The opening ceremony of the annual Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival will take place this Saturday. However, rising tension across the Strait has taken its toll. China-funded films have boycotted the award show en masse, raising serious questions about Golden Horse’s prestige and position in the film industry. On the flip side, this year has not been ideal for the Chinese movie market, which has also felt the squeeze of China’s oppressive political atmosphere.

The 56th Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival will take place this Saturday. This year, the biggest challenge is the boycott of the award show by Chinese movies, many of which chose not to compete or intentionally dropped out during the second round due to bad blood across the Taiwan Strait. Even famed Hong Kong director Johnnie To (杜琪峯), who had been chosen as head of the jury, resigned his position. Word on the grapevine is To quit because he was concerned about the box office performance of his new movie "Chasing Dream" (我的拳王男友), set to premiere in China this November. Unfortunately, the film festival has become the latest ideological battleground between China and Taiwan. The competition is still stiff and exciting, but it’s not the same without the participation of Chinese films.

Most Chinese films distanced themselves from the award show because they are afraid of angering the Chinese government and getting banned in China. China is the world’s second largest movie market. Its annual box office revenue went from 17.1 billion renminbi in 2012 to 61 billion in 2018—an increase of almost 50 billion in seven years. The cinema admissions count in 2018 was over 1.7 billion viewers. The Chinese market may well surpass the United States next year and become the biggest market in the world. This is a gigantic pie and everyone wants a piece of it.

Despite the continuous box office growth, the Chinese movie market also had its share of woes this year.

Beijing doubled down on its effort to monitor and tax the film industry and filmmakers this year. Censorship also went into overdrive ahead of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Over the summer months of July and August, plenty of blockbuster films were pulled from theaters at the last minute. The number of films available in the market dropped drastically as the result. Even “The Eight Hundred” (八佰), a war movie about the defense of the Sihang Warehouse during the opening phase of the Second Sino-Japanese War, was pulled because it showed Nationalist forces in a positive light.

According to Bloomberg, the result of all this was the Chinese box office dropping 3.6% during the first half of 2019. Even large film companies and movie theater chain owners such as Huayi Brothers Media Corporation (華誼兄弟) and Wanda Cinema Line Corp. (萬達影業) saw their revenue, profit, and stock prices go down.

This has been described as a sign that the Chinese movie market has entered its “cold winter”. Some are even pessimistic about whether China can become the largest movie market in the world in 2020.

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Translated by Jack C.
Edited by Sharon Tseng
Cover image courtesy to TGHFF Facebook Fanpage