China's Nationalism and Its Quest for Soft Power Through Cinema

Doctoral Thesis for PhD in International Studies China’s Nationalism and Its Quest for Soft Power through Cinema Frances (Xiao-Feng) Guo University of Technology, Sydney 2013 Acknowledgement To begin, I wish to express my great appreciation to my PhD supervisor Associate Professor Yingjie Guo. Yingjie has been instrumental in helping me shape the theoretical framework, sharpen the focus, and improve the structure and the flow of the thesis. He has spent a considerable amount of time reading many drafts and providing insightful comments. I wish to thank him for his confidence in this project, and for his invaluable support, guidance, and patience throughout my PhD program. I also wish to thank Professor Wanning Sun and Professor Louise Edwards for their valued support and advice. I am grateful for the Australian Postgraduate Award that I received via UTS over the three-and-half years during my candidature. The scholarship has afforded me the opportunity to take the time to fully concentrate on my PhD study. I am indebted to Yingjie Guo and Louise Edwards for their help with my scholarship application. I should also thank UTS China Research Centre, the Research Office of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS, and UTS Graduate Research School for their financial support for my fieldwork in China and the opportunities to present papers at national and international conferences during my doctoral candidature. Finally, my gratitude goes to my family, in particular my parents. Their unconditional love and their respect for education have inspired me to embark on this challenging and fulfilling journey. Almost all the texts from Chinese publications have been translated by myself, and I take responsibility for any error of translation. Abstract This study is concerned with the important role that contemporary Chinese cinema has played in fostering nationalism, reconstructing national identities in the PRC, and the fundamental challenges facing China’s soft power aspiration and its cinema going- going project. It compares contemporary Chinese films about China’s historical clashes with foreign Others with earlier Chinese productions, transnational co-productions, and Hollywood movies of similar themes, focusing on values-orientations and national identity. The analysis finds that although the Party-state is adamant about China’s national unity and sovereignty, it is deliberately more flexible with China’s national identity. The differential representations of the Japanese and the Western Others in the post- 1989 cinema suggest that China’s national identity is an evolving construct tailored to support the CCP’s shifting political agenda. The separation of the Japanese and Western Others is designed to simultaneously validate the Party’s nationalist ideology and its opening-up policy. Within this context, China’s Official Occidentalism is a more fluid and complex concept than Xiaomei Chen has observed in the 1990s. Apart from its domestic concerns, China’s official imagination of the West also has an international dimension. In addition, China’s response to Hollywood’s representations of Mulan is politically defiant and culturally surrendering. This study argues that the CCP’s cultural policies of making the past serve the present and making culture serve the state can have serious side effects. Ignoring Joseph Nye’s emphasis on the significance of shared values for a nation’s soft power, China’s soft power-driven cinema going-global project faces the fundamental challenge of lacking moral clarity and the shortage of shared values with the outside world. Nationalism clashes with universal values and China’s practice of turning cinema into a nationalistic enterprise and pushing nationalistic films to go global could further undermine, rather than enhance, China’s soft power. Table of Contents Introduction ….…….……………………………………………………………….………………….….…….…......1 1. Chinese Cinema as a Nationalist Enterprise…………………………………………….….…..…14 2. Reinforced Nationalism: Chinese Self vs the Japanese Other ………….….........…..…36 3. Modified Official Occidentalism: Chinese Self vs the Western Other…....….......….59 4. Guarding the Spiritual Home: China vs Hollywood ……………….….…….…….…........…81 5. Reimagining Confucius, China’s Soft Power and Moral Dilemma.…...…................102 6. From Culturalism To Nationalism: Two Peking Opera Films………………............…..122 7. Transnational Co-productions: Contested Values and Troubled Identities.….……145 8. Restaging the War with Japan: China vs Hollywood ….…………..…………………..…....170 Conclusion……….…………………………………………………….………………………..….……….….……….192 Bibliography…..