Nine years after the "Crouching Tiger" breakthrough, Asian cinema has virtually disappeared from American screens
Courtesy New York Asian Film Festival
Image from “Dream.”
Last weekend brought the opening of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival, a wonderfully rich and strange event that’s become a highlight of the Gotham summer for movie buffs. Although the NYAFF began in 2000 as a scruffy, fanboy-oriented celebration of old-school Hong Kong kung-fu flicks, it has evolved into the leading North American showcase for East Asian pop cinema. This year’s festival kicked off with the world premiere of Hong Kong writer-director Wong Ka-fai’s “Written By,” a delirious supernatural melodrama with overtones of Charlie Kaufman-style meta-ness. It’s precisely the kind of Asian film some Hollywood producer will try to remake (and undoubtedly will screw up): a grand, quasi-Buddhist meditation on life, death, love and the inescapable nature of suffering, awash with hilariously literal-minded special effects and frank sentimentality.
If “Written By” isn’t your speed, the NYAFF has something for virtually every imaginable filmgoer’s taste, especially if your taste runs to blithe disregard for Western-style movie conventions and constant back-and-forth violations of the Berlin Wall that separates art-house cinema from mass entertainment. There’s a moody noir about a conspiracy by all women to kill all men (“Exodus,” from Hong Kong), a low-budget Japanese blood-geyser in recklessly bad taste (“Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl”), a grimily realistic yarn about an aging bomb-disposal expert in a crumbling Chinese city (“Old Fish”), a Tarkovskyan sci-fi allegory (“The Clone Returns Home,” from Japan), a “Donnie Darko”-style fable about a forgotten Japanese punk-rock single that saves the world (“Fish Story”) and a four-hour romantic epic about a sin-obsessed Japanese Catholic boy who becomes a ninja master of upskirt photography (“Love Exposure”).
And hey, if you don’t live near New York and can’t make the festival, you needn’t worry, right? Because “Written By” and most of the NYAFF’s other movies will be reaching a theater near you, uh, well … Hmm. I’m not exactly sure when, but here’s a good guess: never.
In fact, precisely none of the four dozen or so features in this year’s NYAFF have United States theatrical distribution lined up. Maybe that will change for a handful of them, but even then we’re probably talking about token runs in New York and Los Angeles art houses, mainly to get review quotes that may boost DVD or online sales. That’s precisely what happened with huge Asian genre hits like “Tokyo Gore Police” and “The Machine Girl,” which got blink-and-you-miss-it releases from tiny distributors. Earlier this year, “Big Man Japan,” a Japanese monster mockumentary that was one of last year’s most acclaimed NYAFF films, was released by Magnet, a specialty division of Magnolia Pictures. It played a grand total of four U.S. theaters and earned less than $25,000.
Now let’s jump into the way-back machine and return to the beginning of this decade, when Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” grossed $128 million and won four Oscars, blowing the old paradigm of possibility for foreign-language movies to smithereens. A new era of globalized East-West cinema seemed to be here. Just nine years later, “Asian movies are dead in America and no one cares,” says Grady Hendrix, co-director of Subway Cinema, which runs the NYAFF. “We’re right back where we started.”
How and why did this happen? Those who follow the field say it’s a classic story of boom-and-bust, a toxic business cycle that affected both supply and demand and created an artificial, unsustainable bubble. If that sounds like I’m talking about the price of houses in your neighborhood rather than the commercial fate of Japanese splatter films, welcome to capitalism. Both things are commodities, governed by the inexorable and mysterious laws of exchange-value.
After the unprecedented box-office success of “Crouching Tiger” and Zhang Yimou’s Jet Li action vehicle “Hero” (which grossed $53 million in 2004), Asian movies were “suddenly solid gold,” says Hendrix, who also wrote the now-defunct Kaiju Shakedown blog for Variety Asia Online. “We had to fight distributors to get movies for this festival. Every crummy Asian horror movie was suddenly hot and massive. Martial-arts extravaganzas couldn’t get made fast enough. Walking around Hong Kong Filmart [the biggest Asian film marketplace] in 2004, all you saw were horror movies and ‘Crouching Tiger’ knockoffs.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, this land rush resulted in an overload of Asian movies that — to put it generously — widely varied in quality, and which were dumped on an American audience whose initial curiosity was, it appeared, rapidly sated. Hollywood executives simply “overestimated the American appetite for imported films,” says blogger Keith Allison of the cult-film site Teleport City. “The success of Jackie Chan movies and ‘Crouching Tiger’ had every studio buying up as much stuff from Asia as they could afford, often with little or no regard for the quality of the product” or its likely audience appeal.
Perhaps the central problem, says Hendrix, is that hardly anyone in the American movie business bothered to learn anything about the depth and breadth of Asian cinema, at least beyond action-oriented superstars like Chan, Li and Chow Yun-fat. His eight years of NYAFF programming offers vivid testimony of the trans-Asian explosion of filmmaking talent that transcends conceptual boundaries. But buyers have continued to shovel the same old formulaic action and horror vehicles onto American screens.
“You have acquisitions people picking up movies that aren’t very good,” he says, “and releasing them to an audience that doesn’t know anything about them or have any context in which to enjoy them. They’re being written about by a press that knows less and less about more and more Asian films and directors as magazines and newspapers downsize, fire their older writers and pay for shorter articles that are generally just about that week’s new releases.”
American distributors missed a huge opportunity, Hendrix thinks, to convert all those high-school and college-age anime and manga fans to the universe of live-action Asian films with a similar sensibility. Since they didn’t understand that younger audience or know how to reach it, he says, “They strip-mined the action-horror audience until they’d thoroughly contaminated that ground and sown it with salt.”
