Li Bingbing magazine covers

Mousy Li Bingbing

It often seems like China’s fashion magazines all collude to put a single model on that month’s covers. Sometimes it’ll be a wall of broad Hsu Chi smiles, or cover after cover of glamorous photos of Maggie Cheung. True, it’s probably just random coincidence. This month’s coincidence is Li Bingbing, who appears here on the cover of Digital Fan magazine. Her interview with the magazine reveals she likes shooting DV, and that her favorite piece of music equipment is the iPod Mini.

Li was all over the gossip papers earlier this year after a hotel security camera caught her in an elevator with one of the members of F4. To the dismay of scandal-mongers, however, the situation died down without erupting into a fight between Li and the F’s former girlfriend. Of course, what the reading public enjoys only slightly less than scandal is a heartwarming story of a woman standing tall against naysayers who would tear her down; Li made the cover of BQ last month with the headline, “I’m stronger than I imagined.”

Then there’s Trends Health, in which Li posed nude with Christy Chung and Wu Junmei as part of the “Love our breasts, love ourselves” Pink Ribbon Breast Cancer Prevention Campaign. Celebrity gossip magazine Big Star ran its own cover story on the minor flap stirred up online by this “daring” cover, including a surprisingly substantial interview with the actress, who denied that she was paid big bucks as part of a ploy by Trends to sell more magazines in the name of health awareness.

Li Bingbing shows up on the cover of another Trends magazine, Autostyle, and poses inside in a “Driving is psychological warfare” pictorial. She’s also on WomenFriend: Love‘s November issue, and several other digest magazines that reprint celebrity news stories.