By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Seven years in Tibet and the Chinese interference

In part one, we covered a new brand of diplomacy taking hold in Beijing, and its chief architects have a suitably fierce nickname to match their aggressive style, which is all due to a movie; they are the wolf warriors. Twelve days after its premiere, Wolf Warrior 2 was not just the highest-grossing movie of the year; it was the highest-grossing movie in China’s history.

 

Where underneath, we will chronicle why the head of strategic planning for the Walt Disney Company flew to Washington DC to explain Disney’s decision to make a movie, but the Chinese continued to be resolutely opposed to making this movie. Hence the head of strategic planning next felt the need to approach the former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, for help.

 

                               

Tibet in  Beijing

 

The main entrance of the Tibet Hotel is seen behind a police vehicle parked outside the hotel at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Friday, 11 Feb. 2022, in Beijing. People attending the Beijing Winter Olympics can’t visit Tibet because they’re in China’s “closed loop” system for foreign visitors. But some visitors, including part of the Associated Press’ Olympics team, are getting a taste of the region because they’ve been assigned to the Tibet Hotel. The hotel has been built and outfitted to evoke the remote area on China’s western edge.

One of the hotel’s two restaurants, Shambhala, a reference from Tibetan Buddhism to a mythical kingdom hidden in the Himalayas, is decorated with prayers wheels along one wall. It’s closed during the Olympics because there aren’t enough diners.

This Chinese belief in Shambhala essentially (and we don’t claim that is where Chinese believers got it from) goes back to Saint Yves d’Alveydre, Mission de l’Inde en Europe. According to Sven Hedin, Ossendowski and the Truth,1925, was then borrowed by Ferdynand Ossendowski in his highly popular Beasts Men and Gods, where Ossendowski claims that he had heard about it in Mongolia included a subterranean realm of 800 million inhabitants called “Agharti”; of its triple spiritual authority “Brahytma the King of the World.”

This wasn’t Ossendowski’s first literary fraud, as historian George F. Kennan has pointed out, he was also co-creator of the so-called “Sisson documents.”

The backgrounds story of the movie, which we covered early on, presented extensive details about the original German expedition the Brad Pitt movie referred to.

A government relations executive at Sony Pictures Entertainment received a perplexing phone call that concerned a politically sensitive movie called Seven Years in Tibet. Brad Pitt and David Thewlis were stars, with music composed by John Williams with a feature performance by renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Howard Stringer, Sony Corporation of America’s top executive, explained that the film had been shown to some Chinese officials. It had so offended them that there was no concern that they might expel all Sony business from the country.

Work on Seven Years in Tibet had begun innocently enough. In the early 1990s, Jean-Jacques Annaud, a French director known for little-seen but well-respected art house movies like The Bear and The Lover, was drawn to Asia after filming a movie in Vietnam. He had a strong desire to return and explore the continent’s spirituality and asked his assistant for books he could adapt into movies on the theme. She brought him Heinrich Harrer’s memoir. Harrer was a mountaineer who’d left Nazi Europe to summit Nanga Parbat in British India, only to be taken prisoner, and eventually finds himself tutoring a teenage Dalai Lama as war broke out between Tibet and China. “Fabulous,” thought Annaud as he read the book and assessed its cinematic potential. “Here’s a blond Aryan Nazi who becomes the teacher of the Dalai Lama.” Brad Pitt, Hollywood’s most famous blond, got the part.

The movie was perfectly timed for the Dalai Lama’s star-making moment in Hollywood. He was born in a shed and identified as the fourteenth incarnation of the Dalai Lama at four years old. Now the docile monk lived in Dharamsala, where a government-in-exile of about 113,000 Tibetans sandwiched between China and India is based. As the repression of Tibet grew, the Dalai Lama’s public persona rose. In 1989 he won the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1992 he guest-edited the December issue of French Vogue.

