But it was what happened next that sent a shudder through the Chinese film industry. A Chinese-language student told me she learned Mandarin by watching Fan in My Fair Princess. “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. So there was every reason to think that the ado over Cell Phone 2 would come and go, just like any other celebrity gossip. Because Fan has been China’s sweetheart for two decades, younger fans feel as though they have grown up alongside her, a sort of Emma Watson for Chinese millennials. No, she was dating this other rich guy. In the years that the Chinese film industry was allowed to grow unregulated, it became common for stars to falsify contracts to avoid paying taxes on the huge sums that they were commanding. More crucially, the country is said to need an estimated 500,000 scripts to fill all its available screens and airtime over the next five years. Others were rushing to meet with their accountants, or were holed up in their offices reviewing past budget sheets. Many had either already been “invited for tea” at the tax bureau, or were awaiting their turn. The notice chastised the industry for “distorting social values” and encouraging the “growing tendency towards money worship” through the “blind chasing of stars.”. View details that no one tells you about. Available for everyone, funded by readers, Meng Hongwei appears caught up in anti-graft drive critics say is cover for political purge, Beijing admits it is holding Meng Hongwei, who had been missing since 25 September, Meng Hongwei quits hours after Chinese authorities admit they have detained him, Wife says she has not heard from her husband since he returned to China last week. A producer with a major Chinese studio told CNN the practice of having two contracts, one of them smaller to avoid paying too much tax, was "universal" in the film industry. Fan Bingbing: Has China's most famous actress been disappeared by the Communist Party? In the month after she was engulfed in scandal, shares in publicly listed movie companies in China fell by an average of 18 percent. “I worked so hard,” she told her friend, “and this is how I become famous.”. 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. Fan strenuously denied the affair and was suing Guo at the time of her disappearance. And those were only the dishes I could discern. The rising fear was palpable on WeChat, where people were sharing ad hoc formulas meant to help calculate how much tax they owed in lieu of any official guidelines. But this summer the authorities apparently decided to take action. (Ang Lee, whose Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became the highest-grossing foreign-language film of all time in the U.S., was born in Taiwan.) Victoria Mao, who runs a production company, told me that all of her projects had been put on hold just days earlier, after she received a call from the tax bureau asking her to self-audit. 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. Missing actress is well-known in Hollywood 01:20. This enraged directors, who were being taxed the full 45 percent for their work. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. She was O.K. In 2015, Fan told the South China Morning Post that she had no guanxi, or connections, in show business. Not since the Cultural Revolution have artists in China been as wary of the state, and as aware of the necessity of appeasing it. One contract was apparently for 10m yuan (£1.3m); the other for 60m yuan (£7.6m). “Someone is trying to use Fan Bingbing to get to Wang Qishan,” exiled businessman Guo Wengui told reporters. Films that had passed the censors years ago have now been retroactively banned. More than the regulatory crackdown, it is the nature of Fan’s disappearance that has sent a jolt through Chinese society. The star-dependent culture was on full display at a DVD store in Beijing where I bought pirated copies of Fan’s movies. 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. When Fan’s middle-school teacher suggested she take up music, they bought her a piano and a flute. “There was no stunt about it,” he recalled. Then, in June, official agencies announced a joint clampdown on actors’ pay, citing not only tax evasion but “money worship”, “the youth blindly chasing celebrities” and “distorted social values”. In 2011, the country's best-known artist, Ai Weiwei, was detained for almost three months during which time his whereabouts were unclear. Award-winning Chinese actress and singer who became known for her role in the 1999 film Seventeen Years. He was later released after he signed a confession authorities described as being related to tax evasion. She was a regular sight at major award shows and fashion ceremonies. She is often described as baifumei, a phrase meaning pale-skinned, rich, and beautiful. Three months ago, one of the country’s best known actors went missing. Before we sat down to