Billionaire actress Zhao Wei erased from history
Zhao Wei, one of China’s top actresses, has all but vanished from the internet after the Chinese government scrubbed any record of her online.
Serials and chat shows featuring the actress are no longer available on Chinese streaming sites and her name has been removed from online credits for movies she has appeared in.
Ms Wei rose to fame in the late 1990s after appearing on China’s highly popular television series, My Fair Princess. Since then, she has gone on to become a director, pop singer, and businesswoman on top of being an A-list actress.
But, after Ms Wei was accused of being unpatriotic in hiring a Taiwanese actor for a leading role in a 2016 film, she began to run into trouble.
Her hiring decision was overturned and Ms Wei’s business acquisitions soon came under close regulatory and taxation scrutiny.
Last month, a public relations agency she owns was hit with a nationalistic scandal after one of its clients took a selfie during a visit to Japan’s Yasukuni war dead shrine.
Over the weekend, Chinese news sites reported that Ms Wei had fled the country and was spotted at France’s Bordeaux airport.
The crackdown on Ms Wei comes as Beijing’s Cyberspace Administration agency issued a series of instructions for social media and internet operators to “rectify” issues with fan communities.
The new instructions aim to ensure “political and ideological safety in the cyberspace as well as creating a clean internet”.
This also means celebrities can no longer be ranked in terms of popularity, talent agencies must be overseen by the Community Party, and fan clubs must be licenced and officially authorised.
Previously, China’s National Radio and Television Administration ordered that actors be banished if their “morality is not noble”, are “tasteless, vulgar and obscene”, or if their “ideological level is low and [they] have no class”.
Ms Wei has also been accused by the Communist Party-controlled Global Times of being “entangled in various scandals over the years”, but provides no official reason for her erasure.
Any discussions of why she has been erased is also being censored on social media.
Image: Getty Images