The complicated situation of the Oscar winner in her home country highlights the increasingly charged nature of US-China cinematic relations, with the launch of ‘Nomadland’ in China – and Disney’s Marvel pillar ‘The Eternals’ – hanging on the scales. .
If you are the target of a national reaction on the Internet, the most natural reaction may be to be quiet for a while. But Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao probably doesn’t have that option.
When Zhao won the award for best director at the Golden Globes on February 28 – the first for an Asian woman – the moment was as widely celebrated in China as in the U.S., with Chinese news outlets and social media users demonstrating around of its success as a source of national pride. In one day, however, the climate darkened dramatically. Internet detectives have unearthed old interviews in which Zhao seemed critical of his country and, in a short time, the debate and violence over his “attitude towards China” was spreading as fast as the adulation. Beijing internet censors were the next to enter the fray, blocking most advertising for Nomadland on social media and excluding many references to the film’s release date on April 23 in China.
Assessing Beijing’s response so far, Chinese industry sources say The Hollywood Reporter that regulators seem to be waiting and watching before making a final judgment on the fate of Zhao’s film in China. “It will depend on how she and her allies manage the crisis,” said an executive at a major studio in Beijing (who asked not to be named because of the delicacy of the situation). Being forced to publicly address the personal aspects of identity – under the harsh glare of nationalist geopolitics – is a profoundly unenviable situation; but if you ask veteran Chinese film professionals, who have long been trained in negotiating political risks, they will say that she has no choice. “She will probably have to say something to reassure the Chinese public,” adds the executive.
A source close to China’s National Arthouse Alliance of Cinemas, which is handling the theatrical release of Nomadland, says the organization still hopes to move forward with the launch date.
Speaking through an advertiser, Zhao declined to comment on this story.
Of the two statements that offended China, one seems easier to soften than the other. In a December 2020 interview with the Australian news site news.com.au, Zhao was quoted as saying “the US is now my country”, which some Chinese readers furiously interpreted as saying she had turned her back on China. . The situation was even more confusing by the US media, which referred to it widely as “Asian American” in coverage of its victory on the Globe. Zhao’s aide then began to approach the media discreetly, requesting that she be called the Chinese director (THE New York Times issued a typical correction: “An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Chloé Zhao as Asian American. She is Chinese.”)
The Australian website also published a correction, saying it misquoted Zhao and that she actually referred to the US as “not my country”. Many seem willing to give her the benefit of the doubt at this point, especially since the revised statement would fit better with her other comments throughout the article, which is about the creative advantages of her outside perspective on US social issues as an accountant. stories.
But the second quote that caused Zhao problems in China may be more thorny, although it appeared almost a decade ago in the small quarter of New York, Filmmaker magazine. Discussing what attracted her in her debut film, about a Native American teenager struggling to find her way on a reservation, Zhao said, “This goes back to when I was a teenager in China, being in a place where there were lies everywhere. . ” The anguish of teenagers and the questioning of authority may be a universal experience from northern China to North Dakota Indian reservations, but “a place where there are lies everywhere” is an almost perfectly corrosive catchphrase of having floated in an authoritarian state committed to shaping and controlling all national narratives.
Before the reaction, Zhao had very little public profile in China, although his parents occupied a rarefied step in Chinese society. Her father is the former head of a Chinese state-owned steel company and her stepmother is Song Dandan, a beloved TV sitcom actress. Born in Beijing, Zhao left China at the age of 14 to study at a boarding school in London, later moving to California to finish high school and then study cinema at New York University. His first two feature films, art films Songs my brothers taught me (2015) and The pilot (2017), were acclaimed on the festival circuit, but left no marks in China. Now, however, Zhao is quickly becoming a big star on his own – having arrived there via the original and extremely impressive route to achieving first-rate creative success in Hollywood (“You are the legend of our family,” Song posted on Weibo after her stepdaughter’s victory on Globo).
As its star continues to rise, scrutiny in China will also increase. Zhao is widely regarded as the leader in the category of best director at the Oscars, followed closely by film lovers in China. As the award season goes into high gear in the coming weeks, media appearances will be a necessary constant. If she becomes the first Chinese citizen to win an Oscar, she will instantly be a household name in China, as will her stepmother.
