dropped dramatically.

Talent Television and Film said that the company failed to profit because no partners were willing to screen Fan’s film, for fear of being blamed for giving limelight to an alleged law-breaker.

One famous screenwriter, who is also a CPPCC delegate to China’s highest-level annual meetings going on this week, drafted a proposal with 30 other delegates to establish a “celebrity blacklist” to protect lawful interests of companies like Talent.

Zhao said that “celebrity scandal risks can be hard to predict. This could bring significant loss to investors, and will affect other innocent actors and actresses.” She added that it’s unfortunate that TV series and films starring such celebrities will often be “killed” permanently by the industry to avoid audiences' boycotts.

The celebrity blacklist would keep records on scandal-involved celebrities, and allow further punishment decided by the industry and legal departments. This includes setting up an industry rating system to evaluate the seriousness of a celebrity’s scandal.

The proposal also advocates that a TV series or film starring a scandal-ridden celebrity might be prohibited from being screened, but for no more than six months. Zhao said the proposal will allow investors to demand material compensation from the celebrities.

Interesting strategy. I do think celebrities should take more responsibility for their scandals.

[GeneChing]

APRIL 2019
“The Big Error Was That She Was Caught”: The Untold Story Behind the Mysterious Disappearance of Fan Bingbing, the World’s Biggest Movie Star
NOW YOU SEE HER
Fan Bingbing at the Cannes Film Festival’s opening gala in May 2018. The following month, she disappeared from public view.
She vanished without a trace last year. But it was what happened next that sent a shudder through the Chinese film industry.
by MAY JEONG
MARCH 26, 2019 9:00 AM

Fan Bingbing has been mostly staying at home these days, sending messages on WeChat (the Chinese WhatsApp), working on her English, receiving guests, doing charity work “to wash away her sins,” and otherwise “trying to stay positive,” according to a producer who knows her well. But before the events of last spring, when she abruptly disappeared from public view for three months, she was busy being the most famous actress in China, which is to say, the most famous actress in the world.

Fan is China’s highest-paid female star, with a net worth estimated at $100 million. Her 62.9 million followers on Weibo, China’s Twitter, rivals the total membership of the Communist Party. Among her fans, her classical “melon seed” face—widely viewed in China as a Platonic ideal of beauty—has inspired countless acts of copycat surgery. She is often described as baifumei, a phrase meaning pale-skinned, rich, and beautiful. “The rules of Chinese beauty are rigid, and she follows them,” says Elijah Whaley, a market researcher who specializes in China. Fan has been the face of Adidas, Louis Vuitton, and Moët, selling everything from lipstick to diamonds. They say you can’t take a good selfie with her, because she will suck all the beauty away. Her fame has caught the attention of Hollywood: This year, after appearances in the Iron Man and X-Men franchises, she was slated to begin filming an international spy thriller alongside Jessica Chastain, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, and Lupita Nyong’o.


Fan Bingbing in a dress, smiling
THE FACE OF CHINA
Fan at a Cannes screening in 2018. At nearly 63 million, her social-media following rivals the total membership of the Communist Party.
By Mike Marsland/WireImage.

The trouble began last year, on May 28, when Fan was flying to Los Angeles with her retinue (including a friend who reportedly got work done to look like her). On Weibo, a famed TV host named Cui Yongyuan posted two versions of Fan’s contract for an upcoming film titled Cell Phone 2. One put her salary at $7.8 million; the other at $1.5 million. The implication was clear: Fan had fraudulently declared the smaller sum to the Chinese tax authorities, to avoid paying taxes on the rest. The contracts were redacted in parts, but you could still make out a faint trace of the famous Fan name.

At first no one thought anything of it. For starters, everyone knew that Cui, a household name in China, had an ongoing feud with the makers of Cell Phone 2. (The film was a sequel to Cell Phone, China’s highest-grossing movie of 2003, which starred Fan as the mistress of a character who bore a striking resemblance to Cui.) Besides, the hiss of gossip always trails stars like Fan. If you were to believe the Hong Kong tabloids, Fan’s brother Chengcheng is actually her illegitimate son. (They are 19 years apart.) Fan was said to have gotten her upper lip surgically enhanced, her chin shaved, the fat from her thighs removed. She was dating this rich guy. No, she was dating this other rich guy. In fact, there was a set price for a night with her: 2 million yuan, or $300,000. It said so in a booklet that supposedly lists the going rates of all other A-list actresses.

So there was every reason to think that the ado over Cell Phone 2 would come and go, just like any other celebrity gossip. But 12 hours later, when Fan landed at LAX, the world seemed to have turned against her.

