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Do you really want to support a movie that helps fund China?

posted 4 years ago by Rorikon (16463)
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https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/03/the-untold-story-disappearance-of-fan-bingbing-worlds-biggest-movie-star

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.

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.

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.

[–] Rorikon (16463) 4 years ago

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.

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.

[–] Rorikon (16463) 4 years ago

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.

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.

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.

[–] Rorikon (16463) 4 years ago

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.