…………………………………………………………………………………………………………204 INTRODUCTION Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the Party-state has used cinema as a propaganda machine to advocate nationalism as a principal ideology. In Mao’s time, China’s historical clashes with the foreign Others, particularly during the Opium Wars, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Korean War, were important themes for the PRC’s socialist cinema. With the West and Japan portrayed as evil imperialist Others, nationalism was the dominant ideology firmly embedded in the red classic films of Mao’s era. However, China’s opening-up to the outside world in the 1980s introduced western influence and alternative values to China and Chinese cinema. Chinese filmmakers began to reflect China’s historical clashes with foreign Others quite differently. Wu Ziniu’s 1988 film Evening Bell, for example, introduced western humanitarian values into its reconstruction of the Sino-Japanese War, a typical topic for nationalistic films of the pre-reform era. Nevertheless, the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown brought China’s liberal cultural discourse to an abrupt end. In the 1990s, the Party-state tightened its film censorship and launched Cinema Project 9550 to fund new propaganda films. Once again, cinema became a prominent vehicle for the Party to instill its official ideology of nationalism into the minds of Chinese population. The CCP’s post-1989 nationalist agenda, however, is complicated by the Party’s continuous embrace of the opening-up policy. In the cinematic scene, China is no longer sealed off from the West. Starting from 1994, Hollywood formally returned to the PRC and by 2012, China’s annual film import quota had increased to 34 films a year, 14 of them in 3D format (Hennock, 2012). Cinema has subsequently emerged as an important transnational cultural platform in China, subject to increasing political and cultural contests. As the Chinese film industry continues to boom, poised to become the world’s No.1 within ten years or so from 2011 (Hille, 2011), the tensions between Hollywood, the Chinese state and the 1 domestic film industry intensify. The 2010 open rivalry between the high-profile Chinese film Confucius and Hollywood blockbuster Avatar highlights the intensity of the ideological wrestling between Hollywood and state-backed Chinese films, and Hollywood’s potential threat to the CCP’s ideological security. Meanwhile, as the Chinese economy ascends on the global stage, China’s international standing and its soft power also become a significant consideration for the Party-state. Driven by its desire to enhance China’s international image, the state has urged Chinese filmmakers to step out of the national borders, to go global, and to promote Chinese culture to the world. Zhang Yimou’s 2011 film The Flowers of the War was a revealing case of China’s cinema going-global efforts. The film engaged an A-list Hollywood star, pitched hard for mainstream global audiences and aimed to win China’s first Oscar. But the film failed miserably outside China. Its US box office receipts were just $311.000 (Tunzelmann, 2012) and the film was attacked by western critics as ‘a crude mix of commercial vulgarity and political propaganda’ (French, 2012). While much has been written about Chinese cinema, the important role that Chinese films have played in fostering nationalism in contemporary China, the state’s maneuvering of Hollywood, China’s response to Hollywood’s misrepresentation of Chinese culture, and the dilemma between the CCP’s domestic agenda of using films to advocate its nationalist ideology and China’s desire to enhance its international soft power through cinema, still remain under-examined and demand urgent academic attention. Aiming to address the research gap, this study will examine Chinese cinema’s role in nurturing nationalism on one hand and analysing the substantial challenges China’s soft power-driven cinema going-global project faces on the other. Focusing on the representations of values and national identities, this thesis compares contemporary PRC films about China’s historical clashes with foreign Others – including the Opium War, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Korean War – with earlier Chinese films, Western-led co-productions, and Hollywood films of similar themes. 2 Anthony Smith defines nationalism as an ideological movement that aims at attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity of a nation (Smith, 1991, p.74). Smith also observes that nationalism offers each class the promise of dignity and unity in the ‘super-family’ of the nation (Smith, 1990, p.184). This multi-class character and the emphasis on the pursuit of national autonomy, unity and identity made nationalism the ideal ideology for the CCP to draw upon, and re-introduce as its official ideology when the Party faced credibility crisis after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Through state-funded

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