‘Red Carpet’ Book Excerpt: How Fan Bingbing Went From China’s Most Famous Actress To Its Most Famous Cautionary Tale
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Editor’s Note: Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel’s new book Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy includes a chapter on Fan Bingbing, one of China’s biggest global stars who disappeared from public view in 2018 shortly after she was cast to star in the female action spy movie The 355. In the excerpt below from the Penguin Press book, Schwartzel takes readers from Cannes through Fan’s house arrest — where she was “watched constantly, even while taking showers” — to her eventual reappearance (albeit via greenscreen and with a body double for The 355) as she had become what Schwartzel calls “the most famous chicken used by Chinese authorities to scare the monkeys of its entertainment industry.”
Here’s the excerpt:
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Penguin Press
The paparazzi could barely contain themselves as they took in the quintet of stars. China’s most famous actress, Fan Bingbing, joined Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o, and Marion Cotillard on the red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival in May 2018. Fan and her fellow actresses had just been cast in The 355, a forthcoming film about a cadre of female spies, its title inspired by the code name given to a woman who spied for George Washington in the Revolutionary War. The 355 was not screening at Cannes, but its distribution rights were being sold at the film market that accompanies the glitzy premieres
It was hard to imagine a hotter package. After more than a year of public #MeToo excoriations against powerful men in the entertainment industry, the time felt ripe for a movie about women kicking ass. The global makeup of its cast — American, European, Kenyan, Chinese — boded well for worldwide box-office tallies. A bidding war broke out for the distribution rights. Universal won with a $20 million bid, with Chinese studio Huayi Brothers kicking in the same amount to release the movie in China.
AP
Seeing a Chinese actress alongside Oscar winners, an equal to the Hollywood A-list, was another vindication of Xi Jinping’s new China. A decade after its Olympic opening ceremony, the country had sent one of its biggest stars to the world’s most glamorous film festival. Fan wore oversized sunglasses and a white-on-white ensemble, pairing a loose-fitting blouse with a feathered skirt. She had gone the “flower vase” route in the Iron Man 3 scene that Disney had commissioned and then cut. The following year, she tried again in Fox’s X-Men: Days of Future Past as Blink, a mutant with teleporting abilities. She had one line: “Time’s up.” It was not an auspicious start, but Fan held fast to her hopes. In 2017, as her country’s politicians were projecting a century of Chinese dominance, Fan predicted she would win the lead role in Hollywood movie within ten years. She underestimated herself. The 355 was scheduled to start filming later on in 2018.
But then, when the actresses gathered again for filming, Fan was nowhere to be found. Even one week into the shoot, no one on set knew if she’d show up — or if they were even allowed to talk about why she’d disappeared. With cameras rolling, the cast and crew of Fan’s new movie did not know if the authorities would allow her to leave the country — or even to leave her home.
In the year between the Cannes red carpet and the start of production on The 355, Fan became the most famous chicken used by Chinese authorities to scare the monkeys of its entertainment industry. Her downfall was a dramatic example of Xi’s determination to bring his country’s booming film industry underfoot. While Xi moved aggressively against foreign adversaries and internal rivals, he swiftly enlisted China’s film industry — and its stars in particular — as part of that campaign. The shift in China would inevitably present Hollywood and American industry with some of the harshest lessons yet about what happens when doing business with the country becomes a tacit endorsement of its policies. A new celebrity class formed in China, just as it had in the early days of Hollywood, but its members would have to navigate a political tightrope far trickier than their American counterparts ever did. For those in the U.S. who wanted to keep doing business in the country, the balance proved just as treacherous.
Fan’s downfall came just weeks after her Cannes appearance. Shortly before the release of a new movie she’d just completed, called Cell Phone 2, a Chinese newscaster uploaded images of two contracts to his Weibo account. Both were contracts related to Fan’s work on the movie, but they showed her reporting wildly different salaries. One, reported to the government, said she had made $1.5 million on the film. The other showed the actual amount: $7.8 million. Not bad for four days of work either way, but here was stark proof of so-called yin-yang contracts that allowed Chinese stars to report one set of earnings to tax authorities while secretly pocketing a much bigger one. Fan’s lavish lifestyle — already a rebuke of certain communist philosophies — appeared to have been made possible by tax evasion, an infraction punishable by death in China.
Cui Yongyuan, the newscaster who posted the tax returns, was said to be upset about the original Cell Phone movie, which featured a lecherous character who viewers believed was a thinly veiled portrayal of him. Posting the evidence of Fan’s duplicitous contracts was his way of exacting revenge. Authorities launched an investigation into Fan’s finances a week later. China’s film industry, playing out its role as a reflection of the state’s opinion at any given moment, banned Fan from appearing on-screen.
Graphic designers erased her face from movie posters. Longtime observers of the industry drew comparisons to the fate of Tang Wei, a Chinese actress who had starred in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, a riveting 2007 drama about a troupe of university actors who plot to assassinate a politician in Japanese-controlled Shanghai. The movie’s explicit sex scenes — and the fact that Tang would agree to star in them — led Chinese authorities to pull a promotional campaign she’d signed with Pond’s cosmetics in retribution. Fan was much more famous than Tang had been at the time of her reprisal, and the fact that she was on the verge of becoming better known globally was alarming — it proved Xi was unafraid of overseas criticism. That Chinese officials would turn their country’s most famous actress into its most famous cautionary tale became the ultimate example of how the ruling party required Chinese stars to be model, patriotic citizens. If they stepped out of line, they could disappear. This was not a country where celebrity scandal can lend mystique and a mug shot is eventually sold as kitsch, like Frank Sinatra’s or Lindsay Lohan’s.
