Three months ago, one of the country’s best
known actors went missing. Now, seemingly chastened, she has reappeared with a
bill for £112m in unpaid taxes and fines
By Steve
Rose
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Fan Bingbing has made a grovelling confession, saying ‘I should abide by the law’.
Photograph: VCG/VCG via Getty Images
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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 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 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.
