Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

by Evan Osnos

In April 2013 the filmmaker Feng Xiaogang was giving a mundane acceptance speech for the Director of the Year award when he seized the chance to make a bold statement; he cut short his list of thank-yous and said, “For the last twenty years, every director in China has faced a kind of tremendous torment, and that torment is censorship.” Feng was no dissident; he’d made a bare-handed fortune on romantic comedies and big-budget epics, but the decades of compromises and concessions were rubbing a raw spot on his professional pride. “To get approval, I have to cut my films in ways that actually make them worse,” he told the audience. If his point wasn’t clear enough, the censors unwittingly drove it home to viewers: while he was speaking, someone in the control booth hit a button just in time to censor Feng’s reference to censorship; viewers at home heard him say, “that torment is [beep].”