CHIEN-MIN CHUNG FOR TIME BIG TIME: From left, young directors like Cheng, Teng and Lu want to make hit movies, and they donšt mind compromising with the powers that be

Last year, 30-year-old director Teng Huatao presented his new movie One Hundred Thieves to China's film censors. Change the title, they told him. After all, why would he want to malign the motherland by portraying it as a vast den of criminality? You might expect Teng, the impetuous young artist, to have taken a political stand, but he cheerfully caved in, renaming his movie One Hundred. "We prefer not to challenge the film censors," says Teng, "so more people can watch our movies." In today's China, he is hardly alone. Director Xu Jinglei admits without embarrassment that she too acceded to the censors' requests, rewriting the ending of her movie My Father so that it would win their seal of approval. "As long as the result is not death and destruction," Xu says, "you have to accept the changes they want. Living in China, you can't be that stubborn."

So much for the spirit of political defiance. Teng and Xu are part of China's new wave of young, apolitical filmmakers. Products of the go-go generation, these precocious pragmatists—all in their 20s and early 30s—aren't interested in making underground movies that nobody will be allowed to see. They are too young to remember the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, and they have learned from the Tiananmen Square experiences of their elders that life is much easier if you strive to get rich within the system, instead of getting rolled over by it.

That's quite a change from the mind-set of more seasoned Chinese filmmakers who were scarred and politicized by the Cultural Revolution. Their uncompromising seriousness has often landed them in trouble with the Film Bureau, whose approval movies must have before they can be released in China. Jiang Wen, for example, hasn't directed a film since he angered the censors by sending his critically acclaimed Japanese-occupation movie Devils on the Doorstep to Cannes without official approval. And Zhang Yimou's masterpiece To Live—a sweeping survey of 20th century Chinese history—has never been released in his homeland.

China's new crop of filmmakers has less grandiose ambitions. They tend to focus on smaller, more intimate topics—what 26-year-old director Cheng Er describes as "real people and real life." My Father, for instance, is a movie about a daughter's relationship with her dad. The first of these new filmmakers to make it big is 30-year-old Lu Chuan, director of Missing Gun, which was produced by Columbia Tristar and is now poised for international distribution. It's a rollicking crime story with gangsters, drug smugglers and corrupt businessmen. Amid Missing Gun's pulsing dance music, dizzying handheld shots and MTV-style quick cuts, you barely have time to think. And that's just what this new generation of filmmakers intends.