Beijing, China-born Zhao Ting won the Academy Award for Best Director on April 25, becoming the first Asian-American woman in history to win the award.
Beijing-born, 80-year-old Zhao Ting made history when she won the Academy Award for Best Director on April 25. However, the Chinese Communist authorities, who had regarded Zhao Ting as a gold standard, suddenly went silent on the award day, saying nothing about the Oscars. Why is that?
Zhao Ting won the Academy Award for Best Director on Sunday for her film “Nomadland,” becoming the first Asian-American woman in history to win the award and only the second to do so. Nomadland also won Best Picture.
Zhao Ting, 39, was not only born in Beijing, but also, her father, Zhao Yuji, was a former state-owned enterprise executive. He was the general manager of Capital Iron and Steel Company, the general manager of the China National Defense Corporation, and the general manager of the China National Machinery and Equipment Corporation. Zhao Ting is also considered the second generation of the rich.
“When one of its own children wins an award in the United States, the Chinese Communist Party is bound to make a big deal out of it. In March, when Zhao Ting’s “Land of the Unwanted” won a Golden Globe Award, the Chinese Communist Party’s official media called Zhao Ting “the pride of China. The Chinese authorities also decided to introduce the film, and it was released in China on April 23.
However, the Chinese Communist Party banned the broadcast of the Oscars this year. And for the first time in 50 years, the Oscars will not be broadcast in Hong Kong. At least four journalists from Chinese state media told Western media that they were ordered by propaganda authorities not to cover the Oscars at all. On Douban, the Chinese poster for “Land of the Unwanted” has been removed, and the release date for China has disappeared.
Why did things take a 180 degree turn after a month or so?
It’s all because netizens have dug up an old article from the US media. Zhao Ting was interviewed by Filmmaker magazine in 2013. Zhao Ting was quoted as saying, “It started when I was a kid in China, and it was a place full of lies.
The Chinese Communist Party has recently been busy brainwashing Chinese people with lying movies. The National Film Bureau of the Communist Party of China has recently issued a notice saying that from April to December, so-called “red classic films” such as “The Red Army of Women”, “The Railway Guerrillas”, “The Southern Expedition”, “Shangganling”, “Little Soldier Zhang Ga”, “Mine War”, “Red Sun” and “Heroic Children” will be screened in various parts of China. The film will be released all over China.
Hao Zhongliang (a pseudonym), a performer who has accompanied the “White Maiden” all his life, once said, “I have accompanied the “White Maiden” all my life, but it turned out that the “White Maiden” is a lie, so many ‘landlords’ were criticized, killed, deprived of their family property, and the children of landlords, for generations, have not had good results, and have been rectified in successive campaigns. The children of the landlords, who had been suffering for generations, were all related to the “White Maiden” campaign.
Zhao Ting told The Filmmaker, “A lot of the information I received as a child was incorrect, and I started to become very rebellious about my family and my background, so I suddenly went to England and re-studied my history, and studying political science at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was a way for me to figure out the nature of things, to arm myself with information and then challenge it.”
To be denounced as a “land of lies” is something that the Chinese Communist Party would not tolerate. I am afraid that those who dare to speak in such a way are also classified as “dissidents” by the CCP.
Thus, what could have been an opportunity for the CCP to brag about itself has turned into a taboo event.
Stanley Rosen, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Southern California, told the Wall Street Journal that the Communist Party wanted to “take credit” from a Beijing-born man who had succeeded in the Western creative field, but wanted to control the message of “how good and successful China is. “There is a “fundamental contradiction” between the two.
Although the Chinese Communist Party no longer considers Zhao Ting its “pride,” Zhao Ting spoke fondly at the Oscars of her Chinese roots, which are nourished by Chinese culture.
“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I keep going when things get tough. I think it goes back to what I learned as a child.” In her acceptance speech, Ting Zhao said, “My dad used to play this game with me when I was growing up in China. We would memorize old Chinese poems, and we would recite them together, one saying a line and the other picking it up.”
She says, “One that I remember very well is called ‘The Three Character Classic.’ Its first line is ‘At the beginning of man, nature is good.’ Those six words had such a big impact on me as a child that I still truly believe in it to this day.”
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