Meanwhile, Allison notes, the Japanese and Hong Kong film industries suffered a mid-decade collapse that was both economic and creative, and affected both quantity and quality. “After the coffers of existing movies were pretty well drained, there were no decent new movies waiting for distribution,” he says. “Hong Kong fell apart completely and retreated largely into the world of romantic comedies. Japan retreated almost entirely to the realm of ultra-cheap, shoddily produced, direct-to-DVD fare.” Much of that reflected a worldwide shift, at least for non-Hollywood product, away from movie theaters and toward digital media, already the delivery system for most films most of the time.
Contrary to widespread assumptions in the film industry, most observers insist that DVD and Internet piracy played no role in killing the Asian film market. Hendrix observes that “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” was the most widely pirated film in history, and still did $85 million its opening weekend. Blogger Todd Stadtman (of Teleport City and his own inimitable Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill!) notes that Harvey Weinstein sat on Zhang’s “Hero” for two years, “until everyone and their mama had seen it on cheap import DVDs” that could easily be found at Chinatown video stores. Many people were surprised that the picture was still a big hit when it was finally released.
If anything, there’s a growing consensus that piracy may be a net plus for the film business, Asian or otherwise: It remains a small and economically marginal phenomenon, and spreads the kind of viral publicity that money can’t buy. “The more people who see a movie, the better,” says Hendrix. “The piracy argument is a straw man and one distributors bring up as an excuse to either bury a movie or to show that it’s the fans that kept their movie from succeeding, not their mishandling of the movie or the fact that they bought a bad movie in the first place.”
When the market for Asian imports started circling the drain in the mid-2000s, good movies as well as mediocrities were dragged down. Critics and hardcore fans liked Zhang’s 2005 “House of Flying Daggers” almost as much as “Hero,” but it arrived on American screens too soon after the earlier film and did less than one-fourth the business. Indie distributor Magnolia Pictures fared even worse with its investment in two Asian hits, the martial-arts spectacular “Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior” and “The Host,” a whimsical Korean monster movie.
Despite major marketing campaigns and excellent reviews, those two movies failed to break out to large mainstream audiences — “Ong-Bak” grossed $4.5 million in 2005, and “The Host” just $2.2 million in 2006 — which provided others in the industry with a ready excuse for turning away from Asian cinema. Says Hendrix, “I think other distributors looked at ‘The Host’ and said to themselves, ‘So that’s the best we can do? Forget it.’”
Still, if those numbers represent the “new normal” for subtitled Asian films in American release, it’s a pretty damn good normal. Only a handful of foreign-language releases every year earn more than $250,000 in the U.S., and almost any distributor of European films would be delighted with those returns. It’s likely that Magnolia ultimately made its money back on DVD and television sales. Indeed, “Ong-Bak 2″ is slated for release this fall from the Weinstein Co. (one of Magnolia’s main rivals for the indie audience).
If the post-”Crouching Tiger” boom in Asian cinema was an irrational, Dutch-tulip-style bubble, then the virtual disappearance of Asian films from American screens is an equally irrational overcorrection. That said, Asian cinema in America is now first and foremost a DVD or online product. There are occasional exceptions: “Departures,” the low-key Japanese drama that won this year’s foreign-language Oscar, has performed decently in small-scale release. Korean auteur Park Chan-wook’s vampire film “Thirst” will reach theaters in late summer, riding an insanely popular genre, worldwide publicity from its Cannes premiere and Park’s global reputation as the director of the “Vengeance” trilogy.
Furthermore, it’s not like every important Asian film can be found on DVD. Cult-films-in-waiting like “Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl” or “Love Exposure” will eventually work their way into dens and dorm rooms. But the situation for Asian art-house films without a built-in fan base is truly dire. Naomi Kawase’s supremely lovely and profound “The Mourning Forest,” which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2007, has not been released in North America in any form. The same is true, says Stadtman, of the tragicomic female odyssey “Memories of Matsuko,” widely acclaimed as one of the decade’s most important Japanese films. That’s certainly just the tip of the iceberg.
Even if nobody in Hollywood ever gets around to distributing any of the films in this year’s NYAFF, we can count on one thing: They’ll watch a lot of them at private screenings, in their increasingly desperate search for potential high-concept star vehicles. “When it comes to Asian genre films, studios seem more inclined to invest their money in making remakes of them with white people than in distributing the originals,” Stadtman drily remarks. “I mean, obviously a movie like ‘The Host’ is going to be much more relatable if it has people from ‘Gossip Girl’ in it.”
Never fear, studio execs, I’ve done the heavy lifting for you! I haven’t seen even half the films in the NYAFF, but here are a handful for Hollywood suits (and regular folks) to track down however you can, by fair means or foul:
“Written By” Surprisingly sad blend of supernatural and postmodern, from writer-director Wong Ka-fai, a frequent collaborator of Hong Kong legend Johnnie To. Discussed above.
“Love Exposure” At once juvenile, prurient and profound, this operatic four-hour romance from fast-rising Japanese director Sion Sono (who will next make the English-language “Lords of Chaos,” about the Satanic metal underground in Scandinavia) follows an abused Japanese Catholic boy on his search for a personal Virgin Mary, with stops along the way in a Dickensian criminal underworld, the Zen-like discipline of upskirt photography and a pseudo-Shakespearean, gender-bending love affair. I really cannot explain to you how silly and great “Love Exposure” is; one of the year’s biggest discoveries.
“Fish Story” A year before the Sex Pistols were founded, a pioneering Japanese punk band cut a mysterious single called “Fish Story” (based on a mistranslated American novel) , and more than 30 years later that maybe-haunted song saves the Earth from certain destruction. That’s the basic premise of Yoshihiro Nakamura’s dazzling fantasy-thriller, which skips back and forth from that 1975 recording session to the 2012 day of judgment, with stops at a fateful 1982 drinking party, a 1999 apocalyptic cult, a 2009 ferryboat hijacking and more. A terrifically generous and enjoyable movie.
