The Chinese Film Market Magazine

The Power Game

Feb 06, 2026 CFM Case Study 1

Power lies in a few hands in China’s film industry. This structure may speed up its growth in the short run, but will not be sustainable in the long run.

By Raymond Zhou

Entertainment Weekly selects “the 101 most powerful people in entertainment”; Hollywood. com has its “100 most powerful” list; and even Forbes, not exactly known for its expertise on showbiz, compiles its own version of “celebrity 100” list, which overlaps greatly with the other two rankings.

What if China has such a list? Who will be on the top and who will be excluded?

Don’t worry. I’m not going to come up with my list, but the questions offer a chance for me to probe into the mechanism of China’s film industry. Who are the decision-makers? Who can greenlight a picture, and who can kill it in the censorship pipeline? Who are behind the money that flows into the industry, and who can sway public opinions when a movie is released?

Regulators

The most powerful entity that affects China’s film industry is not an individual, but an organization. It’s common known by its acronym, SARFT, which stands for the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television. It is a minister-level government agency that issues licenses, stipulates laws and macro-policies, and approves programming content for every station at county level or above.

If you rub this organization the wrong way, you can kiss goodbye to your movie career – somewhat like Mel Gibson spewing anti-Semitic poison in Hollywood. However, most SARFT officials are quite nice in person and professional as well. They truly want to aid filmmakers in getting their projects through the hell of approval. You’ll have to know where you can press ahead, gently though, and which issues are absolutely off-limits. If you press the wrong button, it shows your ignorance and that you have not done your homework before embarking on your China dream.

To be fair, the censorship rules are by far less stringent than they used to be. As they stand, they are very similar to the Hays Code, which was effective in Hollywood from the 1930s through much of the 1960s. In some areas, they are more relaxed. For example, you can portray a couple making out if you do not show the private parts. But other areas are more sensitive. You cannot have a police chief who turns out to be a bad person. One way to go around it is to set the plot in Hong Kong.

The emergence of new technologyinduced platforms has caught regulators off guard. If a movie is not screened in theaters, but on the Internet or mobile phones, does it come under the supervision of SARFT? SARFT would like to believe so, but there are many agencies dueling it out for that authority, and as a result, leaving many through the cracks of the official eye. Gay content is not allowed in movies or television shows, but imported American sitcoms with gay storylines are common on Chinese websites.

However, SARFT can take the top spot in the power structure only nominally. It is held accountable to the Propaganda Ministry of the Communist Party, which oversees all cultural and ideological fields in the nation. If they do not like your movie, even after SARFT gives you a license to screen it, it could be pulled off the screen, or more mildly, be blacklisted for awards or even nongovernment recognition.

Directors

China has followed the Soviet paradigmand placed the director in the center of power for a project. That power is not balanced by the producer, who, in China’s case, is often equated with the production manager. Only in recent years have a few competent producers emerged, and most of them were themselves directors.

A director-centric system has yield great pieces with vision, integrity and artistic accomplishments, but it has difficulty producing a reasonable quantity of competent works, especial genre movies. Every director has an artistic dream and few would bother to follow what is known as industry practices in the US.

There are four film directors in China whose names alone can guarantee a significant level of box office returns. Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige started as auteurs who made exquisite art-house movies, but changed gear in the new millennium to the high-profile realm of blockbusters. In China, they are loved and hated at the same time.

“Not every propaganda film is a dud, though. In recent years, a few have made breakthroughs by crossing over other genres.”

Feng Xiaogang is a special phenomenon. He made his career by making small-budget urban comedies that single-handedly created the holiday season in the country. In the past decade, he started branching into more diverse genres and, except for a palace drama based on Hamlet, has been uniformly successful. He is considered the one director who most accurately keeps his finger on the pulse of the country, thus endearing him to a large swathe of society, yet he rarely gets a look, let alone a nod, from foreign critics and festival jurors.

Unlike the prolific Feng, Jiang Wen has made only four features as of 2012. (As a film star, he has appeared in many more movies.) His first and fourth are both record breakers and critical darlings ; his second, Devils on the Doorstep, was banned; and his third, The Sun Also Rises, is so cryptic as to go beyond the comprehension of most people. Jiang is a quintessential artist in that he does not listen to voices other than his own. So, don’t even think of urging him to bow to commercial pressure.

A few Hong Kong directors, such as John Woo and Peter Chan, enjoy overall exalted status but less box-office clout due to their more limited name recognition.

The Great Revival is directed by Han Sanping, one of the most powerful persons in China’s film industry.

