China seeks to turn entertainers into moral models

reporting from BEIJING —  Imagine if, after arresting a wave of celebrities on narcotics charges, American government officials pressed the heads of major Hollywood studios, A-list actors, record label chiefs and chart-topping singers to sign promises that they’d stay away from vices including drugs, pornography and gambling.

Simultaneously, substance-abusing performers found their films shut out of cinemas, forcing producers into hasty reshoots and re-edits. And major news outlets began running editorials criticizing top directors for failing to narc on associates they had witnessed smoking pot or taking Ecstasy.

This parallel universe of probity is no fanciful figment: With China developing a hearty appetite for marijuana, methamphetamine and other illicit substances, Chinese authorities are training their crosshairs squarely on stars — even as they look to celebrities as front-line soldiers in the nation’s nascent war on drugs.

As of June, China had listed more than 3 million people on an official roll of drug users, up from 1.8 million in 2011, according to Liang Ran, a drug-control official in the Ministry of Justice.

Millions more fly below the radar of police, and China’s National Narcotics Control Commission estimates the actual number of drug users to be more than 14 million, roughly 1% of the population. In 2014, authorities seized 69 tons of illicit drugs, arrested nearly 890,000 people on possession-type charges and almost 170,000 more on charges related to production and trafficking.

Among the celebrities who have been busted on drug charges in the last 18 months are Jackie Chan’s son, Jaycee, and his fellow actor friend Kai Ko; the pop singer Yin Xiangjie; and actor Wang Xuebing, who had a major role in “Black Coal, Thin Ice,” which took top honors at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival.

Yin and Chan spent months in jail; Ko delivered a tearful public apology but nevertheless found himself cut out of films including “Monster Hunt,” a partially animated family film that after hurried reshoots became the top-grossing Chinese movie of all time. Wang’s gritty drama, “A Fool,” abruptly had its May release date scrapped and only arrived in theaters in November with some of the supporting actor’s scenes trimmed.

But in a one-party system where even today’s Communist Party leaders maintain that art should “serve the state,” authorities are not merely setting out to punish stars who break the law. They seek, in a time of rapidly loosening social mores, to turn entertainers into moral models — and even model informants.

The rectitude campaign has caught even the most respected celebrities flat-footed. Take director Zhang Yimou. Last month, after Yin was arrested, the state-run New China News Agency interviewed Zhang and about a dozen major stars about their attitudes on celebrity drug use.

“I have seen many actors using marijuana together during their breaks…. It’s terrible that artists are involved in pornography, gambling and drugs,” said the auteur, who’s helmed films including “Hero” and “Raise the Red Lantern” and is currently in production on the big-budget “The Great Wall” starring Matt Damon.

“This trend is unhealthy for the industry. Many people tried to persuade me to try Ecstasy, and even told me, ‘This is the origin of inspiration,’” he added.

But rather than winning plaudits for his propriety, Zhang was pummeled in the state-run press for failing to rat out the law-breakers to police.

“Instead of protecting his actors, he was appeasing and shielding them. This will only make these movies stars more addicted to drugs,” said Eastday, a Shanghai-based news outlet. “If Zhang considered it disloyal to report his friends to the police, he has made a serious mistake, sacrificing the greater good for the sake of his self-interest.”

The Southern Metropolis Daily penned a similar commentary headlined, “Real love is informing on friends to police,” while the Global Times, a nationalist tabloid closely affiliated with the Communist Party, ran a cartoon of a sad-looking yellow star shooting up with a hypodermic needle as Zhang watched from around a corner.

“The government wants celebrities to actively shoulder more responsibility” for spreading anti-drug messages, said Pi Yijun, an advisor to the Beijing Narcotics Control Commission. “Although celebrities are a small percentage of China’s overall drug users, they are an indicator of the trend. If more celebrities are taking drugs then so are more ordinary people.”

China, Pi noted, is still much less permissive about drug use than America. And censors ensure that drug usage very rarely figures in popular Chinese entertainment; a Chinese TV program along the lines of “Breaking Bad” would almost certainly never be approved by authorities — though the American show about a meth-cooking high school science teacher is available online in China and is popular.

“Even President Obama has acknowledged he smoked pot,” Pi said.

How fans, business associates and law enforcement should respond to celebrity drug use has been a topic of periodic debate in the U.S., with actor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s 2014 overdose and the recent death of singer Scott Weiland, who long struggled with addiction.

But for some observers, the notion of blacklisting, sanctioning or otherwise ostracizing drug-using celebrities raises parallels with the anti-communist witch hunts in Hollywood in the 1940s and ‘50s, which forced many talented and creative people to leave the industry.

By pressuring people in Zhang’s shoes to be informants, some observers say, Chinese authorities are walking a thin line that can erode social trust and sow a culture of fear, discontent, secrecy and creative conservatism. That could undermine China’s efforts to develop a world-class entertainment industry, which officials see as a key to advancing its cultural and economic influence.

“This is the perfect ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation. If [Zhang] told, he might be called a rat; if not, then he’d be accused of dereliction of duty,” said Ying Zhu, a scholar of the Chinese entertainment industry at the City University of New York. “The nanny state and the media/Internet vigilantes need to be mindful of the consequences of ratting out friends, colleagues, and neighbors and families.... There is a chilling price to be paid for turning people against each other while looking over one’s own shoulders.”

“Ethically,” commission advisor Pi said, “Zhang should report drug users, but in Chinese culture, it’s hard to put righteousness above friends and family.”

Authorities, he added, might have more success in making it commercially risky for stars to use (or silently condone) drug use. That’s why Chinese officials are pressing ahead with a host of measures to discourage bad behavior.

This fall, the China Alliance of Radio, Film and Television — a state-sanctioned umbrella group of official industry organizations — formed an ethics committee that it said could order individuals or organizations who violate its norms to issue public apologies. It could also disqualify them from awards or “blacklist” them from the industry.

Last month, the group held a forum in Beijing, touting the fact that 50 of its member organizations had signed on to its “pledge on professional ethics and self-discipline.” (In addition to shunning drugs, the pledge also obligates signatories to “protect the leadership of the Communist Party.”

Actress Fan Bingbing, who has crossed over into Hollywood productions including “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and “Iron Man 3” said at the forum, “A good actor must be a good person first.”

Pi said he believed extracting such public pledges from celebrities would make them less likely to transgress and more inclined to think about the financial consequences of breaking their word by exposing themselves as untrustworthy in the public eye.

“I don’t think the law will ever [totally] bar these films from the screen,” Pi said. “But the question is, can movies featuring repeat drug users be profitable? I believe audiences will reject movies starring repeat drug offenders.”

Nicole Liu and Yingzhi Yang of The Times’ Beijing bureau contributed to this report.