So come The Eternals, its Marvel flagship for Disney, starring Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek and Kumail Nanjiani, which launched in the United States on November 5 but awaits its date in China. Commercial expectations for Nomadland in China they have always been very limited, due to the slow pace of the film and culturally remote themes. But Marvel is the most successful Hollywood franchise in the Middle Kingdom, and the stakes are higher than ever for The Eternals now that China has usurped North America as the largest theatrical market in the world (not to mention the still uncertain post-pandemic prospects for US theaters). As a director, Zhao is expected to help market the film in China – and what probably looked to Disney as an advantageous and exciting return is now in danger of becoming a challenge.
By the time of Zhao’s reaction, explosive and unpredictable nationalist outrage had already become a recurring phenomenon for observers of the Chinese market – particularly since US-China relations began to deteriorate several years ago. The same patriotic outrage driven by the internet was behind the NBA crisis in China after former Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey tweeted support for the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement in 2019. And a similar force was working on the scandal that involved the big – video game adaptation budget Monster hunter, which was pulled from Chinese cinemas just a day after the release, after an ambiguous but boring joke was openly racist, causing a wave of online furor. The support pillar created by Disney in China Mulan, who bombed in China, suffered its own Internet-fueled scandals, although most of the political blowback has erupted outside China (Chinese netizens complain about Mulan tended to focus on issues of cultural inauthenticity, but were no less forceful).
In all of these cases, government censorship and regulatory actions have sparked an explosion of indignation on social media, not the other way around. At the Monster hunter In this case, some online patriots even openly rebuked the censors for not “capturing” the offensive dialogue. The biggest risk related to Hollywood content for market access in China used to be the possibility of being caught in the Beijing censorship process; nowadays, getting into conflict with online nationalists, ridiculously called “pinkies” by their critics, has become a bigger and much more unpredictable concern.
Some fear that the succession of recent political scandals involving China has created a perverse reversal of the usual logic of studios and streamers to court international markets – that you win over a foreign audience by creating local themed content, made by local talent and stars. The fear is that studio executives will see hiring Chinese talent and storytelling with Chinese themes as a potential source of external risk – in the largest potential market in the world – rather than an intrinsic virtue.
“It is a very legitimate concern,” said Aynne Kokas, author of Hollywood Made in China and a non-resident Chinese media scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. “I definitely think it will make the studios think twice – and that’s the last thing you want when they just started making very modest progress in addressing structural racism built into their business.”
In Zhao and NomadlandIn the case of, the bitter ironies are particularly acute. China has long coveted the kind of artistic recognition in the West that Oscar represents, but the Chinese Communist Party also remains committed to closely controlling the narrative. Thus, the counter-intuitive situation of a Chinese director whose father has close ties to a state-owned company, on the verge of Oscar glory for a film that is actually implicitly critical of the American social system, not of China, is at risk censorship and reprimand.
“There is a Chinese language, ‘take a stone just to drop it on your feet’, observes Stanley Rosen, professor of Chinese studies at USC specializing in the film industry.
Much like the social media response, which featured fierce criticism of Zhao and fervent defense of her, the official reaction so far has remained strangely confused – a partial online blackout of Nomadland and Zhao, instead of a complete elimination. His admirers in the Chinese film industry are consoling themselves with the fact. Asked what could happen to Zhao, a Beijing producer said: “If people can’t find more dirt on her, I think she’ll be fine – her films will be released.”
The staunch nationalist Hu Xijin, editor of the influential state-backed tabloid Global Timesrecently launched a middle ground outlet. “The ongoing reaction against Zhao is the price she has to pay for what she said. But I don’t think it is necessary to get the film out of theaters. Keeping China open means being able to accommodate some conflicts and inconsistencies,” Hu wrote in a statement. widely shared post on Weibo. “Members of the Chinese public will make their own call and decide how they feel about Zhao and his films. The market will end this.”
Rosen says, “As time goes on – and especially if she can find a way to explain herself that will calm the waters – I think [the officials] you will see that there is much more to be gained by riding in your coat than by working hard on it. “
“I hope so,” he adds. “Because she makes very creative and nuanced films, and anything else would be a shame.”