Then, after 2010, the government decided there was big money to be made in movies. State banks began to finance mergers and acquisitions, and China’s studios went on a buying bender. They snapped up the U.S. theater chain AMC, tried to purchase Dick Clark Productions, which produces the Golden Globes, and signed major financing deals with Sony Pictures, Universal, Fox, and Lionsgate. In total, the deals added up to $10 billion, heavily financed by state-backed banks. Today the Chinese film industry produces more than 800 films a year, and China will soon overtake the United States as the world’s largest film market. For the past four years, China has been building 25 new movie screens every day.

Because show business is still so new in China—it’s been only 20 years since private companies have been allowed to make movies—there aren’t many bankable stars who can guarantee box-office success. As a result, A-list actors like Fan Bingbing were able to command top dollar: it was not uncommon for as much as 90 percent of a film’s production budget to go toward on-screen talent. “We are in the golden age of Hollywood, where the star is key,” said a Chinese film executive who asked not to be identified.

Last year, after Fan turned down the role of the Chinese oceanographer in The Meg, a sci-fi thriller produced by Warner Bros., the studio considered Tang Wei and Jing Tian before deciding on Li Bingbing. “It’s a very short list,” said the same executive, who was involved in the film. Fan seemed poised to become that impossible thing: a star who can appease fans in the three Chinas—mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—as well as Hollywood studios, and their sudden desire for Asian faces.

The star-dependent culture was on full display at a DVD store in Beijing where I bought pirated copies of Fan’s movies. Discs were organized not by title or category but by actor. Nicolas Cage, Tom Hanks, Tom Hardy, and Jason Statham all received the full-row treatment. Nicole Kidman, whom many Chinese consider a vision of unimpeachable beauty, also got her own row. Others—Natalie Portman, Michelle Williams, even Meryl Streep—were relegated to a row seemingly reserved for miscellaneous white actresses.

In the years that the Chinese film industry was allowed to grow unregulated, it became common for stars to falsify contracts to avoid paying taxes on the huge sums that they were commanding. That’s why Fan’s sudden fall sent a chill through the rest of the film world. “There was a certain surprise in the industry,” said Kwei, the producer. “Fan Bingbing was only doing the usual standard package.” David Unger, Gong Li’s manager, put it more bluntly. “The big error,” he said, “was that she was caught.”

Fan’s disappearance, and the subsequent crackdown, was the result of larger forces at play: After years of double-digit growth, the Chinese economy is slowing down. The government claims that economic output grew by 6.5 percent last year—the lowest rate in more than a decade—but observers believe the rate is as low as 2 percent. With consumer spending slowing and foreign investment plunging in the midst of a trade war, the government is seeking to redirect economic power back under state control. It won’t be long, many in China predict, before the tax scandal bleeds into other sectors. What happened to Fan was merely the “primary incision,” says Alex Zhang, executive director of Zhengfu Pictures. Soon, the authorities will “cut all the way down to the rest of the business community.”

In March 2018, President Xi established the National Supervision Commission, granting it sweeping powers to investigate corruption and tax evasion. Suspects could now be legally kidnapped, interrogated, and held for as long as six months. That same month, he also gave the Central Publicity Department, which heads up propaganda efforts, the authority to regulate the film industry. (The only other time film was put under the propaganda ministry, according to industry insiders, was during the Cultural Revolution.) Films that had passed the censors years ago have now been retroactively banned. “That liminal space where you can get away with stuff, that’s gone,” said Michael Berry, a professor of contemporary Chinese culture at U.C.L.A.

Fan was not alone in evading taxes: “The big error was that she was caught.”

Under Xi’s crackdown, tens of thousands of people have disappeared into the maw of the police state. An eminent TV news anchor was taken away hours before going on air. A retired professor with views critical of the government was dragged away during a live interview on Voice of America. A billionaire was abducted from his private quarters in the Four Seasons in Hong Kong. Other high-profile disappearances include Interpol president Meng Hongwei in September, photojournalist Lu Guang in November, two Canadians who went missing in December, as well as the writer Yang Hengjun, who went missing in January. “The message being sent out is that nobody is too tall, too big, too famous, too pretty, too whatever,” said Steve Tsang, who runs the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.