Fan Bingbing’s mysterious disappearance: what it means for China’s elite
Imagine if Jennifer Lawrence or Scarlett Johansson went missing and
nobody knew where they had gone – even three months later. That is what
happened to Fan Bingbing.
Fan is one of China’s best known and highest-paid actors, thanks to a
string of domestic hits such as Cell Phone and Double Xposure, and small
roles in Iron Man 3 and X-Men: Days of Future Past. The 37-year-old was
on the jury of the Cannes film festival last year, and is set to star
in a new thriller opposite Jessica Chastain and Penelope Cruz.
On 2 July this year she posted details of a visit to a children’s
hospital in Tibet on Weibo (China’s answer to Twitter). Then her account
went dead, leaving her 63 million followers, and pretty much the rest
of China, wondering where she had gone. Had Fan been abducted? Arrested?
Was she just taking a career break? The questions piled up, then tipped
over into conspiracy theory. There were baseless rumours such as she
had fled to the US, with the help of Jackie Chan. That she and husband
Li Chen gambled away $12m (£9.2m) in three days in Las Vegas. That she
was being held in a military prison in Beijing after having an affair
with Chinese vice-president Wang Qishan. “Someone is trying to use Fan
Bingbing to get to Wang Qishan,” exiled businessman Guo Wengui told
reporters. Fan strenuously denied the affair and was suing Guo at the
time of her disappearance. Jackie Chan, who had starred with Fan in his
2016 movie Skiptrace, denied all knowledge of Fan’s whereabouts.
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. Shortly before
her disappearance, the popular TV presenter Cui Yongyuan posted on
social media what appeared to be two separate contracts for Fan’s work
on her forthcoming movie Air Strike, starring Bruce Willis. One contract
was apparently for 10m yuan (£1.3m); the other for 60m yuan (£7.6m).
The implication presumably was that this was a “yin-yang contract” – two
for the same job. The smaller figure, it was implied, was declared to
the tax office; the larger one purported to indicate what the star was
actually paid. Fan denied the allegation, and Cui promptly retracted it,
but the authorities reportedly began to investigate shortly before Fan
went off the radar.
This Wednesday, the mystery was apparently partly explained with the
news that Fan and her companies had been ordered to pay 883m yuan
(£112m) in unpaid taxes and fines. She has not been charged with any
crime.
Fan’s first public communication since July was a grovelling confession
on Weibo: “For a long time, I did not distinguish between national,
social and personal interests,” she wrote. “As a public figure, I should
abide by the law, and play a leading role in society and industry …
Without the good policies of the party and the state, and without the
love of the people, there would be no Fan Bingbing.” In short, Fan seems
to have been made an example of.
China’s movie industry has mushroomed over the past decade. In 2007, its
total box office was just over 3bn yuan (£335m); last year it was 56bn
yuan (£6.4bn). It is poised to overtake the US as the world’s biggest
film territory. This cultural explosion has brought in a new breed of
moneyed celebrity, some of whom have no inhibitions about its wealth.
Three years ago, for example, the nation was gripped by the wedding of
high-profile actor Huang Xiaoming to Hong Kong-born Yang Ying – AKA
Angelababy, who is often considered China’s answer to Kim Kardashian
(Kim has 118 million followers on Instagram; Angelababy has 96 million
followers on Weibo). The event, which was livestreamed on the internet,
was like a royal wedding, with a comparable budget – an estimated $31m
(£24m). There was a 10ft wedding cake, a holographic castle, a $1.5m
(£1.1m) wedding ring, a custom Dior dress that took five months to make
and goodie bags including mobile phones for the 2,000 guests.
But this summer the authorities apparently decided to take action.
Already the content of Chinese films is carefully vetted and must
promote “core socialist values”. 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 August, nine major production companies
issued a joint pledge to cap actors’ salaries at 40% of total production
costs, and lead actors’ salaries at 70% of the cast’s total pay. The
same month, Huang was linked to a scandal involving share-price
manipulation and questioned by the authorities. He denied any
involvement, but still publicly apologised for his “indiscretion in
wealth management”. Then, last month, a Beijing university published the
Film and Television Star Social Responsibility Report, ranking the 100
top celebrities. Fan Bingbing came last. The authorities have warned
that others will face penalties and “administrative punishment” like Fan
if they do not “undergo self-examination and make remedial payments to
taxation authorities” before the end of the year.
More than the regulatory crackdown, it is the nature of Fan’s
disappearance that has sent a jolt through Chinese society. 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”. It is essentially a legalistic euphemism for disappearance
and forced detention. “In practice it often means someone is held in
secret and denied all contact with the outside world,” says Michael
Caster, a human rights advocate and editor of The Peoples Republic of
the Disappeared, a collection of first-hand accounts of victims of such
forced detentions. “Many of them were subject to one form of torture or
another, from prolonged sleep deprivation to physical pain, beatings,
stress positions, mental abuse and threatening family members.” In many
cases, the outcome is forced confessions.
Until now, forced detentions have been used against suspected political
dissidents and human rights defenders, such as Caster’s former
colleague, lawyer Wang Quanzhang, who went missing in 2015 and has not
been seen since. In another case, Chen Yong, a driver for a Fujian
official, disappeared in April. A month later, his family were told he
was dead.
Applying such blunt force to the entertainment industry would be new,
but not entirely out of character. “President Xi Jinping has made it
very clear that he wants to do away with elites and the fetishism around
money and certain forms of power,” says Caster. “If you have people
looking to what celebrities do and say online versus what the party
dictates, that may be very plausibly part of it. Anything that rises to a
level of social, economic or political power is seen as a threat to the
supremacy of the Communist party.” We are unlikely to ever know what
exactly Fan Bingbing underwent, but the implication is clear: if the
authorities can get to the biggest celebrity in the land, they can get
to anyone.
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