Fan was born after the death of Mao Zedong, and has lived her entire life governed by the go-go brand of capitalism introduced by his successor, Deng Xiaoping. At 37, she belongs to the first generation that had been allowed to amass private wealth under the informal slogan “Let some people get rich first.” Still, with many Chinese earning pre-reform salaries of less than $10,000 a year, fans were shocked to learn how much Fan could command for only four days of work. “Most people were astonished,” says Ming Beaver Kwei, who produced the Fan vehicle Sophie’s Revenge. “People knew she made money, but they didn’t know it was that much money.” Even worse, Fan had tried to shirk her civic duty by trying to keep most of her morally suspect gains for herself.

Fan’s production company immediately issued a statement denying the charges and informing Cui that they had retained the services of a Beijing law firm. Cui apologized to Fan and retracted his accusation. But by then it was already a national scandal. A week later, on June 4, the central tax authorities deputized the local tax bureau in Jiangsu, the coastal province where Fan’s company was registered, to launch an investigation. Shares of companies associated with Fan plunged by 10 percent, the maximum daily limit on the Chinese stock market. Three days later, Chinese censors banned all stories on the Internet about taxes, films, and Fan.

The movie industry at large also fell under scrutiny. On June 27, five government agencies, including film and tax authorities, issued a joint directive capping salaries for on-screen talent at 40 percent of a movie’s total production budget. Individual stars, meanwhile, would not be allowed to earn more than 70 percent of a production’s total wages for actors. The notice chastised the industry for “distorting social values” and encouraging the “growing tendency towards money worship” through the “blind chasing of stars.”

At first, Fan tried to maintain her normal routine. She attended a Celine Dion concert, made a trip to Tibet for charity, and visited a children’s hospital in Shanghai. Then, in the first week of July, she canceled a meeting with a production company, informing them that she had been placed under house arrest.

One night, amid the scandal, Fan went out to dinner with her best friend, the director Li Yu. As they were driving home, Li recalled, Fan reached for her hand and held it tightly. Li was surprised: Fan had never done that before, through their four movies and 12 years of friendship. Fan didn’t say anything, because she herself didn’t know what lay ahead.

Two days later, Fan Bingbing, the most famous woman in China, whose primary job is being seen by the public, vanished without a trace.

It is hard to convey Fan’s appeal, because there is no star in Hollywood quite like her. She combines the glamour of Nicole Kidman, the sunniness of Julia Roberts, the pluck of Jennifer Lawrence, and the box-office draw of Sandra Bullock. In Beijing, she is the literal girl next door: nearly everyone I met claimed to be her neighbor. A lawyer told me that her house was next to his at Star River, a gated community protected by razor wire. An actor said he often saw her black S.U.V. parked in front of his apartment building.

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[GeneChing]

Fan's fiancé. director Li Chen, with Fan
FEAR AND RUMORS
After Fan disappeared, Internet sleuths noticed that her fiancé, director Li Chen (left), appeared in a video without his engagement ring.
From VCG/Getty Images.

Fan was raised in the port city of Yantai, overlooking the Korean Bay. Her grandfather was a general in the naval air force, and her grandmother gave her the Chinese character bing, or “ice,” to honor the family’s ties to the sea. Fan grew up watching her father, a pop singer, perform at regional competitions. Her mother was a dancer and an actress. Both were party committee members and served as cadres in the cultural division of the local port authority. When Fan’s middle-school teacher suggested she take up music, they bought her a piano and a flute. The family was poor. Young Fan knew this: when she was in a car crash, at age 14, the first thing she did was try to protect the flute. (She still has it to this day.)

Fan spent the next three months recuperating in a hospital, where she watched a Taiwanese drama about Wu Zetian, a consort who rose to become empress during the Tang dynasty. Empress Wu gave Fan the dream of becoming an actress. (Twenty years later, she would produce and star in a TV series about Wu.) She entered a performing-arts school in Shanghai, where she was the youngest of 40 in her class. Sharing a tiny room with seven other students, she struggled to get by on a monthly allowance of $60. On rough days, she sustained herself on a single meat bun or bowl of beef noodle soup.

Through a school play, Fan met a producer who cast her as a chambermaid in an 18th-century costume drama. My Fair Princess aired in April 1998, when Fan was 16 years old. The show became a cultural phenomenon and catapulted her to stardom.

Because Fan has been China’s sweetheart for two decades, younger fans feel as though they have grown up alongside her, a sort of Emma Watson for Chinese millennials. A Chinese-language student told me she learned Mandarin by watching Fan in My Fair Princess. Another showed me a photo of a crane-pattern dress she had ordered on Taobao (the Chinese version of eBay), a knockoff of what Fan wore to Cannes.