“Dream” Prolific Korean director Kim Ki-duk defies all easy classification, and this combination of haunted, art-house love story with fatalistic, “Nightmare on Elm Street” high concept captures that perfectly. Some Hollywood producer’s going to jump all over this remake: A man’s dreams start being enacted by a woman he’s never met, with terrible consequences. Both are wounded and attractive, yet try to resist the mysterious magnetism drawing them together. But an American remake could never capture the spirit of Kim’s allusive, slow-moving drama, underpinned as it is by emotional violence and actual bloodshed.
“Exodus” If I tell you this is a Hong Kong movie about a secret plot by women to kill all men, it’s going to sound like over-the-top exploitation. Instead, Pang Ho-cheung’s film is a cool, modernist noir that depicts one of Asia’s most crowded cities as an emotionally drained and empty landscape, straight out of Antonioni or George Lucas’ “THX 1138.” HK superstar Simon Yam plays a by-the-book cop who’s never quite sure whether he’s uncovered the darkest secret of the gender wars or is simply losing it.
“Breathless” A tour de force for co-director, writer and star Yang Ik-june, who plays a foulmouthed, brutal Korean thug who collects debts with his fists and is the supremely unlikely hero of this violent drama. Is “Breathless” a remake of the film that made Godard’s reputation? Yes and no. It is about an improbable relationship between a criminal and an innocent-seeming schoolgirl (played by Kim Gol-bi), albeit one who can trash-talk right back at him. But Yang’s “Breathless” is a searing indictment of the effects of family violence, which has scarred every character in the film, and it holds up the faintest possibility of escaping from it. Hard to sit through, this masterfully directed and marvelously acted picture is impossible to forget.
“Ip Man” As Grady Hendrix puts it, the period martial-arts drama, for many years the staple product of Asian film, is “as dead as disco” (at least for American audiences). But if you still harbor an affection for the genre, I heartily recommend Wilson Yip’s action-packed biopic of Ip Man (played by the terrific Donnie Yen), a legendary kung-fu master who resisted Japanese occupation during World War II and later became Bruce Lee’s teacher. I don’t think it’s literally true that Ip kicked the Imperial Japanese Army’s entire ass single-handed, but what the hell. It makes for a well-paced and satisfying piece of Chinese-nationalist pulp.
The New York Asian Film Festival continues through July 5 at the IFC Center and Japan Society in New York. The overlapping Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Cinema (which co-presents some NYAFF programming) runs June 30-July 12 at Japan Society.
WikiLeaks sheds light on Adelson’s Asia business
Cable describes shutdown of a $100 million Adelson nonprofit in Beijing and refers to "missteps" in China
Sheldon Adelson, chief executive of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, and his wife Miriam attend the ribbon cutting of the Four Seasons Macao hotel and casino in Macau. (Credit: Bobby Yip / Reuters)
We’ve learned this election cycle that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson isn’t afraid to throw around vast sums of money to get what he wants — he and his family have given at least $11 million to help the Newt Gingrich campaign.
It hasn’t gotten any notice since Adelson became a player in presidential politics, but it turns out that the trove of diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks contains an interesting anecdote about how Adelson aggressively promoted his casino and hotel business in the Chinese territory of Macau — and a run-in he had with the central government in Beijing.
First, some context. The news broke last March that Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. is under federal investigation into whether it has complied with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The act makes it illegal to bribe foreign officials to obtain business deals.
The investigation reportedly came about after a breach-of-contract lawsuit was filed by former Sands executive Steven Jacobs that floated the possibility of an FCPA violation by Sands:
Jacobs alleges, among other things, that Adelson wanted him to conduct secret investigations of the dealings of the Macau government officials to dig up dirt so they could be intimidated, and that Adelson wanted the corporation to continue using the services of a Macau attorney with a bad reputation “despite concerns that [the individual's] retention posed serious risk under the criminal provisions of the United States code commonly known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”
A confidential September 2009 cable sent from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong back to Washington describes Adelson’s business practices in Macau. Unlike its competitor Wynn, Adelson’s Sands was lobbying Chinese government officials in Beijing rather than focusing exclusively on local officials in Macau, according to the cable. The issues of concern to Sands included “foreign labor visas, gaming oversight and regulation, infrastructure development, and perceived interference in personnel management decisions affecting Macau resident workers.”
The cable goes on to describe Adelson’s personal interest in direct engagement with Beijing and the intriguing matter of the “Adelson Center for U.S.-China Enterprise” in Beijing, a nonprofit that was to be financed with a whopping $100 million. A former Sands executive told an unnamed American official that the Chinese government forced Sands to close the center following government inquiries about “funds transfer mechanisms used by [Sands] to establish the now-closed USD 100 million Adelson Center.” The nature of those mechanisms is not specified.
The cable continues that Sands’ “current efforts in Beijing are designed in part to offset these early ‘missteps’” — but there is no elaboration on what the “missteps” were. Sands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As for what the Adelson Center was supposed to do, the New Yorker reported in June 2008 that it was to act as a kind of facilitator for U.S. businesses looking to operate in China:
In early August [2008], during the Olympic Games, Las Vegas Sands will launch the Adelson Center for U.S.-China Enterprise, in Beijing, which seems positioned to wield substantial influence. If you were an American businessman coming to China, the Sands’s Bill Weidner testified at the Suen trial, “you might need a logistics partner to deliver your goods. You might need a manufacturer to manufacture your goods. You might need a law firm. You might need an accounting firm. Whatever it would take to get you involved in business in China, we would-the center would help arrange for you.”
Here is the logo for the center from a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office; it’s not clear that it was ever used:
Below is the relevant section of the cable. Another interesting moment comes further down in the cable when Sands executive Jacobs (who later sued the company) is quoted as saying that a new regulation about how much Macau casino junket operators could be paid “will be routinely violated.”
