The Party Has Run Out of Stories

From Detective Chinatown 1900 to A Love Letter to Grandma, and from Wolf Warrior to a realtor at LAX

By Hiroto Senda

At Chinese New Year in 2025, the season’s great patriotic blockbuster was Detective Chinatown 1900. It is set in San Francisco at the height of the Chinese Exclusion era. A white woman is murdered, a Chinese man is accused, and the city demands that Chinatown be shut down. The climax belongs to Chow Yun-fat, who faces a white courtroom and wins back his community’s dignity, while a dying character’s last words are a plea to save China. The director said he had been moved, while writing the script, by watching TikTok’s chief executive face the US Congress. San Francisco was rebuilt at full scale in a county in Shandong with the local government’s help, and the film earned more than 3.6 billion yuan.

This is the old Wong Fei-hung formula of the 1990s, updated for the trade war: Chinese abroad, humiliated by foreigners, are united by blood and redeemed by standing up. It is aimed at audiences at home. It gives holiday crowds a good afternoon, and it gives the propaganda authorities exactly what they want to see.

Fifteen months later, the flagship film of the party’s overseas work is something very different. A Love Letter to Grandma is a small Teochew-language drama about qiaopi, the letters and remittances that Southeast Asian migrants once sent home. It has no foreign villains, no courtroom and no call to save China. And the officials promoting it do not hide what they want. A district United Front Work Department in Anhui said its screenings for returned overseas Chinese were meant to encourage overseas Chinese to invest in their hometowns. A party school in Hunan marched its students into the cinema to watch the film from a United Front perspective. The foreign ministry hosted 150 diplomats.

In 2025, the message was: we are one people, so stand up. In 2026, the message is: remember your grandmother, and send money. In a single year, the regime’s tone has moved from pride to need.

Neither campaign will move anyone who matters. No family conglomerate in Singapore or Bangkok redirects its capital because a district office in Anhui bought a block of cinema tickets. These campaigns are not really aimed outward at all. They are aimed upward. They produce attendance figures, photographs and work reports that show superiors the task has been done. Whether audiences enjoyed the film is beside the point. What matters is that a modest family drama became the party’s flagship overseas message for the year, because nothing more ambitious could be conceived, funded or approved. A system in which every official’s real goal is a satisfied superior will produce exactly this, in film studios, in ministries, and throughout the party.

Measure this against the party’s high-water mark. That peak was not the 1960s, when Beijing broadcast revolution into the jungles of Thailand and Malaya. By then, after the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, the party was already in decline and exporting ideology because it had little else to export. The real peak came in 1950. Having taken Manchuria, with the Japanese arsenals the Soviets handed over and with Soviet weapons of its own, the party felt strong enough to join Stalin and Kim Il-sung in a war to wipe South Korea off the map. By the spring of 1951, its offensives were breaking against United Nations firepower at enormous cost. The war ended close to where it began, and the Republic of Korea survived. That was the party at its most ambitious: it set out to erase a nation.

Even a decade ago, its ambitions remained large. In 2017, Wolf Warrior 2 earned more than five billion yuan with a fantasy of Chinese commandos rescuing people in Africa while the world looked on in awe. Set that against a remittance drama screened for party-school students, and the distance travelled is plain.

The same decline shows up in the secret world. According to the FBI, the person sent to watch the family of Taiwan’s president was a 34-year-old real estate agent from Irvine. She allegedly received her task in a private room in Changsha, reported over WeChat, left the messages in her iCloud account, and was arrested at the airport as she tried to board a flight to Shanghai. The courts will decide her case. But if this is how the party now runs an operation against the family of Taiwan’s head of state, it tells us something. It is no longer sending professionals; it is sending amateurs, because the job only has to be done well enough to be reported.

From trying to conquer Korea, to Wolf Warrior, to a grandmother’s letters and a realtor with an iPhone. The party’s ambitions have not changed. What it has lost is the means to pursue them. It has not collapsed. It is simply spent.