Nearly all of the people I spoke with who had worked with Fan—English teachers, dialogue coaches, designers, lawyers, film executives, producers, directors, and fellow actors—told me she was kind, and impossible to hate. “She so much cares about the people working for her and treats them really well,” said Fang Li, who has produced several of Fan’s films. “Not many actresses are like Fan Bingbing. She is so strong, spiritually. She can take a lot of pressure, and still smile.”

Daniel Junior Furth, who taught English to Chinese actors, called Fan “ultra-kind and pleasant.” Even though she was always surrounded by people he felt were more important than he was, Furth said, Fan made sure he “never got that sense of being neglected or put off to the side, which is rare in a society that is so hierarchical.” Once, she called him up to say she had front-row tickets to a play at the national theater. Would he like to come? Afterward, she asked her driver to take Furth home. “There was no stunt about it,” he recalled. It was just a nice thing that Fan had done.

Fan is also, by all accounts, a very hard worker. She runs her own acting school, production company, and cosmetics line, sleeping only four hours a night. Kwei, the producer, recalled a rock-climbing sequence Fan shot for Sophie’s Revenge. Fan showed up with a raging fever. Kwei offered to reschedule. Fan said no, they should keep going. She was O.K. to climb, she said, but they would have to dub her voice in post, because she was too ill to speak. “We worked through the night,” Kwei told me.

In 2015, a reporter asked Fan whether she was going to follow custom and marry rich. “I don’t need to marry rich,” she replied in a now oft-repeated rejoinder. “I am rich.” (“People were like, *****, wow,” a young fan recalled.) Her brashness earned her the nickname “Fan Ye”—something akin to Master Fan, a title usually reserved for men. “She is like a strong man inside,” said Fang, the producer. “But outside she is like a pretty girl.”

Fan’s image as the country’s kindest, hardest-working actress only made her sudden disappearance that much more surprising—and terrifying—to the film industry in China. In the month after she was engulfed in scandal, shares in publicly listed movie companies in China fell by an average of 18 percent.

Last summer, after Fan stopped appearing in public and posting on social media, the entire world began speculating about her whereabouts. On August 28, Fan’s fiancé was seen in a promotional video without his engagement ring, and the Internet drew its own conclusions. Five days later, unverified tweets claimed that Fan, after seeking counsel from Jackie Chan, had landed in Los Angeles to request asylum. Chan quickly denied the rumor that same day. Fan’s birthday, September 16, came and went. Montblanc dropped her as brand ambassador. So did Chopard and Swisse, an Australian vitamin company.

Then, on October 3, Fan reappeared as suddenly as she had vanished. According to the South China Morning Post, she had been held under a form of detention known as “residential surveillance,” at a holiday resort in a suburb of Jiangsu. The system was instituted in 2012, under President Xi Jinping, making it legal for the Chinese secret police to detain anyone charged with endangering state security or committing corruption and hold them at an undisclosed location for up to six months without access to lawyers or family members. Sources close to Fan told me that she had been picked up by plainclothes police. While under detention, she was forbidden to make public statements or use her phone. She wasn’t given a pen or paper to write with, nor allowed any privacy, even when taking showers.

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[GeneChing]

Fan with Marion Cotillard, Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, and Lupita Nyong’o.
BEYOND BOND
Before she vanished, Fan was slated to co-star in a spy thriller with Marion Cotillard, Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, and Lupita Nyong’o.
By George Pimentel/WireImage.

After her release, Fan issued an obsequious apology on social media. Saying she had endured “an unprecedented amount of pain,” she said she felt “ashamed and guilty” for not “setting a good example for society and the industry.” She went on: “Today I’m facing enormous fears and worries over the mistakes I made! I have failed the country, society’s support and trust, and the love of my devoted fans! I offer my sincere apology here once again! I beg for everyone’s forgiveness!” She concluded with a reference to a popular Chinese song from the 1950s: “Without the party and the state, without the love of the people, there would have been no Fan Bingbing!”

That same day, tax authorities reported that Fan had declared only a third of her $4.4 million salary for Air Strike, a Chinese action film starring Bruce Willis. The movie’s release was canceled, and a warrant was issued for one of its investors. Fan’s longtime agent, a former nightclub manager named Mu Xiaoguang, was found destroying the company books and was taken into custody. Fan was ordered to pay $131 million in back taxes and penalties—including $70 million from her personal funds. (In fact, Fang told me, Fan wound up paying only $2 million of her own money, which she raised by borrowing funds and selling off properties.) It could have been worse. Until 2009, first-time tax offenders in China could be charged with criminal liability. And until 2011, economic crimes such as tax evasion were punishable by death.