LVS [Las Vegas Sands] Macau President and CEO Steve Jacobs told EP Chief on September 17 that LVS restarted its government outreach efforts in Beijing over the past several months, and achieved “great success” in building direct relationships with senior officials. Jacobs said LVS’s direct engagement in Beijing is designed to build goodwill, explain the company’s current and planned contributions to Macau’s economy and society, and encourage freer movement of PRC residents into Macau. LVS CEO and majority shareholder Sheldon Adelson highly values direct engagement in Beijing, according to Jacobs, especially given the impact of Beijing’s visa policies on the company’s growing mass market operations in Macau.
LVS’s pre-Olympic outreach efforts were suspended in early 2009, after the PRC forced the company to close its newly established non-profit Adelson Center for U.S.-China Enterprise in Beijing. The PRC’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange in China, according to LVS’s latest quarterly report published in August 2009, “made inquiries and requested and obtained documents relating to certain payments made by the company’s wholly foreign-owned enterprises to counterparties and other vendors in China.” A former LVS senior executive told Econoff that the PRC inquiries relate primarily to funds transfer mechanisms used by LVS to establish the now-closed USD 100 million Adelson Center. LVS’s current efforts in Beijing are designed in part to offset these early “missteps.”
Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott
Zbig: Israelis “bought influence” and outmaneuvered Obama
The president "should have stuck to his guns" on Mideast peace, says Zbigniew Brzezinski, former NSC advisor
The unorthodox Zbigniew Brzezinski (Credit: AP)
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s new book, “Strategic Vision,” imagines a world without American power. He envisions profound instability, faltering international cooperation and weak states falling prey to their more dominant neighbors. Describing the dystopia that would emerge if America goes under is a trick British historian Niall Ferguson pioneered. Unlike the jingoistic Ferguson, however, Brzezinski is able to envision China replacing America as the stabilizing force in world affairs. “I don’t think liberal states are more restrained or stabilizing,” he says. “The United States’ actions in the last 20 years, especially with the war in Iraq, do not give reassurance on that score.”
Such unorthodox thinking has made the Polish-born Brzezinski arguably the greatest living scholar-practitioner in Democratic Party ranks. As a scholar, he was erratic but he also foresaw the Soviet Union’s crack-up long before it occurred. As Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, he was controversial and even reckless, but he imbued the president with strong doses of reality concerning the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Since the end of the Cold War, he stayed relevant presciently opposing the Iraq War and supporting presidential candidate Barack Obama at a crucial, early date.
In a telephone interview from his office at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., Brzezinski has both praise and criticism for the president: “He was an improvement by a very large score over his predecessor, but he could have been better.” He thinks the Obama administration “should have stuck to its guns in promoting a fair settlement” in the Middle East. A longtime foe of Israel’s partisans in the United States, he says the Obama team “fumbled by getting outmaneuvered by the Israelis.” Then he gets blunter: “Domestic politics interceded: The Israelis have a lot of influence with Congress, and in some cases they are able to buy influence.”
Brzezinski is still a believer in the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and is hopeful that Obama will again take up the cause if he gets a second term. “He would have time and the historical immunity to do so, because he wouldn’t be facing an election.” He also thinks space has opened up in the United States to be more critical of Israel. “The American public is becoming more discriminating, and the Jewish public in America is becoming more discriminating,” he says. “They realize that extremist sloganeering and warmongering are not the most helpful approaches.” Brzezinski is careful to note that he was never an official advisor to either candidate or President Obama but lets it be known they are still in touch: “I have a relationship where from time to time I am able to share my views with him,” he says.
The focus of “Strategic Vision” is not on the Middle East, but further to the east. Unlike other adherents to the foreign-policy school known as realism, Brzezinski does not see war between China and the United States as inevitable. Conflict, yes, but war, no. “You can have conflicts but avoid a real collision,” he says, arguing there is only a “remote possibility” of war between China and the U.S. over the next 10 to 15 years.
What makes Brzezinski relatively optimistic for the chances of Sino-American cooperation are his views on history. Many times when great powers have shifted positions in the international hierarchy, they have gone to war. Those predicting China and the United States will inevitably come to blows are relying on history and international relations theory, Brzezinski says. “That’s fine as long as there is historical continuity,” he says, but he thinks the world has changed. “I think major wars have become too prohibitively costly for both sides” for states to want to engage in them, he says.
Two things could potentially ruin the chances for good relations between China and the United States, he suggests: a technological-military revolution, and ineffective leadership. “If there are fantastic breakthroughs in military capabilities that allow one side to neutralize each other’s,” Brzezinski says, the delicate balance necessary to maintain stability would be thrown off. Fortunately, there isn’t much chance of such a technology developing in the foreseeable future, he believes.
The quality of leadership is Brzezinski’s real wild card. Prudent leaders from both countries that prepare their respective publics for the compromises that will inevitably have to be made are badly needed. But the “mindless hypocrisy” of the Republican presidential candidates gives little ground for hope. He won’t single out any of them, finding all of them deeply flawed and uninspiring. Noting the Republican names attached to the blurbs for ”Strategic Vision” — among them former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft — Brzezinski believes there still is the “possibility for consensus.” But men like Scowcroft and Gates, who come from the center-right of the political spectrum, are no longer much welcomed in today’s Republican Party. “That is part of the problem,” he laughed, not sounding entirely amused.
Playing Margaret Thatcher in China
I hoped my acting gig would be a history lesson for the Chinese. But it was a lesson for me in government control
I’m teetering in ill-fitting high heels at the top of a flight of cement steps. A stiff wind kicks up, threatening to blow the red wig off my head. Below me, I see a bewildered film crew and its director. He is shouting: “Take a step!”
Behind them, Tiananmen Square stretches out in all directions. I can see Mao’s tomb and swirling crowds of tourists and police and the imposing entrance to Beijing’s ancient Forbidden City. At my back is China’s imposing Great Hall of the People, where the fate of a billion people is routinely determined by a handful of aging men.
