Movie poster of Tiny Times. Photo provided to China Daily

Imagine an America music critic saying Justin Bieber is an awful singer and see what happens. Of course my story was much more complicated than that. It was interpreted as a tug-of-war of different moral values, or aesthetics or generations or even political agendas. Anyway, I made it a point not to see the second installment, which was made together with the first part and premiered only two months later. Its box-office result was 200 million yuan below that of part one, which some attributed to the absence of my castigation, perhaps in jest. This means bad reviews sell a movie, a possibility more Chinese film-goers now reckon with.

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