The harsh treatment of China’s biggest star sent a clear signal to everyone in the Chinese film industry: the boom days of the past were coming to an end. When the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, actors and actresses were renamed “film workers” in an effort to cut “capitalist connections and remold them into socialist citizens,” according to Sabrina Qiong Yu, a scholar of Chinese film. For decades, film workers received salaries on par with factory workers, and most movies were imported from Hollywood. By 2000, the Chinese film industry was producing fewer than 100 movies a year—and only two dozen or so were shown in one of the country’s 8,000 theaters. The rest were stored at the national granary, in climate-uncontrolled archives.

Then, after 2010, the government decided there was big money to be made in movies. State banks began to finance mergers and acquisitions, and China’s studios went on a buying bender. They snapped up the U.S. theater chain AMC, tried to purchase Dick Clark Productions, which produces the Golden Globes, and signed major financing deals with Sony Pictures, Universal, Fox, and Lionsgate. In total, the deals added up to $10 billion, heavily financed by state-backed banks. Today the Chinese film industry produces more than 800 films a year, and China will soon overtake the United States as the world’s largest film market. For the past four years, China has been building 25 new movie screens every day.

Because show business is still so new in China—it’s been only 20 years since private companies have been allowed to make movies—there aren’t many bankable stars who can guarantee box-office success. As a result, A-list actors like Fan Bingbing were able to command top dollar: it was not uncommon for as much as 90 percent of a film’s production budget to go toward on-screen talent. “We are in the golden age of Hollywood, where the star is key,” said a Chinese film executive who asked not to be identified.

Last year, after Fan turned down the role of the Chinese oceanographer in The Meg, a sci-fi thriller produced by Warner Bros., the studio considered Tang Wei and Jing Tian before deciding on Li Bingbing. “It’s a very short list,” said the same executive, who was involved in the film. Fan seemed poised to become that impossible thing: a star who can appease fans in the three Chinas—mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—as well as Hollywood studios, and their sudden desire for Asian faces.

The star-dependent culture was on full display at a DVD store in Beijing where I bought pirated copies of Fan’s movies. Discs were organized not by title or category but by actor. Nicolas Cage, Tom Hanks, Tom Hardy, and Jason Statham all received the full-row treatment. Nicole Kidman, whom many Chinese consider a vision of unimpeachable beauty, also got her own row. Others—Natalie Portman, Michelle Williams, even Meryl Streep—were relegated to a row seemingly reserved for miscellaneous white actresses.

In the years that the Chinese film industry was allowed to grow unregulated, it became common for stars to falsify contracts to avoid paying taxes on the huge sums that they were commanding. That’s why Fan’s sudden fall sent a chill through the rest of the film world. “There was a certain surprise in the industry,” said Kwei, the producer. “Fan Bingbing was only doing the usual standard package.” David Unger, Gong Li’s manager, put it more bluntly. “The big error,” he said, “was that she was caught.”

Fan’s disappearance, and the subsequent crackdown, was the result of larger forces at play: After years of double-digit growth, the Chinese economy is slowing down. The government claims that economic output grew by 6.5 percent last year—the lowest rate in more than a decade—but observers believe the rate is as low as 2 percent. With consumer spending slowing and foreign investment plunging in the midst of a trade war, the government is seeking to redirect economic power back under state control. It won’t be long, many in China predict, before the tax scandal bleeds into other sectors. What happened to Fan was merely the “primary incision,” says Alex Zhang, executive director of Zhengfu Pictures. Soon, the authorities will “cut all the way down to the rest of the business community.”

In March 2018, President Xi established the National Supervision Commission, granting it sweeping powers to investigate corruption and tax evasion. Suspects could now be legally kidnapped, interrogated, and held for as long as six months. That same month, he also gave the Central Publicity Department, which heads up propaganda efforts, the authority to regulate the film industry. (The only other time film was put under the propaganda ministry, according to industry insiders, was during the Cultural Revolution.) Films that had passed the censors years ago have now been retroactively banned. “That liminal space where you can get away with stuff, that’s gone,” said Michael Berry, a professor of contemporary Chinese culture at U.C.L.A.

Fan was not alone in evading taxes: “The big error was that she was caught.”

