China has got to stop competing with Hollywood for sensational plotlines, of both the real and more dubious variety. The latest outrage ascribed to Bo Xilai, the former Communist Party chief in the megacity Chongqing—whose fall has already involved allegations of murder, torture and espionage—concerns Zhang Ziyi, China’s best-known actress and the star of Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” It also involves the interaction between news and gossip sites off of the mainland and its own chaotic social networks.
Here’s how the story—for which no proof has been offered—spread: on May 29th, Boxun, a U.S-based Chinese-language site, claimed that Zhang had been paid six million yuan (a little short of a million dollars) to sleep with Xu Ming, Bo’s friend and purported financier, before he passed her off to Bo with a fifty-per-cent markup. The report goes on to say that, between 2007 and 2011, she rendezvoused with Bo ten times, for which she was paid a total of a hundred million yuan, and that she had similar arrangements with other officials. Apple Daily, a popular Hong Kong publication, picked up the story, and from there newsrooms across Asia have been busy coupling photos of Bo with glamour shots of Zhang.
There are reasons to be very cautious here, especially given how many enemies Bo has made. Zhang, too, has detractors who would be more than glad to slander her. She has not only denied the reports but has gone into fighting mode.
By Wednesday, her lawyers had indeed issued a public letter decrying the charges and threatening to sue, and Zhang said that she was hurt that her fans hadn’t rejected the reports out of hand, and added, via microblog, that “Apple Daily is clearly having a mental masturbation with Boxun.com.”
And this story is as much about China’s microblogging culture as anything else. When I turned to Weibo, the Chinese Twitter and perhaps the country’s largest and most loose-lipped neighborhood, I found that many Zhang posts had been deleted and relevant comments had been blocked from view. It felt like being in a chase scene, with posts that contained the words “Zhang” and “official” vanishing almost the moment they appeared. China’s Web police are on top of their game with this one.
So are various online speculators and conspiracy theorists. Zhang didn’t attend the Cannes festival despite the world première of her upcoming film (“Dangerous Liaisons,” unfortunately) and an invitation to present the prestigious Palme d’Or. Why not? Had the government barred her from leaving the country on account of the ongoing investigation? She was shooting a new movie (“The Grandmasters”), she told the press curtly, though she was deeply appreciative to Cannes for showcasing her work.
The danger, again, is that the over-the-top nature of the more credible charges against Bo might lead to insufficient wariness. This is, after all, a case that involved a dead Briton with spy connections and a police chief on the run—and so, the thinking goes, why not this? (Evan Osnos has been following the Bo story.) There are more whys in this case, though, than why nots. Why would a megastar who earns seven figures need to do this? What political advantages might be traded in such encounters? And what doors, exactly, would be opened for a starlet with politburo connections, or closed to one who didn’t go along with such a scheme? Assuming it is all pure fiction, who or what is permitting these rumors to gain this type of traction, and who benefits?
But the other overwhelming reaction, I found, was indifference, or, rather, a cynicism about what could be expected. “It is an open secret that celebrities in the entertainment circle sell their bodies to powerful figures for quick cash,” one poster on Weibo wrote, while another commented, matter-of-factly, “celebrities and officials… they live in a different world than us ordinary folk.”
What world was that, exactly? I wanted to ask before realizing that it was the difference between these two worlds that so invariably and insidiously sits at the heart of such scandals. Until China reaches a place where the world of officials begins to share some commonalities with that of ordinary citizens, the rumor mill will always be hard to differentiate from the newsreel.
Before it was excised, I did catch the work of one Weibo blogger who proudly pasted the screenshot of Zhang’s name, spelled in Korean, topping Korea’s most popular search engine, Naver. It is widely known and a source of mild embarrassment that the Chinese are more obsessed with Korean dramas and celebrities than they are with their own. Touchingly, the blogger seems to have felt, however small and misplaced, an involuntary swell of patriotic pride in seeing his fellow country-woman so “esteemed”; Zhang herself would most likely have failed to share the sentiment. In the meantime, Hollywood screenwriters may do well to take notes.
Photograph by ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images.
