The great glass ceiling of Chinese cinema: pretty young men and few females in the top roles

The latest instalment of Stephen Chow Sing-chi’s Journey to the West: The Demon Strikes Back , Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall , long-time Jackie Chan collaborator Ding Sheng’s upcoming adaptation of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow – a pretty disparate batch of films, but there’s one thing that links them (and many other mainland Chinese blockbusters) together.

These all boast generous helpings of xiao xian rou. Literally translated as “little fresh meat”, it’s the widely accepted and highly fashionable term of describing pretty young men. And they are, indeed, nearly omnipresent on mainland Chinese screens these days, even when they don’t necessary fit the logic or premise of the films themselves.

Producers of The Demon Strikes Back and A Better Tomorrow 4 – yes, that’s the very imaginative official title to the John Woo remake – have gone out of their way to replace older characters with much younger and more photogenic faces, much to the chagrin of fans of the original films.

Critics have lambasted the shallow performances of heartthrobs Kris Wu Yifan and Kenny Lin Gengxin in Demon, and John Woo aficionados have been venting their fury online at Ding’s decision to reinvent A Better Tomorrow’s hard-boiled, battle-hardened characters as fetching twentysomethings (to be played by the trio of Wang Kai, Darren Wang Da-lu and Ray Ma Tianyu).

Meanwhile, The Great Wall’s main attraction in China wasn’t necessarily Matt Damon, top-billing actress Jing Tian or Zhang Yimou himself. Step forward, Lu Han. While playing one of Jing’s submissive underlings, the 26-year-old former K-pop star seemed to be getting all the squeals from young, female filmgoers whenever he appeared on screen, as attested by this writer’s experience while watching the film in Shenzhen.