When Chloé Zhao won the Golden Globe for best director for the film “Nomadland” last Sunday, becoming the first Asian woman to receive the award, the Chinese state’s media were elated. “The Pride of China!” I read a headline, referring to Ms. Zhao, who was born in Beijing.
But the mood quickly changed. Chinese online detectives unearthed a 2013 interview with an American film magazine in which Zhao criticized his home country, calling it a place “where lies are everywhere.” And they focused on another more recent interview with an Australian website in which Ms. Zhao, who received much of her education in the United States and now lives there, was quoted as saying, “The United States is now my country, in ultimately. “
The Australian website later added a note saying that it had misquoted Ms. Zhao and that she had actually said “it is not my country”. But the damage was done.
Chinese nationalists attacked online. What was her nationality, they wanted to know. Was she Chinese or American? Why should China celebrate its success if it is American?
Even a research center overseen by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, affiliated with the government, opined. “Don’t be in such a hurry to praise Chloé Zhao,” said a social media post from the academy’s State Cultural Security and Ideology Building. “Look at her true attitude towards China.”
On Friday, censors invaded. Chinese searches for the hashtags “#Nomadland” and “#NomadlandReleaseDate” were suddenly blocked on Weibo, a popular social media platform, and the promotional material in Chinese has also disappeared. References to the April 23 release of the film in China have been removed from prominent movie sites.
It was not a total blackout. Several stories about the film were still online on Saturday. And so far, there have been no reports that the film’s release in China was at risk. (China’s National Arthouse Alliance of Cinemas, which will oversee the theatrical release, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did Searchlight Pictures, the Hollywood studio behind “Nomadland.”)
But online censorship was the latest reminder of the power of China’s growing nationalist sentiment and the increasingly complex political minefield that companies must navigate there.
For years, the central government was the only major guardian of films in China, determining which foreign films received the official seal of approval and, ultimately, access to the country’s growing box office. Now, more and more, China’s online patriots can also influence the fate of a film or a company.
In many cases, winning over – or at least not offending – these patriots, sometimes disparagingly called “roses,” has become another crucial consideration for companies looking to enter the Chinese market.
“There is a lot more space to punch figures like Chloé Zhao,” said Aynne Kokas, author of “Hollywood Made in China”.
The reaction against “Nomadland” was somewhat unexpected. In addition to Zhao, the film, starring Frances McDormand in a sensitive portrayal of the lives of itinerant Americans, has little or no connection to China. Although he is considered a strong Oscar candidate, he was not expected to bring a large Chinese audience, given his limited theatrical release and slow pace.
But the patriotic frenzy could become a significant problem for another film directed by Zhao, “The Eternals”, a big-budget superhero film for Disney’s Marvel Studios, starring Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiani and Salma Hayek. It is scheduled to open in the United States in November, but a release date in China has not been publicly announced.
Experts say that while Zhao’s track record was probably a big selling point for “The Eternals” in China, he can now become an Achilles’ heel – a potentially devastating blow to the film and Marvel, which has reaped huge rewards in the Chinese market with films like “Avengers: Endgame”.
That scenario would be especially damaging this year, with the pandemic having decimated the box office in almost every major market except China, where the virus is largely under control and the national film industry is thriving.
“Blocking references to ‘Nomadland’ underscores China’s new position of power,” said Kokas, referring to online censorship, which was previously reported by Variety. “As the largest market in the world, there is much less need to bring Hollywood studio films to the market.”
Until recently, few in China had heard of Ms. Zhao, 38.
Born in Beijing, she went to boarding school in London, to high school in California and, finally, to film school at New York University. Prior to “Nomadland”, Ms. Zhao gained recognition for critically acclaimed art films “Songs My Brothers Taught” Me ”(2015) and“ The Rider ”(2017).
In China, however, she was best known as the stepdaughter of the popular comic actress Song Dandan, who in 1997 married Zhao’s father, the former head of a Chinese state-owned steel company.
Zhao talked about what she sees as a change of identity, a product, she said, of years past moving around the world. She described her Chinese heritage as part of that identity.
In a recent profile in New York magazine, Ms. Zhao referred to northerners in China as “my own people” and described herself as “from China”. Global Times, a nationalist tabloid backed by the Chinese state, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, Disney had said that Zhao was a Chinese citizen.
The quote in which Zhao said there were “lies everywhere” in China first appeared in 2013, in an article in New York’s Filmmaker magazine. It was still in the article recently, in October, according to the archived versions of the page. But in mid-February, the quote was removed and a note added, saying the article had been “edited and condensed after publication”. The quote is not in the most recent version of the article, although it appears elsewhere on the magazine’s website.
Filmmaker Magazine did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did Disney. Ms. Zhao could not be reached for comment.
In the midst of the nationalist outcry, many Chinese rushed to defend Zhao and disdained the “roses” for being overly sensitive. “Nomadland” was a beautiful film, many said, that rose above the ugliness of politics and national borders.
Nothing comparable to his uncompromising portrayal of the struggles of concert workers and America’s worn-out social safety net could have been done in China, others said. At Douban, a review site popular with relatively liberal-minded Chinese, the film has almost 66,000 reviews and a strong rating of 8.4 out of 10.
Some commentators also pointed out the irony that Chinese nationalists would like to repress a film that seemed to fit so well with the narrative that official propaganda agencies had recently been running, of a rising China and a decline in the United States.
“Chloé Zhao’s ‘Nomadland’ profoundly reveals the crisis of America’s lower class citizens and the difficult lives of its people,” wrote Qiao Mu, a former professor of communication at Peking University of Foreign Studies in Weibo. “This should strengthen our pride in socialism and our self-confidence in the Chinese way.”
“She is the pride of the Chinese people,” he added, “not someone who insults China.”