Ming Dynasty Casting Couch

In spite of censorship and limited access to the entire World Wide Web, the Chinese have taken to blogging with a vengeance. That word might best describe actress Zhang Yu's reasons for posting what she has on her personal blog. XXX-rated, by all accounts, and a clever twist on the reality TV concept.

She comes from a poor farming town in Hubei province, and she has dreams of being a big actress. She hasn't had many roles so far, but her current production is making heads spin. Without doubt, her blog is garnering an astronomical number of hits, and could go a long way to furthering her career.

Zhang has blown the whistle on the Chinese entertainment industry, by posting graphic videos of her sessions on the casting couch. She complained about it years ago, when a coveted role would only come her way if she could convince another actress to sleep with the director. He denied it, of course, and no one paid much attention to Zhang's version of events. Since a picture tells a thousand words, she found another way to get her point across.

There are twenty videos posted on her site, which is hosted by Sina.com. Any and all knowledgeable Chinese who have viewed the tapes have gotten an eyeful of some well-known men, some of them household names in China, in flagrante delecto as the Romans might have said if they had videos back then. Want to know how Chinese actresses get roles, Ms. Zhang implies, then have a good long look and doesn't this prove what I said all along?

The average person is, by all accounts, quite horrified by the exploitation of vulnerable young women, and some people claim that they suspected the existence of the casting couch all along. It was certainly a staple in our own budding film industry, and might still exist for all we know. Ms. Zhang has demonstrated, without question, that the casting couch is alive and well in China. And she has also shown that a website with a million hits will get its blogger a lot of publicity, and maybe even a book deal to write her sordid tale.