eat, the actor, who had moved in only two days before, offered to give his guests a tour of the multi-million-dollar home. In China, celebrities often try to keep their reputations' positive and inoffensive. A retired professor with views critical of the government was dragged away during a live interview on Voice of America. Morgan quoted a Chinese proverb: the state is “killing the chicken to scare the monkey.” (He also said, in a burst of animal metaphors, that it is only a matter of time before “the chickens come home to roost,” and that the government is doing whatever it can to “catch the mouse.”). After Fan disappeared, Internet sleuths noticed that her fiancé, director Li Chen (left), appeared in a video without his engagement ring. ", But the film star hasn't been seen in public since early June, when, according to a post on her verified social-media account, she, In an article by state media Securities Daily on September 6, which was later deleted, the publication said Fan had been brought "under control and about to receive legal judgment.". That party had also gone on for hours, with interminable talk of tax woes over interminable glasses of baijiu. Her beauty, too, appeals to the domestic market. Fan's team issued a furious denial at the time but the actress hasn't been seen in public since the dispute. In 2014, Fan landed a bigger role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, as the teleporting superheroine Blink. But as Zhang sees it, President Xi isn’t out to ruin the film industry. Fan was ranked last. “There was a certain surprise in the industry,” said Kwei, the producer. “Everyone you can think of is dealing with taxes right now,” said Kwei, the producer. Picking up his fork, he traced an imaginary path in the air to illustrate the film industry’s attitude toward the government crackdown. According to reports, Fan was detained at a “holiday resort” in Wuxi, under a 2013 legal framework known as “residential surveillance at a designated location”. For starters, everyone knew that Cui, a household name in China, had an ongoing feud with the makers of Cell Phone 2. In one scene, Fan appears in a bomber-pilot outfit, wielding an ax and running to save a boy and his mother. Since her release last October, Fan has consciously kept a low profile. As they were driving home, Li recalled, Fan reached for her hand and held it tightly. Fan’s longtime agent, a former nightclub manager named Mu Xiaoguang, was found destroying the company books and was taken into custody. A month later, his family were told he was dead. But capitalism, once unleashed, does not give up on its privileges and profits easily. She is the perfect star for a modern China. Fan, predictably, was said to be living “just three houses down.”. The Hollywood star had personally contacted Fan about the movie, wanting to know why there were no female James Bonds. Fan seemed poised to become that impossible thing: a star who can appease fans in the three Chinas—mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—as well as Hollywood studios, and their sudden desire for Asian faces. In 2007, its total box office was just over 3bn yuan (£335m); last year it was 56bn yuan (£6.4bn). (“When she is with a great director,” one publicist says, “she’s a great actress.”) In 2013, she made a China-only cameo as an unnamed nurse in Iron Man 3, a role that earned her the disparaging epithet of “flower vase”—a pretty prop in a Hollywood production. (The only other time film was put under the propaganda ministry, according to industry insiders, was during the Cultural Revolution.) The crackdown may in fact be intended to solve a different problem facing authorities. Fan is also, by all accounts, a very hard worker. The first public sighting of Fan after her release, on October 15, 2018. Now, backed by a venture-capital fund in Hollywood, Zhengfu hopes to resurrect the project. The same month, Huang was linked to a scandal involving share-price manipulation and questioned by the authorities. 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. The controls, though, can only go so far. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Fan’s birthday, September 16, came and went. 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). “If we get angry, we are done,” explained the actor’s agent, who was the only one not drinking with abandon. Kwei, the producer, recalled a rock-climbing sequence Fan shot for Sophie’s Revenge. The Chinese Communist Party has long had an uncomfortable relationship with celebrities. The most credible rumour may have been that Fan was in trouble with the tax office, which is not quite as prosaic as it sounds. The first bottle of the night was a Merlot from a Bordeaux winery that Zhao Wei, Fan’s co-star from My Fair Princess, had purchased for an estimated $6.4 million in 2011. And until 2011, economic crimes such as tax evasion were punishable by death.