At the center is Gu Er, a little-known screenwriter who says he wrote substantial portions of the ‘Blossoms’ scripts while being paid just ¥3,000 a month—not as a writer, but as Wong Kar-Wai’s personal assistant. According to Gu, he was responsible for everything from script drafts to cooking meals, all while coping with increasingly debilitating ALS symptoms. For three years, he tried to resolve the issue quietly, facing—again, according to him—stonewalling, legal pressure, and attempts to bury his claims.
His patience ran out. And then came the leaked tapes. As the days went on, the releases became significantly more damning. In the later recordings, Wong can be heard talking about setting up a bootcamp for aspiring writers, with the clear implication that he’d then steal their work. Both Wong and Qin can be heard acknowledging that Gu had written most of ‘Blossoms,’ contradicting the official credits entirely. They also make a range of sexist comments about women and about female audiences— remarks that have spread widely across Chinese platforms.
The recordings depict Wong publicly belittling Gu, mocking his condition, and humiliating him for sport, even as Gu’s ALS symptoms worsened. By the time the most recent tapes were released, public opinion in China had decisively turned.
Yet I don’t even think what I’ve written so far is what will get Wong canceled in China. What’s more likely to be the culprit is that the tapes also contain disparaging comments about the Chinese government and its COVID-era policies. Wong reportedly describes the CCP as ‘a greedy one-party state.’ That alone is often enough to end a filmmaker’s mainland career. Combined with the rest, it’s difficult to imagine a path forward for him in China. He is also said to have remarked that the CCP ‘has no compassion’ and ‘only knows how to reap people’s lives like crops.’
While I agree, and it seems likely to me that this guy would minimally be taken to court over what happened (depending on the legality of the recordings, unfortunately), I think the article is even worse than that:
Not “arrested,” “canceled.” It’s just such a sick society that never mind a criminal case and the massive public outrage described in the article, I guess even Chinese media companies aren’t worried about anything, even selfishly (as all corporate “cancelling” is!), so long as it’s not what the malicious CPC censors force on them. It’s as though they are saying that either the people of China won’t care in a month or these companies just let people who are openly publicly reviled as abusive criminals take top-billing on their media projects so long as it’s not posting a picture of Winnie the Pooh on Weibo.
It’s like as soon as anyone mentions criticism of the government, literally anything else that could be said about this society of 1.4 billion people needs to be completely subordinated to Manichean narratives about the CPC, the evil of which is so great that it makes all other evils indifferent and any non-Party villain a victim.
Like, yeah, I totally believe that CPC bureaucrats will use the public outcry as cover to take revenge on him for his attacks on the Party, but that doesn’t mean that whether this guy had a good career ahead of him hinged so singularly on this aspect like the article suggests.