Viewpoint

03.08.19

Here’s How the Trade War Is Affecting Hollywood

Ying Zhu
In February 2017, the United States and China began renegotiating the five-year film pact that had limited the annual number of foreign film exports to China to 34 and the share of revenue payable to foreign-rights holders to 25 percent of gross box...

Director behind ‘Great Wall’ Says China Has a Long Way to Go to Rival Hollywood

Sophia Yan
CNBC
Chinese audiences hotly follow U.S. actors and movies, but Americans “probably” don’t care much about Chinese movies, Zhang told CNBC. On the outside, maybe they’ve tracked a couple of stars like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan or Jet Li, he said.

Conversation

02.23.17

Can China Expand its Beachhead in Hollywood?

Stanley Rosen, Ying Zhu & more
With The Great Wall, a classic army vs. monsters tale, director Zhang Yimou has brought America the most expensive Chinese film ever created. The movie may be backed by a Hollywood studio and it may star no less an American icon than Matt Damon, and...

Excerpts

03.22.16

Beyond ‘Chicken or Beef’ Choices in China Debates

Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Growing up in California with no special interest in China, one of the few things I associated with the big country across the Pacific was mix-and-match meal creation. On airplanes and in school cafeterias, you just had “chicken or beef” choices,...

Culture

11.04.15

Zhang Yimou: ‘Even Though Our Market Is Growing Fast, We’re Still Not Satisfied’

Jonathan Landreth
Hollywood has Steven Spielberg and China has Zhang Yimou, the senior statesman of moviemaking in the People’s Republic. From Red Sorghum, his 1987 debut right out of the Beijing Film Academy, through Hero, which grossed more in America in 2002 than...

Culture

10.02.15

In Zhang Yimou’s ‘Coming Home’ History is Muted But Not Silent

Eva Shan Chou
Coming Home, directed by the celebrated Zhang Yimou and released in the U.S. last week, begins as a man escapes a labor camp in China’s northwest and tries to return home. But he is captured when he and his wife attempt to meet, after their daughter...

Media

03.28.14

Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou Talk Movies

Jonathan Landreth
Ang Lee, the Oscar-winning American film director with Taiwan roots, and Zhang Yimou, the storied veteran of mainland Chinese moviemaking, joined together on March 27 at Cooper Union in New York in a discussion billed “Chinese Film, Chinese...

Film Director Zhang Yimou Pays 7.5 Million Yuan Fine Over Children

Agence France-Presse
Zhang admits he has two sons and a daughter with his current wife and a daughter with a previous wife.

China Fines ‘House of Flying Daggers’ Director for Breaching One-child Policy

Tania Branigan
Guardian
Film-maker Zhang Yimou, who has three children with wife Chen Ting, has to pay £750,000 for breaking law.

Steven Spielberg Aiming to Make a Film with Zhang Yimou in China

Andrew Pulver
Guardian
Renowned American director seeks collaboration with respected Chinese director on “international film”—their first possible contact since his withdrawal as consultant to Bejing Olympics in protest.

China Investigates Director Alleged To Have 7 Kids

Associated Press
Reports circulated online this week that Zhang Yimou has seven children from his two marriages and from relationships with two other women in violation of the country’s strict family planning laws. 

Ordering Off the Menu in China Debates

Jeffrey Wassterstrom
Oxford University Press Blog
Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize win last fall led some foreign commentators into an “Ai Weiwei or Zhang Yimou” trap. The former is an artist locked into an antagonistic relationship with the government, the latter a filmmaker who has been...

Caixin Media

05.02.12

Garish Flowers of War

The Flowers of War begins December 13, 1937, with young convent girls fleeing for their lives through a besieged Nanjing shrouded in mist. The first words heard are those of the lead girl Shujuan: “Everybody was running that day but no one could...

Unjust Desserts

Jonathan D. Spence from New York Review of Books
Can there be any justice in today’s China? It is the deepest question that the film director Zhang Yimou has asked so far. His best-known earlier films, sexually supercharged, suffused with violence or the threat of it, always found some politically...