Under Xi’s crackdown, tens of thousands of people have disappeared into the maw of the police state. An eminent TV news anchor was taken away hours before going on air. A retired professor with views critical of the government was dragged away during a live interview on Voice of America. A billionaire was abducted from his private quarters in the Four Seasons in Hong Kong. Other high-profile disappearances include Interpol president Meng Hongwei in September, photojournalist Lu Guang in November, two Canadians who went missing in December, as well as the writer Yang Hengjun, who went missing in January. “The message being sent out is that nobody is too tall, too big, too famous, too pretty, too whatever,” said Steve Tsang, who runs the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Taken together, Xi’s moves represent a dramatic rollback of the economic reforms and relative freedom that enabled the film industry to flourish in the time before his reign. “Deng Xiaoping kept everyone together by promising to make them rich,” said Nicholas Bequelin, the East Asia director of Amnesty International. “What keeps things together under Xi is fear. Fear of the system, where no matter how high you are, from one day to the next you can disappear.”

When I arrived in Beijing, just before Christmas, everyone in the film industry seemed to be in a state of panic. The tax authorities had issued a directive calling for all film companies to do ziwo piping, or “self-criticism,” and “rectify themselves” by paying the back taxes they owed on unreported income before December 31. Those who paid up would not be fined. Starting in the new year, however, there would be “heavy, random checks,” and those who were caught would be “dealt with seriously.”

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[GeneChing]

Fan in *X-Men: Days of Future Past*
VANISHING ACT
Fan made her proper Hollywood debut as Blink, a mutant with the power to disappear and reappear, in X-Men: Days of Future Past.
From AF Archive/Alamy.

The authorities also declared that special tax zones, which had allowed stars to pay lower taxes, were no longer legal. Following the proverb “The mountains are tall and the emperor is far away,” many film studios had registered in these special zones, far from the major coastal cities. Tax rates in the zones could be as low as 0.15 percent. Now, overnight, those working in the film industry would be taxed at the highest rate—45 percent. And all this was to be paid for not only 2018 but also for the two previous fiscal years, dating back to January 2016.

The rising fear was palpable on WeChat, where people were sharing ad hoc formulas meant to help calculate how much tax they owed in lieu of any official guidelines. Many faced staggering sums that dwarfed Fan’s tax bill. Open letters protesting the yidaoqie, or “one knife chop” approach, of the tax bureau made the rounds before being taken down.

Because of Fan’s clout in the industry, the probe of her finances had incriminated many companies that were partnering with her on projects. Scores of films have been put on hold. “Everyone you can think of is dealing with taxes right now,” said Kwei, the producer. Many had either already been “invited for tea” at the tax bureau, or were awaiting their turn. Others were rushing to meet with their accountants, or were holed up in their offices reviewing past budget sheets. Victoria Mao, who runs a production company, told me that all of her projects had been put on hold just days earlier, after she received a call from the tax bureau asking her to self-audit. “We don’t have any time to go forward,” she said, “because we have to go back.”

People were even more reticent than usual to talk on the phone. “We are not the only people on the line, so to speak,” producer Andre Morgan told me, before suggesting we meet at his hotel. Morgan, who is widely credited for introducing Jackie Chan to Hollywood, described how things have changed since he came to China in 1972. “There weren’t that many rules back then,” he said. Now the bureaucracy is catching up with the industry. As he sees it, the people aren’t afraid of the state—the state is afraid of the people. That’s why the government singled out and punished a select few, like Fan—to keep everyone else in line. Morgan quoted a Chinese proverb: the state is “killing the chicken to scare the monkey.” (He also said, in a burst of animal metaphors, that it is only a matter of time before “the chickens come home to roost,” and that the government is doing whatever it can to “catch the mouse.”)

After the government issued the new tax directive, screenwriters had protested to the authorities, who in turn agreed to tax income on original screenplays at only 16 percent, the maximum rate on intellectual property. This enraged directors, who were being taxed the full 45 percent for their work. If a completed movie is not intellectual property, they demanded, then what is? “What is culture?” wondered Fan’s producer, Fang Li, who himself owed $1.7 million in taxes. “What is intellectual property?” The tax authorities, it seemed, had thrown the film industry into a state of existential crisis.

My first Saturday in Beijing, I attended a dinner at the home of an actor. Dinner begins early in the city, and by the time I arrived, at seven P.M., the ayah had already put out dishes of pork belly, cured beef, tofu curds, lotus root, and chicken feet. And those were only the dishes I could discern.

Before we sat down to eat, the actor, who had moved in only two days before, offered to give his guests a tour of the multi-million-dollar home. We walked past a Japanese rock garden and a patio that opens up to a sweeping view of the city that was at once dystopian and weirdly beautiful. Because the house was shaped like a spaceship, and because I had fallen into a jet-lagged sleep the night before watching a dubbed version of the new Blade Runner, and because I was about to eat dishes I would never learn the names of, I felt like I had been transported into the future. Fan, predictably, was said to be living “just three houses down.”