In early July, Fan was placed under house arrest and was not seen in public for months. She was secretly held at a vacation resort for “residential surveillance,” the kind of arrest that Xi reserved for senior party members suspected of corruption. She was allowed no phone, pen, or paper. She was watched constantly, even while taking showers. She would not resurface until October, nearly three months after she’d disappeared.
Before that moment, Fan, like any big star in China, had adroitly balanced fame with the party allegiance required to retain it. Her father had been forced to sing Communist anthems, and her mother was a dancer until a family history that flirted with capitalist ventures ruined her career onstage.
“The most unfortunate thing is their dreams were suppressed,” Fan said. “For me, nothing is impossible, nothing is beyond consideration.”
After starting in costume dramas, Fan got lead roles in commercial hits like Renny Harlin’s Skiptrace and I Am Not Madame Bovary, a marital comedy that won her critical respect. Free of the artistic suppression that her parents faced, Fan challenged norms about fame and women in China, becoming a larger-than-life role model in the process. “I don’t need to marry rich. I am rich,” she said in 2015. Fans called her “Fan Ye,” or Master Fan, a designation normally bestowed only on men. She flaunted her wealth, buying expensive apartments that challenged Chinese traditions of public modesty. Only the best dressed her: Dior, Versace, Armani.
But Fan also knew how to offset the Western designers and braggadocio with roles that let the government know she wouldn’t stray too far afield. One of her movies, Sky Hunter, was made in partnership with the People’s Liberation Army. A rip-off of Top Gun, even down to some of its fighter-jet choreography, Sky Hunter followed a group of fighter pilots who must stop an imminent missile attack and free Chinese hostages trapped overseas. The movie performed modestly in China and collected a pittance outside it in only a handful of foreign markets. One Hong Kong–based critic called it “little more than a recruitment drive for the Chinese military.” (Michael Gralapp played the American president.) Fan’s next movie, Air Strike, was scheduled for release just as she disappeared. This was similarly a movie for the Chinese military to show its power on-screen, since it told the true story of an American air force officer training Chinese fighter pilots to take on Japanese bombers destroying the city of Chongqing. (Bruce Willis played the air force officer who trains them.)
China’s film industry under Xi Jinping wanted the special effects, the box-office grosses, and the global influence of modern-day Hollywood. But it wanted the stars that such a system creates to remain stuck in the 1920s, when Rin Tin Tin was the ideal star — bankable and trained. “The creation of art can fly with the wings of imagination,” Xi had said at his Yan’an speech on art in 2014. “But make sure art workers tread on solid earth.” China’s quest to balance its consumerism and its Communism resides in these “art workers” who pose for Gucci one day and play a Mao-era soldier the next. Before her arrest, Fan’s filmography was a model for every Chinese actor, producer, and director trying to succeed in the country’s modern entertainment sector: commercial and patriotic.
Following Fan’s arrest, the government announced that it would rein in stars’ salaries, ruling that they could account for only 40 percent of a film’s total budget. The film industry was “distorting social values” through “money worship,” the authorities declared. Fan was ordered to pay $131 million in back taxes, though reports of how much came out of her own pocket range from $2 million to $70 million. The government said it collected $1.7 billion in total from the film and television industry’s unpaid taxes as other stars and studios were audited. Shares in Chinese movie companies fell an average of 18 percent as investors realized that China’s government was on to them.
The stars and studios got to work reacquiring the patriotism points they’d lost in the tax scandal. After the pro-Taiwan comment at the Golden Horse Awards, Fan came out in support of her country on social media, saying, China cannot miss out on any inch.” Feng Xiaogang, the Cell Phone 2 director who was arrested along with her, announced that his next movie would celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the party. Huayi Brothers, another studio implicated in the tax scandal, established an in-house Communist Party committee. The studio would “integrate the party’s achievements into film and television.” It was an unusually explicit encroachment of the party into an entertainment company, but not entirely unprecedented. At least 288 companies listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges had “revised corporate charters to allow a deeper management role” for the Communist Party, according to Nikkei research conducted in 2017. Huayi also announced that its movies would stick to certain themes: coming of age, Communist history, traditional Chinese culture, and the Belt and Road Initiative.
Eventually, Fan was allowed back into polite society, giving interviews in which she positioned her experience as an instructive fable for others. She was permitted to leave China, but not in time to make it to the set of The 355. When Chastain, Cruz, and her other costars spent the summer of 2019 filming in Paris and Morocco, a body double was used for all of Fan’s scenes. Once production had wrapped, Fan flew to Los Angeles, where she filmed her lines in front of a green screen for director Simon Kinberg. It would be kept top secret, but the real Fan Bingbing would appear in the movie thanks to a postproduction team who inserted her footage. All viewers of the finished film would see was a beautiful and talented Chinese actress, looking perfect on-screen.
From Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy by Erich Schwartzel. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Erich Schwartzel, 2022.
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