The single most powerful person may be Mr. Han Sanping, president of China Film Group, the state-owned and by far the biggest film producer and distributor in China. However, he chose to list himself as one of the directors for Founding of the Republic and The Great Revival, which illustrate the prestige enjoyed in China by film directors. Of course, he appears in numerous movies as theexecutive producer.

Stars

Because a lot of hot money flows into the industry (and television serial drama as well) and investors know only the stars (and a few directors), stars not only skyrocket their salary, but also their power. There are a dozen or so actors who can make or break a project. Huang Xiaoming turned around An Inaccurate Memoir, a Chinese western that had previously languished in development limbo. Zhang Ziyi raised the fund for Sophie’s Revenge and toured 70-plus Chinese cities to plug it, pushing it above the 100-million-yuan-mark in box office.

Zhang Ziyi works as a producer in Sophie’s Revenge.

As above-line expenses account for such a high proportion of the budget, stars can get things done even by dropping or waiving their salaries. Sometimes, as in the case of Qin Hailu for Piano in a Factory, a star may even sink his or her own cash into a project if it is deemed worthwhile. Overall, stars command more reasonable salaries for movies than for TV drama, and the more prestigious a film project is, the less they’ll be likely to ask for an exorbitant fee.

The over-reliance on a few big names has also made it more difficult for others to break through. Just consider that we now have no action stars under the age of 40 -and this in a country where hundreds of thousands are learning martial arts. The three biggest films at the end of 2010 starred the same actor Ge You. The young generation is not given the opportunity as investors tend to be risk-averse. The irony is, few stars can actually carry a picture. So, the money machine simply splurges on as many known quantities as it can, cramming a picture, even cameo roles with recognizable faces.

On the Peripheral

Screenwriters in China are at a noticeable disadvantage as they are seen as easily replaceable. Only a handful get pay commensurate with the film’s budget. Most are simply hacks who put down the director’s whims to paper. The most recent controversy involving the movie White Deer Plain is a case in point. Lu Wei, who wrote Farewell, My Concubine and To Live, arguably two of the best movies in Chinese cinema, produced seven drafts for White Deer Plain, a movie with the same historical sweep as the other two. Yet, at the last minute, the director replaced it with his own, which was finished in less than three weeks. Lu turned down the offer to list his name as a co-writer. “Even though the final script did use many of my ideas, the spirit was completely different from mine. I don’t want to be part of it,” he said.

White Deer Plain has complicated writer issues.

This happened to an eminent writer with a great track record.

If a filmmaker does not have clout, his or her movie is subject to the whims of the distributor and the exhibitor, who may place it in a faceoff, knowingly or otherwise, with competitors much better financed. Most Chinese features never get a theatrical release, and out of those that do make it to the big screen, many disappear within a day or two. Hence the gallows humor for “one-day tour”.

The power struggle spills over to marketers and promoters. Sometimes, two movies in the same slot may resort to unfair contest by hiring online armies to throw mud at the competition. Many movie reviews, especially those on the Internet, are not to be trusted as they are actually paid advertisements. This has tarnished the reputation of even the few honest critics because potential moviegoers cannot distinguish between genuine criticism and plugging passed off as reviews.

Still, a discerning person can examine the tone of the articles and postings and get to the truth. Some movies are indeed widely embraced or rejected based on a majority of voices. However, as in the US, the quality of a movie does not correlate to its box-office performance, and even a universally acclaimed film may not be able to find a decent audience – if it does not come with bells and whistles such as flashy stars or headline-making scandals.

China’s film industry is not really big, but with its disproportionate influence it can be the tail that wags the dog. A film star may make more money endorsing products than their already skyhigh movie salaries. A writer or director may consider television drama the day job and the occasional foray into movie as icing on the cake. An investor may mainly desire to rub off some of the showbiz glitter and never intend to spend the marketing outlay needed for a real audience.

Power, when concentrated, can be very alluring. It gives rise to phantoms of grandeur. But a solid industry needs more than illusions; it needs a structure for a steady flow of money, talent and ideas. In the end, power has to beshared because filmmaking is teamwork.

Raymond Zhou

Executive Editor in Chief at China Daily Online. Zhou has a B.A. from Hangzhou Univer- sity, an MA from Guangzhou-based Sun Yat-sen University and an MBA from the Univer- sity of California at Berkeley. He worked more than 15 years in the US before returning to China. Zhou is known as a cultural and social critic, with influences in the media and culture circles. Zhou publishes more than 200 articles each year, in either English or Chinese. He has several columns that reach millions of readers. He also makes some 100 media appearances each year, as interviewee, host or special guest.

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