The following year, Richard Gere, star of An Officer and a Gentleman and Pretty Woman, went off-script before announcing the winner for Best Art Direction at the Academy Awards to decry the “horrendous, horrendous human rights situation” in Tibet. Sharon Stone called herself a disciple. In a 1997 ceremony in India attended by 1,500 monks and nuns, Steven Seagal, the star of ultraviolent revenge fantasies like Hard to Kill, was anointed a tulku, a “reincarnated lama and radiant emanation of the Buddha.” Disney’s ABC put Dharma & Greg, about a young American woman embracing Buddhism, on its prime-time lineup. A charming monk who encouraged others to shun all earthly possessions had become the patron saint of Beverly Hills.

His Holiness was so popular that soon there were not one but two movies about him underway. Also, among those taken in were E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial screenwriter Melissa Mathison and her husband, Harrison Ford, already a fixture in the Hollywood firmament as the star of Star Wars and Raiders of Lost Ark. The couple had traveled to Tibet in 1992 and met a tour guide, Gendun Rinchen, who China accused of being a spy and imprisoned for nearly a year. Mathison was preparing to write Kundun, a screenplay about the Dalai Lama’s teenage years. Mathison wanted to ground Tibet in the story of the real people caught in a political and spiritual tinderbox. “Part of the tragedy of Tibet is that it’s been Shangri-La” in Hollywood movies, she said, presented as a caricature and not as a pressing humanitarian crisis. “Nobody believed it existed in the first place, so its destruction was the destruction of a fantasy.” She began telling associates in Hollywood that hers would be the original Dalai Lama production of 1997; she and Ford had flown to India and read the Kundun script with the man himself. Martin Scorsese came on board to direct. Then the Dalai Lama, ever the diplomat, also endorsed the story that had inspired Seven Years in Tibet.

“Harrer is one of the few Westerners who [are] fully acquainted with the Tibetan way of life. His book is beautiful and good,” the Dalai Lama said. He added, “Since I was 15 or 16, there has been a tragic situation in my country, and most of my life has been spent under difficult circumstances. Buddhist teaching has helped me to retain hope and determination in this time, so perhaps a story about such a person must be a good thing.”

 

We are resolutely opposed to the making of this movie

The history that both Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet explored was nearly fifty years old, but it was fresh in the minds of Chinese officials. China invaded Tibet in 1949, its soldiers sweeping through the region and ordering monks to reeducation camps. Soldiers destroyed religious temples and killed villagers. Bronze statues from the area were melted down for copper. A decade later, Chinese soldiers handily defeated a Tibetan insurrection, and the Dalai Lama escaped to India, worried his murder or capture would spell the total end of Tibetan Buddhism. He still lives there today; his power is defined more by where he cannot go than by where he can. To Americans, Tibetans can be viewed as spiritual brethren to their country’s colonists, persecuted for their beliefs, and forced to find refuge elsewhere. But to many Chinese, the Tibetans’ argument for sovereignty, as one scholar put it, is akin to an American hearing about a “rally calling for Hawaii to be returned to the descendants of the last king of those islands.” His mere presence - let alone his star power - is a one-person rebuke to what China considers its rightful borders. At least one U.S. executive knew making a movie about this history was bad for business.

Edgar Bronfman Jr., the CEO of the beverage company Seagram, acquired Universal Studios in 1995. Scorsese had a distribution deal with Universal at the time, but things quickly grew tense between him and the new owner. The director had recently wrapped his three-hour epic Casino, and Bronfman wanted him to cut forty-five minutes from the film to make it commercially viable. Scorsese refused, prompting Bronfman to wonder why a studio had employees if they wouldn’t listen to the boss. Then Scorsese brought the boss Kundun.

Kundun tells the story of the early life of the 14th and current Dalai Lama, born in 1935 in Amdo, Tibet (now part of Qinghai, China). Tibetan Buddhists believe the Dalai Lama to be the reincarnation of Chenrezig, a legendary bodhisattva (someone who seeks enlightenment to help others), and look to him as their political and spiritual leader.

