A Drought in Shanghai

After graduating from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy five years ago, Ma Ning landed a job in Shanghai. It might as well have been Siberia.

“I had no idea Shanghai was such a cultural desert,” said the 37-year-old, a producer at the state-owned Shanghai Film Studio.

But Ma believed that China’s most modern city was too exciting a place to be relegated to the backwaters of Chinese filmmaking.

The local movie industry is facing a crisis of survival. American pictures are practically the only films with drawing power at the box office. China’s recent entry into the World Trade Organization means Hollywood will fight harder to dominate the local market.

On the other hand, some of the best works by Chinese directors are banned in China and available only at overseas festivals or art houses.

Shanghai is the mother of Chinese cinema. More than any other city, it has the potential to make movies that are both politically viable and profitable. It’s a do or die situation, Ma Ning thought. So he published a manifesto, asking Shanghai to again make cinema history and reclaim its role as the Hollywood of China. “I wanted a revolution,” he said.

Three years later, he’s embarrassed by his own naivete. The promising young filmmakers he inspired got fed up with fighting the system and decided to shoot lucrative television commercials instead. Ma’s only feature film died on the vine.

His experience highlights Shanghai’s transformation from one of Asia’s most dynamic and daring cultural hot spots to an unexpected pillar of censorship and conservatism.

Make no mistake, Shanghai is China’s showcase city--a breathtaking economic miracle and a magnet for dream-seekers near and far. But Shanghai has lost its edge as the country’s cultural center. Here, where capitalism, not communism, appears to reign supreme, the party still maintains an iron grip on the arts. The city is acutely aware that its social stability is paramount to the welfare of the entire country. Thus, Shanghai has perfected the art of control and self-censorship.

In fact, the creative climate here proved so stifling, the finest artistic talents have fled. Their counterintuitive new home is up north, in the capital, Beijing.

“More than 100,000 of the county’s best actors, directors and other aspiring filmmakers are congregated in Beijing,” said He Zizhuang, a screenwriter at the Shanghai Film Studio, describing the phenomenon called beipiao, or northern drift. “They are there because it’s the home of other talented people. It’s the center of China’s culture and power. Shanghai just can’t compare.”

Despite mind-boggling changes during two decades of economic reforms, the Communist Party remains the final arbiter of the arts in China. It still sees movies as a powerful propaganda tool too important to leave to the whims of the market.

Ironically, Beijing, the nerve center of the party, has managed to offer relative freedom to its artists.

“People from Beijing love to talk politics and critique society,” He said. “But people from Shanghai have little desire to speak their minds. They are more interested in business, in fashion. If you have nothing to say, what’s the point of making a film?”

The downgrading of Shanghai to cultural irrelevance is a direct result of a power shift after the Communists took over this gigantic nation of farmers. Essentially, that meant the triumph of peasant culture over urban culture.

“Half a century of revolution has indeed destroyed in toto China’s urban culture, together with its cosmopolitan sensibilities,” said Leo Ou-fan Lee, professor of Chinese literature at Harvard University and the author of “Shanghai Modern,” a 1999 history of Shanghai’s urban culture between 1930 and 1945.

Back in the early part of the last century, Shanghai was the brave new world that defined China’s liberation from the shackles of rural tradition and backwardness. Artists and intellectuals from around the country flocked here and thrived during a moment of exhilarating change.

They embraced the accouterments of modernity, from cafes to cars, from capitalism to communism. And they loved the cinema. As the birthplace of the Chinese film industry and home of its biggest stars, Shanghai built some of the world’s most splendid Art Deco movie houses. The motion picture flourished here in the 1930s as an irresistible medium of the times.

“Ninety percent of Chinese films back then reflected life in Shanghai,” said Xu Yuan, founder of Studio 101, a local film club. “There was no other Chinese city capable of representing modern life.”

After 1949, however, China’s new peasant rulers thought otherwise. The old port city reminded them of the twin evils of capitalism and colonialism. Shanghai practically vanished from films except as a negative caricature.

Famous filmmakers and movie stars fled the country. Many of them continued their craft in Hong Kong, building a vibrant film industry there in Shanghai’s image.

