“The choice has paid off as mainland director and actor Jiang Wen and Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen have left a deep and favorable impression on audiences in China,” the article said, and went on to criticize previous instances of pandering as “lazy” marketing attempts to make more money in China. Take Disney’s “ Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” Although it has struggled at the Chinese box office since its release here this month, local media and amateur online reviewers have responded positively to the casting of the Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen as Chirrut Imwe, a blind warrior-monk, and the Chinese actor Jiang Wen as Baze Malbus, an armored knight.Įven the state-run newspaper Global Times chimed in with its approval.
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To their credit, some Hollywood studios appear to be responding to the criticism by creating larger roles for Chinese actors. Ying Zhu, professor at the College of Staten Island, noted in a 2014 article that the cameos in “Transformers” made by the prominent Chinese actress Li Bingbing and the Chinese Olympic boxer Zou Shiming were “so perfunctorily inserted into the film that they amount to nothing more than another type of incoherent product placement.” “Iron Man 3,” “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” for example, have been criticized for what critics see as pandering. In these films, the actors serve as what Chinese derogatorily call “flower vases.” Instead, moviegoers here have become especially sensitive to pandering, another common Hollywood tactic that can have several meanings.Īs Stephen Colbert pointed out in a 2015 “Late Show” segment called the “ Pander Express,” pandering can mean accommodating the Chinese government by altering story lines to ensure that references to China are positive.īut it can also refer to efforts to cater to Chinese audiences by dropping Asian actors into roles not meaningful to the plot - a form of “reverse whitewashing,” if you will. Though Asian-American actors have been quite vocal in the last year about their consistent underrepresentation in Hollywood, whitewashing is a fairly novel concept for Asians in Asia, where most local television shows and movies feature all-Asian casts. Looking back, “The Great Wall” highlights the challenges that films face as they navigate the increasingly complex web of racial sensitivities. What few may have realized - and what American viewers may not know when the film is released in the United States next month - is that “ The Great Wall” was actually conceived as an effort to avoid another diversity issue: pandering.
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She added, “His character, a mercenary soldier who stumbles into an elite corps fighting mythical beasts, spends the course of the film being humbled, outsmarted and re-educated in Chinese virtues of bravery, selflessness, discipline and invention.”
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“Those who ranted against the project as another case of Hollywood ‘whitewashing’ in which Matt Damon saves China from dragons may have to bite their tongue,” wrote Maggie Lee, chief Asia film critic for Variety. BEIJING - When the trailer for “The Great Wall,” a high-profile China-Hollywood coproduction, was released last year, critics pounced: The scenes of Matt Damon leading a Chinese army into battle seemed like yet another instance of Hollywood’s “white savior” complex and its repeated whitewashing, the practice of casting white actors in roles originally conceived as Asian (or nonwhite).įast-forward to December and vindication of sorts for this Legendary Entertainment picture: Reviewers largely dismissed the accusation, while lukewarm in their assessments of the adventure flick.