“I’m not doing this. I don’t need to have my spirits, and wine business was thrown out of China,” Bronfman said. Through his beverage deals, Bronfman was already aware of a principle Hollywood was learning in real-time: in China, political mistakes are punished with economic sanctions. Alienating China with a movie wasn’t about losing the paltry box-office sales it might yield. It was about allowing that movie to become a contaminant in the larger corporate structure, one that put far more significant revenues at risk. For Sony, China threatened disruption of an electronics supply chain that would cost billions to rebuild. At Disney, where Scorsese took the project after Bronfman’s refusal, it was the TV channel, theme park, and Mickey Mouse plush dolls that might not pass through Chinese borders because of a midbudget drama being made through a production deal signed by a subdivision of a subdivision.

Chinese officials didn’t care what the studio executives knew or when. “We are resolutely opposed to the making of this movie,” said an official in China’s film bureau of Kundun months before it was scheduled to hit theaters. “It is intended to glorify the Dalai Lama, so it is an interference in China’s internal affairs.”

When had a movie release ever been received with the language of spycraft? For the first time, a certain kind of message had been sent from China to Hollywood at large, as effective as if couriers had been dispatched to every office with a telegram. There’s a saying in Chinese, shā jī jǐng hóu, which roughly translates to “kill the chicken to scare the monkeys.” The chicken was the person who could be made a public example of; the monkeys were everyone who watched and learned from that person’s mistake. The cases of Seven Years in Tibet and Kundun were the first clash of Hollywood moviemaking with Chinese politics. Still, as the industry’s entanglement with China grew, Sony and Disney would have a lot of companies in the coop.

When officials in the town where the Seven Years in Tibet production was based, Ladakh’s border region told the film crew that India, under pressure from China, had threatened to cut off their electricity if filming continued, then the production was denied permission to open a local bank account. Cutting off the power was one thing. Cutting off the money was another, and Chinese pressure stopped the production for the thirty minutes it took the film crew to secure permission to move Seven Years in Tibet to a friendlier country.

The cast and crew hence decamped to the Andes Mountains along the border of Chile and Argentina. This range broached the same altitude as their original location in Ladakh but was safely located halfway around the world. Laborers reconstructed Lhasa. The roughly one hundred monks cast in the movie, some of whom had signed their contracts with purple-inked thumbprints, flew to South America, crying when they saw the movie-set simulacrum of their lost city. They were a lot cast out by the world. The Argentine government had limited the number of monks granted entry, worried they would stay and form a politically problematic settlement. When Argentinian customs agents wouldn’t allow Asian yaks in, fearing they carried disease, the director Jean-Jacques Annaud’s crew sourced new yaks from Montana. These yaks stepped off the cargo plane and into roles for which they’d been miscast; they were not, Annaud realized, working yaks but “yak de Compagnie,” accustomed to a life of leisure on the Montana prairie and unprepared to haul heavy bags on their backs. Two were eventually trained to the point that Annaud could get the shots he needed. Annaud had effectively re-created Tibet in the Andes, though modern life would sneak in every morning when Argentinian teenagers screamed for Pitt as his motorcade rode into a set.

When she sat down to watch the completed film soon after receiving the call from her studio’s CEO, Hope Boonshaft had only a cursory understanding of Chinese politics. Still, it didn’t take a sinologist to see why China would be offended. The movie opens with a toddler Dalai Lama, still missing a few teeth, receiving gifts from prostrating Tibetans. After Harrer’s capture, the Dalai Lama, now a young boy, is drawn to the white man who teaches monks how to ice-skate. Harrer (along with moviegoers) learns what China doesn’t want anyone to know: his surrogate son is the spiritual leader of millions. They understand the rarefied world he lives in, where no one is ever to be seated higher than him, speak before he does, or look him in the eye. Harrer becomes his tutor of the outside world, telling him where Paris is, who Jack the Ripper was, what a Molotov cocktail can do. Harrer, in turn, adopts the Tibetan sensibility: he respects all living creatures and learns the omen that an asteroid portends. In this case, the evil omen is Mao, who a radio broadcaster tells us has consolidated power and vows to reclaim Tibet.