The dinner party consisted entirely of film people. It’s a socially incestuous community, where everyone either went to the same film school, or belongs to the same agency, or lives in the same gated community. Even those who were meeting for the first time that evening discovered they had many friends in common, and bonded quickly.

The first bottle of the night was a Merlot from a Bordeaux winery that Zhao Wei, Fan’s co-star from My Fair Princess, had purchased for an estimated $6.4 million in 2011. Now Zhao, who had recently been banned from the stock market for misleading investors, was rushing to pay her back taxes before the December 31 deadline. As we moved on to more expensive wine, the talk turned to other colleagues who were scrambling to raise money to pay their back taxes—selling cars, mortgaging homes, taking out loans. A director said he owed $29,000. An actor responded by saying he owed $73,000.

Was anyone angry? “If we get angry, we are done,” explained the actor’s agent, who was the only one not drinking with abandon. “You can’t make movies anymore. We have just the one government.” People, he added, were “not mad, but confused.” The informal rules that had governed the industry for decades were changing, which was unnerving. Even worse, no one seemed to know what the new rules were. Meanwhile, the government was “taking money from your pocket.” But what could you do?

Around one in the morning, after our host had passed out in one of the guest rooms, a neighbor complained about the noise we were making with the newly installed sound system. The same neighbor, the agent told me, had complained the night before. That party had also gone on for hours, with interminable talk of tax woes over interminable glasses of baijiu.

In 2015, Fan told the South China Morning Post that she had no guanxi, or connections, in show business. “In China, to be successful, it is often not enough to have talent and earn merit,” she said. “Some guanxi is almost always necessary. But when I walked into the entertainment industry, my family had no guanxi. So I knew I had to risk failure and bear the consequences alone.”

It’s a Cinderella story worthy of Hollywood. In fact, however, Fan had the ultimate guanxi—her family’s longtime involvement in the Communist Party. Throughout her career, Fan has continued to be openly friendly with the authorities. Indeed, two of the biggest awards she’s received—the Hundred Flower and the Golden Rooster—represent “official opinion from the government,” according to Gao Yitian, a producer who runs the First International Film Festival. Fan’s tax breaches were not especially egregious. But she had the money to pay, says Zhang, the film executive. And most important, he adds, the government “knew she is smart enough to cooperate.”

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[GeneChing]

Fan walking inconspicuously
FAME AND MISFORTUNE
The first public sighting of Fan after her release, on October 15, 2018.
From VCG/Getty Images.

“That’s what happens here,” said Michael Gralapp, an entertainment recruiter who has consulted for a subsidiary of China Central Television. “You play ball, or you are screwed. So you play ball.”

Like many movie stars, Fan is famous more for the iconic traits she embodies than for her talents on-screen. (“When she is with a great director,” one publicist says, “she’s a great actress.”) In 2013, she made a China-only cameo as an unnamed nurse in Iron Man 3, a role that earned her the disparaging epithet of “flower vase”—a pretty prop in a Hollywood production. But the movie went on to make $121 million in China, and Hollywood took note. In 2014, Fan landed a bigger role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, as the teleporting superheroine Blink. She was also nominated for a Golden Horse Award, the Chinese equivalent of an Oscar, for her starring role in I Am Not Madame Bovary.

As her fame spread, Fan always made sure to stay in the good graces of the Communist Party. In 2017, she appeared in Sky Hunter, directed by Li Chen, to whom she is now engaged. Like Top Gun, the film is an unabashed work of military propaganda. In one scene, Fan appears in a bomber-pilot outfit, wielding an ax and running to save a boy and his mother. As the building disappears beneath their feet, Fan gets them to a helicopter just in time.

For the most part, Chinese films that have done well in the West have been either art-house pictures like Raise the Red Lantern or martial-arts movies in the tradition of Jackie Chan and Jet Li. (Ang Lee, whose Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became the highest-grossing foreign-language film of all time in the U.S., was born in Taiwan.) Until recently, Fan has selected her roles with an eye not for potential exposure in Hollywood but for how she will be received at home. Her beauty, too, appeals to the domestic market. Taoists have long considered outer beauty—from “eyebrows like faraway mountains” to “feet like bamboo shoots carved in jade”—inexorably linked to inner virtue. And the Communist Party, scholars note, has expanded such time-honored definitions of beauty to include devotional sacrifice to the people. Fan, with her mix of patriotism and elegance, hits all the right notes. She is the perfect star for a modern China.