Like Meryl Streep, I am playing Margaret Thatcher. But this is no Hollywood production. This is a Chinese government TV movie showcasing the accomplishments of Deng Xiaoping, the country’s late paramount leader.
Again, the director yells. My translator barks out his message: “Take a step forward! Fall down the steps!”
No stunt coordinator, no safe place to land off camera. No net. Just 50 feet of steep cement. I may break my neck doing this, I tell the translator. She shoots me a blank stare. The camera rolls. And the Iron Lady falls.
—–
For weeks, we’d been shooting pivotal scenes that chronicled Thatcher’s meeting with Deng in 1982 to negotiate the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, at that point still 15 years away. This tiny, awkward moment — a re-creation of Thatcher’s brief stumble while walking down these very steps after that meeting with Deng in the Great Hall — seemed more important to them than any of her powerful speeches.
They needed the villain to be brought low.
They saw her not as a real person but as a cartoon bad guy – the embodiment of an empire that, in their eyes, had taken a piece of China more than a century before and held the Middle Kingdom hostage when it tried to get the island back.
This was, of course, a biopic about their man – Deng Xiaoping, the “little bottle,” who emerged from Mao’s shadow and persecution to set China down the road of “reform and opening up” – its reengagement with the world.
How do you portray a world leader when the people who hired you see her as nothing more than a parody? That was my acting challenge as I, with almost no Mandarin to my credit, tried to negotiate the politics of the Chinese movie industry – and of China itself.
My challenge became clear on the first day of filming.
As I slumped in a makeup chair at 5 a.m. one morning in Shanghai, a young woman presented me with a single page photocopied from a textbook. It included one small news photo of Thatcher beside Deng during their negotiations. This grainy, black-and-white image was all they had to go on as they transformed my 35-year-old blonde self into a 57-year-old, red-headed British politician.
The half-dozen crewmembers buzzing around me treated the page like a rare document. They assumed I’d never seen a picture of the woman who forced Deng to negotiate for China’s “stolen property.” The makeup artists laughed uncomfortably when I asked if we could find more photos to work with, especially ones printed in color. They were shocked when I explained that, as a teenager, I’d seen countless photos and tons of video of Britain’s prime minister.
I told them all I knew about Thatcher’s face, hair and style of dress, hoping to fill in the creative blanks as they tried to transform me. They were skeptical that I could know she was married to a man named Denis or had children. They didn’t seem comfortable with the idea that any of this could be true, that she could possibly be someone’s mother.
We were documenting a piece of history. But with information so tightly controlled, there was no room for verisimilitude. China’s information blackout, which persists even in the age of Twitter, means their leaders can still be presented as unblemished, epic figures. And those who oppose them can be cast as one-dimensional, Voldemortian bad guys.
A few weeks ago, a New York Times story quoted Phyllida Lloyd, the director of Streep’s new film, as saying she wanted to bring some subtlety to the world’s image of Thatcher. “In parts of England, now it’s a transgression even to consider her as a human being,” Lloyd said. “She’s that monster woman, the she-devil. For me the point of the film was to find the human side.”
That was exactly what I wanted – to add texture and depth to the grainy photocopied image I had been handed. Here was my chance to show a small cross-section of China that Margaret Thatcher was not a cartoon. She was a real, three-dimensional person.
—–
Weeks later, I caught an early flight to the seaside city of Dalian. Thatcher had been invited to christen a Chinese ship there in 1982, so I stood in the shadow of an available stand-in – an Iranian tanker ship – to capture that photo-op moment.
It should have been a quick scene, but the morning came and went with nothing shot. For hours, the director idled in a black Mercedes while the crew smoked a lethal number of unfiltered cigarettes. We were getting nowhere. Much of the crew had begun to nap. Then we heard that the director had gone back to the hotel for lunch.
I was due back in Beijing in a few hours, so I found my translator and asked about making my flight. Not possible, she said; the director had decided I would stay for one night, or maybe two, in Dalian.
I cautiously pushed back, explaining that they’d booked me only for the day and I needed to get home to my newborn son in Beijing. The few crewmembers milling about fell silent. They’d already seen me ask to adjust my hair and makeup to look more like the real Maggie Thatcher. They’d seen me balk at falling headfirst down the stairs at the Great Hall. Now I was objecting yet again.
To many Chinese raised on bootleg DVDs, Americans are the spoiled 20-somethings of “Friends,” fretting over minor inconveniences while living lives of casual luxury. Did I seem just as spoiled for standing my ground in a culture where it’s not acceptable to tell your boss that anything is wrong?
I managed to get the scene shot and made it back to Beijing by midnight. I had just one scene left to shoot – a conversation between Thatcher and her entourage as they flew from London to Beijing. A jet that was once Mao’s private plane, now a museum piece, would double as Thatcher’s aircraft.
After three months of shooting, I was owed thousands of dollars. I’d been paid less than $100. An American actor friend who made his living in Chinese movies was blunt with me: If you shoot the final scene of a government film without the money already in your pocket, he said, they’ll never pay you anything.
As the red bouffant wig was glued onto my head one final time in a small building on an airstrip outside Beijing, I quietly reminded my translator that she’d been promising me further installments of my pay for several months but I’d gotten nothing. She looked away.
“You’ll be paid tomorrow,” she said. Then she quickly left the room.
Minutes later, as I boarded the plane, I asked her to tell the director that I couldn’t play this scene without being paid. He refused, so I refused to act.
“Paying you is impossible,” he said.
“I’m sure you can find a solution,” I said.
We all sat. Then we sat some more.
Finally, they began to realize I wasn’t bluffing. Furious, the director summoned an assistant, who appeared with a bulging black leather case. Unzipping it, he pulled out thick wads of Chinese currency and counted out the cash. With my pay sitting in my backpack under those same ill-fitting shoes I wore tumbling down the steps at the Great Hall, I played my last scene as Margaret Thatcher.