China had reason to fear the way the movie presented it. Chinese soldiers mow down statues of Buddha with machine guns, bomb villages, and chase out terrified citizens. The Chinese send officials to reason with the Dalai Lama, offering autonomy and religious freedom if China accepts its political master. The Dalai Lama’s teachings of nonviolence and compassion make the Chinese officials look like boorish fools. Harrer leaves Tibet a changed man, of course, one who reconnects with his estranged son and at one point plants a Tibetan flag atop a mountain. The movie’s final image: text on the screen reminding the audience of the one million Tibetans dead at the hands of the Chinese occupation.

The lights came up in Boonshaft’s screening room on the Sony lot. Years later, Sony would learn how easy it was to cut a single scene or line of dialogue from a movie to get approval from Chinese censors, but this was a 130-minute humanization of a Chinese state enemy and an assault on its most sensitive political issue. Boonshaft hustled to manage damage control, calling Jim Sasser, an old friend from Washington who served as U.S. ambassador to China. He recommended she immediately acquaint herself with local Chinese officials and study Mandarin. It was all a matter of building up guanxi, the Chinese mixture of etiquette and politesse that undergirds every relationship in Chinese professional circles. More than simply networking or quid pro quo arrangements, guanxi is a level of trust that must be established before any deal is completed or truce reached.

Hope Boonshaft’s first step toward building it: traveling across town to introduce herself to the Chinese consul and the Chinese cultural attaché in Los Angeles. Her second step: going to the Tiffany in Beverly Hills to buy offertory presents (she had already learned not to give them clocks, since the Chinese view such gifts as a death omen). Her third step: doing whatever she could to get in their good graces. Even in 1997, Boonshaft could see that China’s top priority was to spread its influence abroad. She started screening local Chinese movies on the Sony lot, another suggestion of Sasser’s that meant the world to Chinese officials trying to develop the credibility of their film industry. The screenings were by invitation only, and the consulate managed the guest list. The movies themselves were not high priorities for Sony, but the expense of dessert for the receptions afterward was a small price to pay if it built up goodwill. Those Chinese officials cheered to see Sony executives drop by unannounced and express interest in China’s entertainment industry did not know that Boonshaft had invited them for the charm offensive. 

She brought herself up to speed on the history of China’s relationship with Japan, learning about the Battle of Nanjing, the six-week massacre of some three hundred thousand Chinese civilians at the hands of Japan’s Imperial Army. The so-called Rape of Nanjing had occurred sixty years prior, but the Chinese had never forgotten the murders - or Japan’s refusal to apologize for them. Sony, Japan’s best-known company, did business with China, but Boonshaft always sensed tension. Now the Chinese were unhappy about a movie whose release was still months away.

No matter: Chinese officials took advantage of Sony’s willingness to please. The country asked Sony and the other studios to support its bid to join the World Trade Organization - a request they all accommodated. They asked Sony to sponsor a table at a Los Angeles event honoring the Chinese prime minister - a proposal it accommodated. Boonshaft hosted a Mandarin tutor in her office each week to demonstrate her commitment to celebrating their culture. 

Disney CEO Michael Eisner and his team needed to find the least bad option. They had weighed shutting down the movie before the situation had gone public but knew doing so would risk Scorsese’s wrath. The director would tar them in the press as bowing to a totalitarian regime, and the rest of the industry would rally against Disney for silencing the director. China’s threats challenged a core tenet of Hollywood, especially of filmmakers like Scorsese, who’d been inspired by the European auteurs of the mid-twentieth century. Movies were a business, to be sure. Still, they were also a vehicle of American expression, an industry where filmmakers were unafraid to take on - were even celebrated for taking on - politically charged topics.

Disney ultimately decided on a Goldilocks option: release the movie, but as quietly as possible. They would spend as little money as possible to market the film in a limited release. Once that dearth of marketing led to lousy returns in its opening weeks, Disney would have justification to tell Scorsese that it wasn’t worth expanding to theaters nationwide. Still, no one in Hollywood could argue that Disney had censored it.

 

Kundun

Peter Murphy, the head of strategic planning for the Walt Disney Company, flew to DC to explain Disney’s decision to the Chinese. He brought Henry Kissinger with him. The diplomat didn’t say much, understanding that his role was to sit and lend some gravitas to the situation. He joined Murphy on one side of the table; more than half a dozen Chinese officials faced them. Murphy told the Chinese that the limited release for Kundun was good for them since it would avoid any critics saying China had censored a Hollywood movie. Neither was it. Coincidentally, Kissinger came aboard as Disney was planning the release of the Martin Scorsese film “Kundun.”

