Director associated with the 'Fourth Generation'. Graduated from Beijing FIlm Academy, in late 1970s, but only from one of the intensive short courses open to studio employees.
Born in 1939 in Shaanxi province, north of Xi'an. His father was a Communist Party veteran. Began as an actor in the early 1960s. He moved to directing in 1979, after attending one of the short courses at the BFA. After directing several films there, he was elected to be head at Xi'an Film Studio in late 1983. In this position he would strongly encourage younger talents and act as a mentor-like producer of Fifth Generation films, from 1984 to 1989, where he made it a policy to give opportunities to young directors.
In 1986, he made it studio policy to specialise in what he termed 'westerns', an elastic term standing for any film set in the vast rural provinces of China, anywhere from Tibet in the West to to Yunnan in the South and Xinjiang in the North. The argument went that the bigger city-based studios like Shanghai and Beijing could cover urban films. This therefore gave an official justification for the rural-based films made by Fifth Generation directors, other than the more likely predilection behind it, namely their own pasts as sent-down youths who were relocated to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, Xi'an Film Studio produced such key films by all major directors of the era, such as The Horse Thief, The Black Cannon Incident, King of the Children and Red Sorghum.
His own directorial career, naturally halted like those of other Fourth Generation directors due to their prime years coinciding with the barren era of the Cultural Revolution, was rejuvenated by the influence of the Fifth Generation's innovation and output.
Spent some years between 1989 and 1994 in exile in the US.
References:
Profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 196.
Rayns, The New Chinese Cinema.
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