One of the better known is the Shaw Bros. studio, which started out making silent films in Shanghai. It went on to Hong Kong to produce classic martial arts movies, influencing cult figures from actor Bruce Lee to director John Woo. But those who remained on the mainland suffered, particularly under the vengeful hands of Madame Mao Tse-tung, who was a fledgling actress here back in the 1930s under the stage name Lan Ping.

Culturally, Shanghai stagnated. Its new role was as China’s industrial powerhouse, filling the national coffers with tax dollars and keeping a low profile.

Then, in the early 1990s, Shanghai became a workhorse with a different saddle, as Beijing resurrected it as the country’s financial capital.

Shiny new buildings as befit a capitalist stronghold shot up, including a state-of-the-art opera house, a modern museum and U.S.-style multiplexes. Hoping to cash in on China’s most lucrative box office, Warner Bros. is planning to open a nine-screen theater in Shanghai’s shopping mecca.

But all that points to this city emerging as an ideal market of cultural consumers, not producers.

“Shanghai was always at the forefront of filmmaking in China,” said Stanley Rosen, political science professor at USC and an expert on Chinese film. “There is no sign of it happening at this point. Maybe in the very long run.”

Today, despite Shanghai’s image around the world as China’s trendiest city, there are surprisingly few Chinese films that feature the city.

“In Hong Kong, they have Wong Kar-wai. In Taiwan, they have Edward Yang,” said Xu, referring to the respective makers of the award-winning films “In the Mood for Love” and “Yi Yi.” “They are like New York’s Woody Allen. When will there be a Chinese director famous for shooting urban stories about Shanghai?”

Blame it on a debilitating system of censorship and control, which many filmmakers say is worse in Shanghai than Beijing.

“This is a city that from a distance looks like a place with limitless opportunities. But get close, and you’ll find there are walls everywhere,” said Yang Lu, a freelance film critic. “We will never become a movie center until all the conservative officials retire.”

The Chinese compare bureaucratic hurdles to a landscape of mountains and valleys. It is easier to get things done in Beijing because many government agencies work like valleys between the mountains. If one doesn’t work, try another or do without. But there are few ways in Shanghai to slip into a valley.

“For example, if I get a script and don’t like it, there’s no way it could get made,” said He, who screens movie proposals. “There is only one film studio in Shanghai. In Beijing, they have other options.”

It doesn’t help that Shanghai’s artistic gatekeepers harbor a reputation for being notoriously image-conscious but risk-averse. The result is a city that knows it could raise its profile with flashy international film festivals. But city leaders don’t seem to realize that Shanghai’s image is at stake if they promote mostly boring movies.

Local filmmakers have little room to maneuver. In a recent movie, a Shanghai family coped with life after losing state jobs. The otherwise mainstream film got the green light in Beijing but hit a wall in Shanghai.

“The officials didn’t like it because it showed the family cleaning their bedpans on the street,” said Wu Hehu, a manager at Paradise Film, the city’s only film distributor. It was told to abandon the project for fear of being seen as promoting a negative image of China’s wealthiest city.

Some local filmmakers have simply given up trying to show the real Shanghai.

“I was born and raised here, but I never had the desire to write about it,” said He of the Shanghai Film Studio. “A lot of people like me don’t see the romance and mystery outsiders see.”

Still, the city’s rise as an international center of commerce may be incubating a new breed of filmmakers. They are mostly amateurs working outside the system, working on digital video without government approval or funding.

They want to show the seedy side of the shiny coin: the drugs, trauma, AIDS, suicide and a whole host of other vices plaguing the city’s listless youth.

“Lots of Westerners know China” through celebrated director Zhang Yimou’s historical films,” said Andrew Cheng, whose debut film, “Shanghai Panic,” is a digital video production loosely based on a short story by Shanghai’s “bad girl” author, Mian Mian. “When they see my movie, they can’t believe this is China, that this is Shanghai.” The film depicts a group of young Shanghainese dealing with alienation, HIV and homosexuality.

Cheng has shown his version of the city at local bars and schools and plans to take it to film circuits outside China, including L.A’s Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

For now, it has little chance of reaching a larger domestic audience. But many hope that the Shanghai story, in all its splendor and shame, may yet inspire a new wave of Chinese filmmakers. “The past 20 years of reform in China has been a collective process of urbanization,” Cheng said. “The dawn of a new era in Chinese film will start with a new way of making urban movies about Shanghai.”

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Ching-Ching Ni is a Times staff writer.