Between takes, no one spoke. I’d proven them right about me – and about her. I had forced their director to negotiate with me, just like the Iron Lady had forced Deng. Face had been lost. My hope that playing this role might humanize Thatcher for Chinese audiences had failed. I had fallen down those steps for nothing.
Nearly eight years after my film wrapped, access to information is still so tightly controlled in China that Barack Obama (and David Cameron, for those who know his name) may well seem like caricatures, too. How will this change for Chinese young people as technology makes their government’s control of information more difficult to enforce? Will they ever see that leaders aren’t angels or devils but, like all of us, something in between?
I hope Lloyd and Streep’s film accomplishes that in a way that mine couldn’t. Especially if, just like “Friends” and so many other Western TV shows and movies, it finds its way to the streets of China.
Asia’s rampant cheating problem
Determined to get into U.S. colleges, more and more students turn to fake transcripts, essays and SAT scores
Students attend their college graduation ceremony in Shanghai's Fudan University July 2, 2011. (Credit: Carlos Barria / Reuters)
BANGKOK, Thailand — From sleep to social lives, there is little Asia’s most upwardly mobile students won’t sacrifice for education. Though they belong to the so-called “Asian Century,” American colleges remain the premier destination for the elite from Shanghai to Singapore to Seoul.
The path to U.S. college acceptance, however, increasingly compels students to sacrifice their integrity. For the right price, unscrupulous college prep agencies offer ghostwritten essays in flawless English, fake awards, manipulated transcripts and even whiz kids for hire who’ll pose as the applicant for SAT exams.
“Oh my God, they can do everything for you,” said Nok, 17-year-old Thai senior in her final year at a private Bangkok high school. (She asked GlobalPost to alter her name for this article.) “They can take the SAT for you, no problem. Most students don’t really think it’s wrong.”
Among Asian high society, and particularly in China, parents’ obsession with sending their offspring to U.S. colleges has given rise to a lucrative trade of application brokers. Depending the degree of assistance, families can expect to pay between $5,000 and $15,000.
“The parent says, ‘My kid needs this GPA but, frankly, his scores aren’t that strong.’ Then the unscrupulous agent says ‘Don’t worry. We’ll figure that out,’” said Tom Melcher, chairman of Zinch China and author of a Chinese-language book on choosing American colleges.
A 250-student survey by Zinch China, a Beijing wing of the California-based Zinch education consultancy, suggests college application fraud among Chinese students is extremely pervasive. According to the survey, roughly 90 percent of recommendation letters to foreign colleges are faked, 70 percent of college essays are ghostwritten and 50 percent of high school transcripts are falsified.
“For the right price,” Melcher said, “the agent will either fabricate it or work with the school to get a different transcript issued.” Admission into a top 10 or top 30 school, as defined by the U.S. News & World Report, can bring a $3,000 to $10,000 bonus for the agent, he said. The magazine, Melcher said, is commonly confused in China for an official government publication.
Demand for such agents is high and getting higher. Rapid economic growth across China and other parts of Asia has sparked an explosion in foreign students hoping to secure their ascent with a Western diploma.
Chinese citizens currently account for more than one in five foreign students studying at U.S. colleges. Nearly 158,000 Chinese students are enrolled at any given time, a full 300 percent jump over mid-1990s numbers, according to the Institute of International Education.
Chinese, Indian and South Korean students comprise roughly half of America’s foreign college student population. Vietnam has sent 13 percent more students to the U.S. within the last year, and Malaysia has added 8 percent, the institute reports.
But many American college officials are oblivious to the application fix-it men these foreign students may have paid back home. Worse yet, remaining blind to the deception is often financially incentivized.
America’s economic downturn has drained the state tax coffers that provide a funding lifeline to many U.S. colleges. Many schools have resorted to unpopular tuition hikes. But many are also courting wealthy foreign students whose families gladly fork over money for housing and tuition along with out-of-state or even out-of-country fees.
“International students are seen as a source of revenue … and the trend has exploded in the past two years,” said Dale Gough, international education director for AACRAO, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
Foreign students, through tuition and living expenses, contribute $2.1 billion to the U.S. economy, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. “In short,” Gough said, “they help the bottom line.”
Excuses abound for ignoring fraudulent applications, Gough said. Some assume that kids who cheat will inevitably flame out anyway and never score a degree. Some admissions officers, he said, contend that “that’s just the way it’s done over there.”
Many schools also make sloppy attempts to translate foreign transcripts, calculated by an “indigenous” and unfamiliar methodology, into America’s GPA or “grade point average” system, Gough said.
His association publishes a guide to deciphering foreign scores, the only one of its kind, but fewer than 500 of the 3,500 institutions represented by AACRAO bother to buy a copy.
“Translating foreign grades into a GPA system is meaningless,” Gough said. “They attempt to do it anyway.”
Gough fears that universities’ lax standards, and focus on big foreign tuition payments, will eventually undermine the pedigree of an American diploma. The damage, he said, would be nearly impossible to undo.
“This scenario spells disaster,” Gough said. “Even if a lot of the students who cheat are bright, and they go on to succeed, is this fair to American students? Or [to] the foreign students who play by the rules?”
While America has ceded manufacturing power and foreign influence to China, an American degree remains the gold standard of educational prestige. Nok, who is currently applying for colleges abroad, never considered applying to universities in Asia.
“Students who study in America are elite, the privileged,” said Nok. “It shows you’re smarter than the others.”
But like most Asian students, Nok has felt baffled and overwhelmed by America’s complex application system.
“Here, you take a big test one day and report the score. That’s how you figure out where you’ll go to college,” she said. “The Americans are different. They want to know the big picture. All these essays. All this stuff about your life.”
America’s liberal arts application system is “fundamentally more confusing,” said Joshua Russo, director of Top Scholars, a college prep and tutoring agency in Bangkok.
