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World|art & entertainment|December 25, 2015 / 11:41 AM
China might turn film stars into models of morality

AKIPRESS.COM - Jing Tian With China developing a hearty appetite for marijuana, methamphetamine and other illicit substances, Chinese authorities are training their crosshairs squarely on stars – they look to celebrities as front-line soldiers in the nation's nascent war on drugs, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

As of June, China had listed more than 3 million people on a 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 number of drug users to be more than 14 million, roughly 1 percent 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 arrested on drug charges in the past 18 months are Jackie Chan's son, Jaycee, and his actor friend Kai Ko; pop singer Yin Xiangjie; 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 drama, A Fool, abruptly had its May release date scrapped and arrived in theatres only 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 also seek, in a time of rapidly loosening social mores, to turn entertainers into moral models.

The campaign has caught even the most respected celebrities flat-footed. Last month, after Yin was arrested, the state-run New China News Agency interviewed director Zhang Yimou 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 Zhang, who has directed such films as Hero and Raise the Red Lantern, and is 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'," Zhang said.

But rather than winning praise for his propriety, Zhang was pummelled in the state-run press for failing to report the lawbreakers 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 government wants celebrities to actively shoulder more responsibility" for spreading anti-drug messages, said Pi Yijun, an adviser to the Beijing Narcotics Control Commission.

China, he added, is still far less permissive about drug use than America. And censors ensure that drug use 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. "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."

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