Since her release last October, Fan has consciously kept a low profile. (She and her agency declined to speak with VANITY FAIR for this story.) Her first post on social media after her public apology was an overt display of fealty to the Chinese government. On November 17, when a director made a pro-Taiwan comment at the Golden Horse Awards, Fan shared a pro-China post from the Communist youth league. “China,” she said, “cannot miss out on any inch.”

Her collaborators followed suit. On November 20, Feng Xiaogang, the director of the two Cell Phone movies, who was reported to have been fined $288 million, announced that his next film would be about the 70th anniversary of the founding of the party. Creative Artists Agency China, which represents Fan, was rumored to have lost more than half of its income with the scandal, and its agents have been scrambling to sign new talent. One analyst predicts that a third of the Chinese film industry will go out of business in the coming years, leaving fewer than 1,000 production companies standing. Not since the Cultural Revolution have artists in China been as wary of the state, and as aware of the necessity of appeasing it.

But capitalism, once unleashed, does not give up on its privileges and profits easily. The film industry in China remains huge. A studio movie in America typically opens on fewer than 2,500 screens. A wide release in China, by contrast, can open on more than 20,000 screens. More crucially, the country is said to need an estimated 500,000 scripts to fill all its available screens and airtime over the next five years. If the story of Fan is the story of modern film in China, then both are far from over.

Fan, for her part, appears to be quietly plotting a comeback. Throughout the crisis, her production company never shut its doors. “Of course she lost a lot of money,” said Fang, the producer. “But she’s not completely depressed.” Fang and Li, Fan’s best friend and frequent collaborator, have been discussing future projects for their favorite star. When I asked Li why she would risk casting Fan, she told me that the anguish Fan has gone through would become the well she draws from. “Nobody can be a better actress than her,” Li said.

Zhengfu Pictures, which was co-founded by the former head of the state-run China Film Group, has been in discussions to purchase the rights to 355, the spy thriller that Fan had been slated to star in with Jessica Chastain. The Hollywood star had personally contacted Fan about the movie, wanting to know why there were no female James Bonds. Wouldn’t it be cool, Chastain wondered, to make a super espionage movie with actresses from around the world?

Universal pledged $20 million for the rights to 355, but the movie’s Chinese distributors pulled out in the wake of the tax scandal. Now, backed by a venture-capital fund in Hollywood, Zhengfu hopes to resurrect the project. In China, at least, big money still depends on big stars—and big money, it appears, is still willing to bet on Fan Bingbing.

The subject of 355 came up as I was having a late lunch in the lobby of my hotel with Zhang, the director of Zhengfu Pictures. The sun was out, but it was so diffused through the infamous Beijing smog that you couldn’t be sure where the mountains ended and the high-rises began. Eighty years ago, before Chairman Mao, the building we were sitting in was a brick factory. Now it is a luxury hotel, with a penthouse frequented by Alibaba founder Jack Ma. While I was there, it was undergoing a top-to-bottom renovation, and the interior shifted daily: a wall I leaned on in the morning would be gone by the time I returned at night. I found it disorienting, but everyone around me seemed to regard the constant disruption as the price of progress.

Zhang, at age 30, personifies this particular brand of optimism. On January 22, the state tax authorities announced that they had collected a staggering $1.7 billion in back taxes from film and TV stars—an amount equal to 20 percent of China’s entire gross box office last year. But as Zhang sees it, President Xi isn’t out to ruin the film industry. He is making China more powerful. And a stronger China will, in the long run, be good for Chinese moviemakers.

Like most of the filmmakers I spoke to, Zhang mentioned both the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square—not as cause for fear but as a way of emphasizing that they aren’t going to be deterred by a few billion dollars in back taxes. Picking up his fork, he traced an imaginary path in the air to illustrate the film industry’s attitude toward the government crackdown. “If you see a mountain,” he said, “just go around it.”

That sense of determination is apparently shared by Fan Bingbing. China’s film industry was built on the hustle and grit of young entrepreneurs like her—and as true hustlers know, there’s always money to be made, even in the face of authoritarian rule. “She is a businesswoman first, then an actress,” an industry insider told me.

Not long ago, Fan had drinks with her friend Li, who told me that they discussed Fan’s ordeal. If the best art reflects its times, the two concluded, who better to cast as a lead than Fan Ye herself?

Fan laughed at her luck. Perhaps there was an upside to becoming the world’s most celebrated missing person. “I worked so hard,” she told her friend, “and this is how I become famous.”

Isn't the biggest error of any criminal that they got caught?

