Aamir Khan and the Chinese Market.

A film about a burkha-wearing Muslim teen who dreams of becoming a pop star might seem like an unlikely hit for China… However, Secret Superstar swept the box-office when it opened on Jan. 19, taking in more than $27 million, outpacing months of India’s earnings in just three days! After its second weekend, its take was over $66 million!

It’s the latest success for Aamir Khan, who is besieged by fans every time he shows up in China. His films have resonated deeply with young people in China. His last movie, Dangal, also about young women struggling for their dreams in a male-dominated sport, was one of the best-grossing foreign films in China last year. Chinese audiences are reacting to the films at a symbolic level. For them it is a story about individualism vs. authoritarianism.

SKEWED SEX RATIOS AND FEMALE DEFIANCE

Secret Superstar tells the story of Insia Malik, or Insu, a Muslim teenager whose dreams of being a famous singer are snuffed out by her domineering, and sometimes abusive, father. Unable to let go of her love of music, Insu dons a burqa, picks up her a guitar, and takes to YouTube, where, as the film title suggests, she becomes an anonymous sensation. Khan plays the role of music show director who discovers Malik.

During the movie, Insu also learns that her mother Najma struggled to keep her alive when her father was pushing for an abortion because he didn’t want to have a girl—a common phenomenon in India, and one to which audiences in China, which has 30 million more men than women, can relate.

Both Secret Superstar and Dangal center on conflicts women face in a patriarchal system. The films also carry on Aamir recurring themes about the importance of pursuing dreams, and female empowerment. Another aspect that likely appealed to audiences in China was the idea of turning to the internet to bypass the parental firewall, given the popularity of live-streaming, a huge phenomenon in China among everyone from young women to farmers.

Dangal became the top-earning Indian film of all time in China, after India-China co-production Kung Fu Yoga, according to box-office data research firm EntGroup. Those achievements come even as China only allows four Indian movies in its annual quota of three dozen or so foreign films, which Hollywood films usually dominate. To many Chinese moviegoers, Aamir Khan is the ambassador for Indian movies. There are well-known Chinese movies focused on similar themes, but they don’t always strike a chord with city audiences.

THE YOUNG AND RESTLESS

Chinese fans have nicknamed Khan “Uncle Mi,” taken from his first name Aamir. During Khan’s five-day visit to China for the promotion of “Secret superstar”, fans from Shanghai and Beijing surrounded him with neon signs of his name. On Weibo, China’s Twitter-esque social platform, Khan’s official blogging site has gathered over a million followers since the first post in April 2016.

Deng Junyi, a sophomore from Hainan Normal University in southern China, said she became a fan of Khan in high school, when she watched Three Idiots, which depicted academic pressure at an Indian engineering school and screened in China in 2011. Deng said the movie touched her because she felt China’s education system also needed to be challenged, yet she found few domestic movies touching the same topic. “His movies changed my concept of Indian movies. Most of the ones I had watched were filled with dancing and singing,” says Deng.

Set at a fictional college modeled on one of India’s most competitive higher education universities, the Indian Institutes of Technology, “Three Idiots” tells the story of how three engineering students suffered under and fought against the strict college principal, nicknamed “Virus” who drove one of them to attempt suicide after threatening to expel the student. The movie is ranked the 12th most popular movie of all time on Douban (A Chinese social networking website).

To others, the 52-year-old Aamir Khan is “the conscience of India,” because his themes are able to cross national differences, and because he’s taken his fight to change social norms beyond the movies. Satyamev Jayate, a talk show Khan hosted a few years ago, discussed social issues prevalent in India such as domestic violence, rape, and discrimination in the caste system. On Douban, the average rating of the show’s three seasons is around 9.6/10.

“China seems to have every problem that India faces, such as gender discrimination, archaic practices, religious problems, medical malpractice, class discrimination… ,” said a user called Chen Hao on Douban (link in Chinese). “You can see India as a China with all the social problems amplified,but China doesn’t have an Aamir Khan.”

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