Asian families unfamiliar with the process, he said, are justified in seeking an agency’s help with application strategies and tutoring to build the skills U.S. colleges demand. But Russo’s refrain to parents, he said, is that kids who can’t write their own essays are likely to burn out once enrolled in America.
“Some consultants will promise the world … and they’re fundamentally preparing students to fail,” Russo said. “Beyond fabricating an essay, they’re fabricating a whole life story. Students will start to believe in the lie. It’s wrong.”
The allure of America’s universities, and the pressure-cooker drive to succeed among Asia’s expanding upper class, will continue to propel Asian students into American schools. Many Chinese teenagers applying abroad, Melcher said, are the sort of highly motivated students colleges desire.
“Chinese kids are typically great,” Melcher said. “They’re not at the tailgate parties drinking. They’re busting their butts. Failure is not an option.”
But college application fraud will continue, he said, so long as the risks are low and the rewards are so high. His consultancy suggests interviewing all Chinese students via online video chats, conducting spot tests in English, and hiring a mainland Chinese staffer in the college’s home office.
“Frankly, I feel really bad for Chinese families who are trying to be honest,” he said. “They’re driving 55 while everyone’s zooming past them. After a while, they throw up their hands and say, ‘Fine, I’ll speed up.’”
The new Cold War
America's military buildup in Asia could launch a devastating arms and energy race between the U.S. and China
President Barack Obama and President Hu Jintao of China (Credit: AP)
When it comes to China policy, is the Obama administration leaping from the frying pan directly into the fire? In an attempt to turn the page on two disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East, it may have just launched a new Cold War in Asia — once again, viewing oil as the key to global supremacy.
The new policy was signaled by President Obama himself on November 17th in an address to the Australian Parliament in which he laid out an audacious — and extremely dangerous — geopolitical vision. Instead of focusing on the Greater Middle East, as has been the case for the last decade, the United States will now concentrate its power in Asia and the Pacific. “My guidance is clear,” he declared in Canberra. “As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.” While administration officials insist that this new policy is not aimed specifically at China, the implication is clear enough: From now on, the primary focus of American military strategy will not be counterterrorism, but the containment of that economically booming land — at whatever risk or cost.
The Planet’s New Center of Gravity
The new emphasis on Asia and the containment of China is necessary, top officials insist, because the Asia-Pacific region now constitutes the “center of gravity” of world economic activity. While the United States was bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, the argument goes, China had the leeway to expand its influence in the region. For the first time since the end of World War II, Washington is no longer the dominant economic actor there. If the United States is to retain its title as the world’s paramount power, it must, this thinking goes, restore its primacy in the region and roll back Chinese influence. In the coming decades, no foreign policy task will, it is claimed, be more important than this.
In line with its new strategy, the administration has undertaken a number of moves intended to bolster American power in Asia, and so put China on the defensive. These include a decision to deploy an initial 250 U.S. Marines — someday to be upped to 2,500 — to an Australian air base in Darwin on that country’s north coast, and the adoption on November 18th of “the Manila Declaration,” a pledge of closer U.S. military ties with the Philippines.
At the same time, the White House announced the sale of 24 F-16 fighter jets to Indonesia and a visit by Hillary Clinton to isolated Burma, long a Chinese ally — the first there by a secretary of state in 56 years. Clinton has also spoken of increased diplomatic and military ties with Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam — all countries surrounding China or overlooking key trade routes that China relies on for importing raw materials and exporting manufactured goods.
As portrayed by administration officials, such moves are intended to maximize America’s advantages in the diplomatic and military realm at a time when China dominates the economic realm regionally. In a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine, Clinton revealingly suggested that an economically weakened United States can no longer hope to prevail in multiple regions simultaneously. It must choose its battlefields carefully and deploy its limited assets — most of them of a military nature — to maximum advantage. Given Asia’s strategic centrality to global power, this means concentrating resources there.
“Over the last 10 years,” she writes, “we have allocated immense resources to [Iraq and Afghanistan]. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership [and] secure our interests… One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment — diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise — in the Asia-Pacific region.”
Such thinking, with its distinctly military focus, appears dangerously provocative. The steps announced entail an increased military presence in waters bordering China and enhanced military ties with that country’s neighbors — moves certain to arouse alarm in Beijing and strengthen the hand of those in the ruling circle (especially in the Chinese military leadership) who favor a more activist, militarized response to U.S. incursions. Whatever forms that takes, one thing is certain: the leadership of the globe’s number two economic power is not going to let itself appear weak and indecisive in the face of an American buildup on the periphery of its country. This, in turn, means that we may be sowing the seeds of a new Cold War in Asia in 2011.
The U.S. military buildup and the potential for a powerful Chinese counter-thrust have already been the subject of discussion in the American and Asian press. But one crucial dimension of this incipient struggle has received no attention at all: the degree to which Washington’s sudden moves have been dictated by a fresh analysis of the global energy equation, revealing (as the Obama administration sees it) increased vulnerabilities for the Chinese side and new advantages for Washington.
The New Energy Equation
For decades, the United States has been heavily dependent on imported oil, much of it obtained from the Middle East and Africa, while China was largely self-sufficient in oil output. In 2001, the United States consumed 19.6 million barrels of oil per day, while producing only nine million barrels itself. The dependency on foreign suppliers for that 10.6 million-barrel shortfall proved a source of enormous concern for Washington policymakers. They responded by forging ever closer, more militarized ties with Middle Eastern oil producers and going to war on occasion to ensure the safety of U.S. supply lines.
In 2001, China, on the other hand, consumed only five million barrels per day and so, with a domestic output of 3.3 million barrels, needed to import only 1.7 million barrels. Those cold, hard numbers made its leadership far less concerned about the reliability of the country’s major overseas providers — and so it did not need to duplicate the same sort of foreign policy entanglements that Washington had long been involved in.
