A Novelist Says a Movie Fails to Credit Her. The Film World Shrugs.

In 2018, as a celebrated Chinese director prepared to film a movie, his team sent the novelist Geling Yan a 33-page script with her name printed on each page. Ms. Yan said that made sense to her because she had written the Chinese-language novel that inspired the film.

But when the film, “One Second,” was released in China and elsewhere two years later, her name did not appear in the credits. It was directed by Zhang Yimou, an…