Organizer: Zhiwei Xiao, California State University
Chair: Paul G. Pickowicz, University of California, San Diego
Discussant: Zhen Zhang, New York University
As an event that has fundamentally changed the course of modern Chinese history, the Opium War has commanded a great deal of attention in mass culture circles. To date, there have been three feature films based on the Opium War. These are "Eternity" (1943), "Lin Zexu" (1959) and "The Opium War" (1997). All three films are historically significant because they offer fascinating perspectives on major political and ideological concerns of their times, namely, the issue of wartime occupation, the problem of building a distinctively Chinese form of socialism, and the debate about the post-Mao commercialization and globalization of Chinese society. Although produced under sharply contrasting historical circumstances, the films, when viewed together, suggest a remarkable continuity in the narrative, motif and imagery. This panel is an attempt to critically examine these three films from a broad historical perspective.
Poshek Fu’s paper, "Remembering and Forgetting the Opium War in Occupation Cinema" will discuss "Eternity" and show how Chinese filmmakers cleverly sabotaged the Japanese and their puppet regime’s propaganda effort by employing several narrative as well as visual tropes.
Pickowicz’s presentation, entitled "Lin Zexu, Maoism and the Great Leap Forward," offers a fresh look at "Li Zexu," a film intended by the state to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the PRC. Pickowicz shows that despite the efforts by the filmmakers to satisfy the needs of the party, ideologically speaking, there is much ambiguity in the film that deviated in a number of respects from the Maoist ideology.
Xiao’s paper, "Text, Context, and Subtext: A Post-socialist Film Representation of the Opium War" focuses on Xie Jin’s 1997 film, "The Opium War." By comparing and contrasting Xie’s film with the two previous productions, he demonstrates the changes and continuities in the screen representations of the Opium War from 1943 to 1997.
Remembering and Forgetting the Opium War in Occupation Cinema
Poshek Fu, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The first film on Opium War, Wanshi liufang (Eternity), was made during the Japanese Occupation. Its pronounced theme was to use the Opium War to arouse indignation against the evils of British imperialism in order to promote the "unity of Greater East Asia." For this, the film has been condemned within the Chinese nationalist discourse as a piece of traitorous propaganda. But a close reading of it in relation to the contextual complexity of cultural production under political oppression, this is in effect a film of depoliticization. By turning the historical narrative of the Opium War into a private story of Lin Zexu’s romantic relations with two virtuous women, it decenters the political theme of anti-imperialist nationalism as well as dramatizes the complexity of the Chinese history of semi-colonialism.
Lin Zexu, Maoism and the Great Leap Forward
Paul G. Pickowicz, University of California, San Diego
In 1958, at the outset of the earth-shaking Great Leap Forward, cultural bureaucrats and leaders of the state-run film industry spent a tremendous amount of time and money thinking about the best way to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1959. Many feature films were in production in 1958, but none was more important politically than Zheng Junli’s Opium War epic entitled "Lin Zexu." Indeed, this movie was perhaps the most ambitious film project undertaken in the first decade of the post-revolutionary era. Expectations were unrealistically high. Zheng and his co-workers could not have chosen a more difficult (and potentially controversial) subject. Capturing the complexities of the Opium War in a two-hour film narrative would not be easy. It would not be enough to tell this emotional and symbolically important story from a conventional Marxist (that is, Soviet-style) perspective. Chinese intellectuals were well aware that there was a big difference between Great Leap Maoism and the sort of Soviet-style Marxism that dominated historical discourse in China in the mid-1950s. Zheng and his colleagues wanted "Lin Zexu" to be a distinctively Maoist film. They wanted the movie to win the approval of both the party/state and the vast film audience.
This paper argues that the project never had a chance to succeed. Maoists withheld their criticisms at first, but there can be no doubt that they believed the film contradicted Maoist doctrine in many important respects, and wondered why the film was allowed to get so much attention. Non-Maoists were also dissatisfied. They thought that the Maoist interpretation distorted the true picture of the Opium War. When the Great Leap Forward was at its peak in early 1958, it was impossible for these people to raise objections. In fact, many non-Maoist intellectuals were themselves swept up by Great Leap euphoria. But by October 1, 1959, when the film was actually released, the Great Leap Forward was in ruins and a catastrophic famine was underway.
Interestingly, in the immediate wake of the Great Leap, Zheng Junli managed to discourage, if not completely silence, critics from both the Maoist and non-Maoist camps by steadfastly insisting that "Lin Zexu" was a patriotic film consistent with the thought of Mao Zedong. In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, however, Maoist critics went on the political offensive and denounced the film as a "poisonous weed" that slandered the Chinese people. In the post-Mao era, the controversial film was revived for a time, but was held in low esteem by reform-minded intellectuals who looked forward to a time when the "correct" version of the Opium War story could be offered to film fans.
Text, Context, and Subtext: A Post-Socialist Film Representation of the Opium War
Zhiwei Xiao, California State University, San Marcos
At a cost of 12 million dollars, Xie Jin’s 1997 film production, The Opium War, is the most expensive film production in Chinese film history. As a major film production by a privately-owned film studio, The Opium War illustrates many interesting and new developments in contemporary Chinese politics and culture. This paper is an attempt to understand this film in the context of commercialism and Chinese discourse on nationalism and modernity in the 1990s. The paper begins with an examination of the complex relationship between the state and filmmakers in the post-Mao era and shows that while the state tried to exploit the film for political purpose, the filmmakers took advantage of the state’s interest to profit themselves financially. Politics and commercial interests were delicately mixed in the production and promotion of this film. The paper then proceeds to a close reading of Xie’s film and points out a number of significant changes from the two previous Opium War films. One of the changes is that Xie’s film portrays the West in a much more positive light and portrays the Westerners with nuances and complexity. Another significant departure from previous films is that the Qi Shan character is presented sympathetically and his appeasement policy as realistic. Finally, the paper seeks the linkage between the thematic orientation of The Opium War and the contemporary discourse on modernity and nationalism in post-Mao China. It suggests that despite its seeming pro-Western stance, Xie’s film advocates a new kind of nationalism that contrasts sharply to the mainstream nationalistic expressions of the 1990s.