All of that promise and ambition were suddenly endangered in 1996 when Peter Murphy, the head of strategic planning for the Walt Disney Company, received a phone call to his Los Angeles office. It was the Chinese embassy in Washington. An official there had called Disney’s general line and been directed to Murphy. “You started, in the last forty-eight hours, shooting a film about the Dalai Lama called Kundun, the embassy official said.

As the embassy official had said, his colleagues told him that it was a drama being directed by Martin Scorsese about the Dalai Lama. It had taken only two days after cameras started rolling for word of the production to travel from its set in Morocco to Beijing, where officials were not happy. After learning about the film and the story, Murphy realized that making this movie endangered Disney’s entire future in China. He didn’t know it at the time, but that phone call to his Burbank office was the start of a cautionary tale for all of Hollywood; it was a sign that the capital offered in China was inextricably tied to politics. On the afternoon of the call from the Chinese embassy, a future in which China would exercise remarkable power in Hollywood - the ability to green-light projects and change scripts like an invisible studio - began to take shape.

In the meantime, though, Murphy needed to put out this fire. He called the person who was already on retainer to help Disney navigate the Chinese power structure and who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Henry Kissinger listened to Murphy as he laid out the Kundun issue. Murphy’s mind was racing with the implications it might spell for Disney’s plans in China, but the former secretary of state remained unfazed by the whole thing. Granted, Kissinger had negotiated Nixon’s meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972, a détente that reorganized the world order. Given China’s economic growth and the political power it had accrued since Nixon and Mao shook hands in Beijing, it was fitting that, twenty-four years later, he would be called in to save Mickey Mouse.

When next Murphy flew to DC to explain Disney’s decision to the Chinese. He brought Kissinger with him. The diplomat didn’t say much, understanding that his role was to sit and lend some gravitas to the situation. He joined Murphy on one side of the table; more than half a dozen Chinese officials faced them. Murphy told the Chinese that the limited release for Kundun was good for them since it would avoid any critics saying China had censored a Hollywood movie. 

“You do not want us to kill this film. It’s not good for either of us,” he explained, parsing his words to avoid using the word apology. He expressed regret for “the situation we find ourselves in” - not for making the movie. But the Chinese didn’t understand.

Across town at Sony Pictures Entertainment, a government relations executive named Hope Boonshaft received a perplexing phone call of her own only a few months later, in the spring of 1997. Of all things, it also concerned a politically sensitive movie about the Dalai Lama, this one called Seven Years in Tibet.

Howard Stringer, Sony Corporation of America’s top executive, explained that the film had been shown to some Chinese officials. It had so offended them that there was no concern that they might expel all Sony business from the country. The film wasn’t just putting Sony movies at risk; in the mid-1990s, the Chinese box office could have hardly covered a few executive salaries anyway. It was threatening “big Sony,” as employees put it - the manufacturer of computers and televisions that had led Japan’s electronics boom since its founding just after the end of World War II. The prospect of losing access to China’s factories and customers meant billions of dollars were on the line.

Work on Seven Years in Tibet had begun innocently enough. In the early 1990s, Jean-Jacques Annaud, a French director known for little-seen but well-respected art house movies like The Bear and The Lover, was drawn to Asia after filming a movie in Vietnam. He had a strong desire to return and explore the continent’s spirituality and asked his assistant for books he could adapt to the theme’s film. She brought him Heinrich Harrer’s memoir. Harrer was a mountaineer who’d left Nazi Europe to summit Nanga Parbat in British India, only to be taken prisoner, and eventually finds himself tutoring a teenage Dalai Lama as war broke out between Tibet and China. “Fabulous,” thought Annaud as he read the book and assessed its cinematic potential. “Here’s a blond Aryan Nazi who becomes the teacher of the Dalai Lama.” Brad Pitt, Hollywood’s most famous blond, got the part.

 

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