Golden Rooster vs Golden Horse: how top film awards in China and Taiwan could be in direct competition

China’s Golden Rooster Awards will now be held every year, and in Xiamen, a city on the Taiwan Strait – a possible challenge to Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards

China boycotted this year’s Golden Horse Awards, whose organisers remain tight-lipped ahead of this weekend’s announcement of the 2019 winners

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Guests unveil a symbolic golden rooster sculpture to mark the opening of the 28th China Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival in Xiamen, Fujian province. Photo: Xinhua/Jiang Kehong

Published: 6:00pm, 22 Nov 2019Updated: 6:38pm, 22 Nov 2019

Featuring Jackie Chan, famous Chinese director Zhang Yimou and other A-list celebrities, the Golden Rooster Awards opened to great fanfare on Tuesday. Held in Xiamen in Fujian province, the 32nd edition is the biggest yet, say organisers, attracting 277 entries in 19 categories.

At the awards’ opening, the organisers announced that from now on, they would he held annually, instead of every two years, and that, instead of rotating the event between different major cities in China, Xiamen, just across the Taiwan Strait from Taiwan, would be its permanent location.

Observers of the Taiwanese film industry, which holds Golden Horse Awards – known as the “Oscars of Chinese-language film” – this weekend called the announcements confrontational and said they would further stoke tensions in the cultural sphere between Taiwan and mainland China sparked by the latter’s announcement in August of an unprecedented boycott of this year’s Golden Horse Awards.

As with all such festivities held in the year mainland China celebrated the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the communist People’s Republic of China, discussion of the state of its film industry at forums held on the awards’ opening day was notable for its pomposity.

Huang Kunming, head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, addresses the opening ceremony of the 28th China Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival in Xiamen. Photo: Xinhua/Ding Lin

At one forum Wang Changtian, chairman of production company Beijing Enlight Media, gushed about the 5 billion yuan (US$710 million) box office takings for Nezha , a Chinese 3D computer animation fantasy released this year. “We are convinced that China’s animation industry will exceed Hollywood and Japan to become the market leader,” he said.