[GeneChing]

Fan Bingbing Movie Comeback to Happen “This Year”
After being disappeared due to tax evasion last year, Fan Bingbing looks set to return via Jessica Chastain-led spy thriller 355
By RADII CHINA 3 days ago

She may not have opened a crazily expensive beauty salon to claw back some money after her enormous fine for tax evasion, but disgraced Chinese movie star Fan Bingbing looks set for a comeback after all.

Rumors have been bubbling away about her returning to the movie business via Jessica Chastain’s spy thriller 355 for a while, but now they’ve been given extra credence by director Simon Kinberg.

Talking to Collider, Kinberg referenced Fan Bingbing by name and stated that she, Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Penelope Cruz, and Marion Cotillard were “not just interested, but committed” to the project.

Kinberg’s interview, taking place as part of WonderCon 2019, was mostly a promotional push for X-Men movie Dark Phoenix, and the director wasn’t pressed on whether participating in the film may prove difficult for Fan, given she’s yet to return to work following her disappearance and subsequent fine for tax evasion last year.

But he added that “we plan to make that movie this year” and that he’s currently tweaking the script and casting for male characters in the female-led spy thriller.

THREADS
355
Where in the world is Fan Bingbing?

[GeneChing]

ASIA APRIL 26, 2019 12:35AM PT
Fan Bingbing Starts to Re-Emerge Months After Tax Scandal
By REBECCA DAVIS


CREDIT: ALVARO BARRIENTOS/AP/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Half a year after she was found guilty of tax fraud and disappeared from the public eye, Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing has begun to signal her comeback, attending a gala event and launching her own beauty product on social media this week.

The 37-year-old actress unexpectedly hit the red carpet in Beijing on Monday at a ninth-anniversary event for streaming giant iQiyi, though she arrived late and didn’t answer media questions. “iQiyi hosted a closed-door event of entertainment professionals, unrelated to any specific projects,” the company told Variety in response to a query about Fan’s attendance.

Industry watchers saw her presence as an attempt to assess public reception of her re-emergence months after she issued a groveling public apology and was ordered to pay more than $100 million in penalties and back taxes. Reactions on social media to her re-appearance suggest that Fan could face a tough road back to public favor.

At the iQiyi event, she wore what is assumed to be sponsored luxury clothing – an Alexander McQueen suit, a Louis Vuitton handbag, and De Beers jewelry – in a sign that the fashion world, at least, appears ready to forgive. (Fan was the public face of Louis Vuitton and De Beers for years before her fall from grace.) A selfie of the star holding up a V-for-victory hand gesture in the company of Yue Hua Entertainment CEO Du Hua has made the rounds online. She herself posted her red-carpet photos on her Instagram account, which has lain more or less dormant since last May.

Commenting on the post, Jessica Chastain wrote “Beautiful” with a heart emoji. Chastain is set to begin shooting this year alongside Fan, Lupita Nyong’o, Penelope Cruz and Marion Cotillard in the all-woman spy thriller “355,” directed by Simon Kinberg, a film whose fate had been uncertain in the wake of the Fan’s fall from grace.

The response in Fan’s home country, whose highly censored online space is often swept up in fits of nationalism, has been much frostier, with many netizens apparently unwilling to forgive and forget.

Under the top news story about her iQiyi appearance on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform, amidst the comments extolling her beauty, hundreds of thousands had posted and liked vitriolic retorts, many calling her a thick-skinned liar.

“So we’re supposed to pretend that nothing happened?” wrote one commenter, while another added sarcastically: “It’s so great to be an artist in China – Chinese people apparently only have a three second-long memory.”

Another said of her tax evasion: “If an act is wrong, even if thousands upon thousands of people are doing the same thing, it’s still wrong.”

On Wednesday, her beauty brand Fan Beauty announced the launch of a “seagrape deep hydrating water gel” face mask, which goes on sale in Hong Kong on Friday. Included was a promotional video message from the actress.

Last month, Fan was photographed at the opening of a new beauty salon in central Beijing. Although the designer Zhang Shuai publicly stated that it was his business venture, Chinese databases show that Fan’s mother holds 98% of shares and her father the other 2%.

Membership cards begin at RMB50,000 ($7,400) and go up to RMB1 million ($148,000), leaked photos circulating online showed.

Since last fall, Fan has posted only a few times on either Chinese or foreign social media: wishing fans a happy lunar new year in February on Instagram (a platform blocked in China), giving a shout-out to Chinese film “The Crossing” in March, and honoring firefighters who battled a big forest fire in the southwestern province of Sichuan in April.

Tempted to search for that “seagrape deep hydrating water gel” promo vid...