Battle of the Chinese Movie Queens

I wasn't trying, but I dug up some dirt about actress Chen Yumei, who I blogged about the other day. In my previous post I had reported that she was first runner-up to Hu Die for the title of China's "Movie Queen" in a 1933 newspaper contest. Well, it seems that the rivalry between Miss Chen and Miss Hu carried over the following year. Surprisingly, the story was picked up by U.S. newspapers. According to an article in The Ogden Standard Examiner (May 27, 1934):

Warlords and bandits may ravage the back country, and the Japanese may be consolidating their conquest of the border provinces — but amid all of these distractions, China has found the time and energy to get all wrought up about a row between two movie actresses....

The trouble all started when one of the newspapers in Shanghai conducted a straw ballot for the title of "Movie Queen of 1934" — thus proving that the ways of the press agent are not entirely unknown in the ancient land of the dragon.

At the conclusion of this campaign the title was awarded to Miss Cheng [Chen Yumei], who in private life is Mrs. Shao Tsui-ong, wife of the managing director of the Unique Film Co.

Immediately the storm arose. Most of the other newspapers in Shanghai jumped into the argument with both feet, denouncing the vote as a fraud and asserting stoutly that the title ought to have gone to Miss Wu [Hu Die]. They pointed out that a picture, "Two Sisters," starring Miss Wu [and produced by Mingxing Film Company], played to full houses at the Strand Theater for two months, every seat being sold at every performance — an all-time high record for movie attendance in China.

Although Chen Yumei was undoubtedly a popular actress, it does seem unlikely that she could have beat Hu Die for the title of "Movie Queen". Furthermore, it turns out that her second-best win in the 1933 contest (which placed her ahead of Ruan Lingyu) was generally regarded a result of Runje Shaw's manipulation. So, you can imagine the outrage when she was announced the winner of the 1934 contest.

I don't know how the ensuing "row" was resolved, but nowadays Hu Die is firmly enshrined as "Movie Queen" in the firmament of Chinese cinema, while Chen Yumei seems to be dismissed as a mistress turned movie star. In fact, it's said that when Hu Die left Runje Shaw's Unique Film Company in 1928 and signed on with rival Mingxing Film Company, Runje decided to take Chen Yumei as his second wife and make her the top star of his studio. In this way, the notoriously stingy Runje could "save on actors' pay and prevent their pay from somersaulting once they became big stars" (Chung).

Whether or not this is true is beyond me, but it's obvious that the rivalry between Unique and Mingxing played out in the annual battle of the Chinese "Movie Queens".

Further Reading

• "The Industrial Evolution of a Fraternal Enterprise: The Shaw Brothers and the Shaw Organization" by Stephanie Chung Po-yin in The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study
  
• "Shanghai's Unique Film Productions and Hong Kong's Early Cinema" by Zhou Chengren in The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study