Now, so the Obama administration has concluded, the tables are beginning to turn. As a result of China’s booming economy and the emergence of a sizeable and growing middle class (many of whom have already bought their first cars), the country’s oil consumption is exploding. Running at about 7.8 million barrels per day in 2008, it will, according to recent projections by the U.S. Department of Energy, reach 13.6 million barrels in 2020, and 16.9 million in 2035. Domestic oil production, on the other hand, is expected to grow from 4.0 million barrels per day in 2008 to 5.3 million in 2035. Not surprisingly, then, Chinese imports are expected to skyrocket from 3.8 million barrels per day in 2008 to a projected 11.6 million in 2035 — at which time they will exceed those of the United States.
The U.S., meanwhile, can look forward to an improved energy situation. Thanks to increased production in “tough oil” areas of the United States, including the Arctic seas off Alaska, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and shale formations in Montana, North Dakota, and Texas, future imports are expected to decline, even as energy consumption rises. In addition, more oil is likely to be available from the Western Hemisphere rather than the Middle East or Africa. Again, this will be thanks to the exploitation of yet more “tough oil” areas, including the Athabasca tar sands of Canada, Brazilian oil fields in the deep Atlantic, and increasingly pacified energy-rich regions of previously war-torn Colombia. According to the Department of Energy, combined production in the United States, Canada, and Brazil is expected to climb by 10.6 million barrels per day between 2009 and 2035 — an enormous jump, considering that most areas of the world are expecting declining output.
Whose Sea Lanes Are These Anyway?
From a geopolitical perspective, all this seems to confer a genuine advantage on the United States, even as China becomes ever more vulnerable to the vagaries of events in, or along, the sea lanes to distant lands. It means Washington will be able to contemplate a gradual loosening of its military and political ties to the Middle Eastern oil states that have dominated its foreign policy for so long and have led to those costly, devastating wars.
Indeed, as President Obama said in Canberra, the U.S. is now in a position to begin to refocus its military capabilities elsewhere. “After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly,” he declared, “the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia-Pacific region.”
For China, all this spells potential strategic impairment. Although some of China’s imported oil will travel overland through pipelines from Kazakhstan and Russia, the great majority of it will still come by tanker from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America over sea lanes policed by the U.S. Navy. Indeed, almost every tanker bringing oil to China travels across the South China Sea, a body of water the Obama administration is now seeking to place under effective naval control.
By securing naval dominance of the South China Sea and adjacent waters, the Obama administration evidently aims to acquire the twenty-first century energy equivalent of twentieth-century nuclear blackmail. Push us too far, the policy implies, and we’ll bring your economy to its knees by blocking your flow of vital energy supplies. Of course, nothing like this will ever be said in public, but it is inconceivable that senior administration officials are not thinking along just these lines, and there is ample evidence that the Chinese are deeply worried about the risk — as indicated, for example, by their frantic efforts to build staggeringly expensive pipelines across the entire expanse of Asia to the Caspian Sea basin.
As the underlying nature of the new Obama strategic blueprint becomes clearer, there can be no question that the Chinese leadership will, in response, take steps to ensure the safety of China’s energy lifelines. Some of these moves will undoubtedly be economic and diplomatic, including, for example, efforts to court regional players like Vietnam and Indonesia as well as major oil suppliers like Angola, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. Make no mistake, however: others will be of a military nature. A significant buildup of the Chinese navy — still small and backward when compared to the fleets of the United States and its principal allies — would seem all but inevitable. Likewise, closer military ties between China and Russia, as well as with the Central Asian member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan), are assured.
In addition, Washington could now be sparking the beginnings of a genuine Cold-War-style arms race in Asia, which neither country can, in the long run, afford. All of this is likely to lead to greater tension and a heightened risk of inadvertent escalation arising out of future incidents involving U.S., Chinese, and allied vessels — like the one that occurred in March 2009 when a flotilla of Chinese naval vessels surrounded a U.S. anti-submarine warfare surveillance ship, the Impeccable, and almost precipitated a shooting incident. As more warships circulate through these waters in an increasingly provocative fashion, the risk that such an incident will result in something far more explosive can only grow.
Nor will the potential risks and costs of such a military-first policy aimed at China be restricted to Asia. In the drive to promote greater U.S. self-sufficiency in energy output, the Obama administration is giving its approval to production techniques — Arctic drilling, deep-offshore drilling, and hydraulic fracturing — that are guaranteed to lead to further Deepwater Horizon-style environmental catastrophe at home. Greater reliance on Canadian tar sands, the “dirtiest” of energies, will result in increased greenhouse gas emissions and a multitude of other environmental hazards, while deep Atlantic oil production off the Brazilian coast and elsewhere has its own set of grim dangers.
All of this ensures that, environmentally, militarily, and economically, we will find ourselves in a more, not less, perilous world. The desire to turn away from disastrous land wars in the Greater Middle East to deal with key issues now simmering in Asia is understandable, but choosing a strategy that puts such an emphasis on military dominance and provocation is bound to provoke a response in kind. It is hardly a prudent path to head down, nor will it, in the long run, advance America’s interests at a time when global economic cooperation is crucial. Sacrificing the environment to achieve greater energy independence makes no more sense.
A new Cold War in Asia and a hemispheric energy policy that could endanger the planet: It’s a fatal brew that should be reconsidered before the slide toward confrontation and environmental disaster becomes irreversible. You don’t have to be a seer to know that this is not the definition of good statesmanship, but of the march of folly.
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Page 1 of 123 in China
Killing Me Softly (With This Economy) 
The GOP’s Assault Upon Economic Reality 
Our non-withdrawal from Afghanistan 
“We don’t need someone to think” 
How rough it’s gotten for Mitt 
The Grammys’ most memorable moments 
A passport to utopia 
“The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog”: Not kids’ stuff 
Ricky Gervais: My conscience never takes a day off 
Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume 
America’s failed promise of equal opportunity 
Is gay literature over? 
