Front. Lit. Stud. 2012, 6(1): 95–111 DOI 10.3868/s010-001-012-0007-6

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Mingwei Song How the Steel Was Tempered: The Rebirth of Pawel Korchagin in Contemporary Chinese Media

Abstract Russian writer Nicholas Ostrovski’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1934) provided generations of Chinese youth with a widely admired role model: a young devoted communist soldier, Pawel Korchagin, whose image occupied a prominent place in the orthodoxy revolutionary education and literary imagination during Mao’s era. Over the past decade, Pawel Korchagin has regained his popularity in Chinese media, his name and image have been appropriated by numerous artists and filmmakers to help in portrayals of the new generation’s self-fashioning. The various (unorthodox) interpretations recently attached to Pawel’s heroic story reveal a huge gap between Maoist ideology and the post-Mao ideas. This paper looks into the intricate relationships between Pawel Korchagin’s revolutionary past and his varied contemporary representations. By doing so, I hope to gain a better understanding of the cultural politics of appropriating Mao’s legacy to create new meanings for a changing Chinese society. One example on which this paper focuses is the sixth-generation director Lu Xuechang’s film Becoming a Man (1997), which rewrites the revolutionary Bildungsroman of Pawel in a startling different context.

Keywords youth, revolutionary Bildungsroman, contemporary Chinese culture, the sixth-generation filmmakers, self-fashioning

Introduction

Russian writer Nicholai Ostrovski’s 1934 novel Kak Zakalialas Stal (How the steel was tempered; translated in Chinese as Gangtie shi zenyang liancheng de)1

1 Kak Zakalialas Stal was published in 1934 in Russia. An English translation (by Alec Brown) was published in 1937 as The Making of a Hero (New York: International Publishers).

Mingwei Song ( ) Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481-8203, USA E-mail: [email protected]

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access 96 Mingwei Song is today probably better known in China than in its home country. While it has disappeared from Russia’s recently published “Literary Canon Series,” more than thirty new translations of this novel are currently available on China’s book market. 2 Ostrovski’s protagonist Pawel Korchagin (“Bao’er Kechajin” in Chinese translation) is a household name in the PRC, and very likely the best-known foreign literary character for people living through Mao’s era. In the story, Pawel Korchagin is a Ukrainian youth who devotes his life to the cause of the Russian revolution, subjects himself to the disciplines of the Party, and goes through all kinds of imaginable (and unimaginable) difficulties to develop himself into a qualified communist soldier. During Mao’s era, this glorified and familiar image of the youthful Korchagin occupied a prominent place in the orthodox revolutionary education and literary imagination. The way he overcomes “weakness” and strengthens his revolutionary will helped to establish the correct route of personal development for several generations of socialist youth during the Mao era. Since the past decade has seen renewed interest in Mao’s legacy, Pawel Korchagin has also regained popularity in Chinese media, and his name and image have been appropriated in portrayals of the new generation’s self- fashioning. The various (unorthodox) interpretations recently attached to Pawel’s heroic story reveal a huge gap between Maoist ideology and the post-Mao ideas.

Pawel Korchagin: A Revolutionary Bildungsroman

Nicholai Ostrovski (1904–1936) based the story of How the Steel Was Tempered on his personal life experience. Both the author and his protagonist Pawel Korchagin were born in czarist Ukraine, joined the communist underground as teenager soldiers, defended Bolshevism against the White Army in the civil war, became communist party workers, and during this process were blinded, crippled and tortured by several diseases caused by extreme exhaustion during the work. Ostrovski completed this autobiographical novel by dictating it to his wife on his death bed, and after its publication in 1934 it soon assumed a place in the socialist literary canon, despite the fact that some editors, who rejected the manuscript, considered it very poorly written and over-simplified in its characterizations.3 One might say that the title of How the Steel Was Tempered itself caused the book to be tempered into an appropriate weapon for claiming a piece of the literary canon, especially because of its intense contribution to the communist

2 Zha Mingjian and Xie Tianzhen, 2007, 849–50. 3 See Mei Yi, 1983, X.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access The Rebirth of Pawel Korchagin in Contemporary Chinese Media 97 revolution. In the novel we see a revolutionary soldier being tempered like a piece of steel. The story can be read as a typical revolutionary Bildungsroman, which presents a clearly structured linear process of the self-fashioning of a communist hero. Bildungsroman is a German critical term used to refer to a novelistic genre that finds its mature form in novels like Wilhelm Meister Lehrjahre.4 As the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin claims, this type of novel is generically “modern” because unlike the novels of antiquity that know only the image of the ready-made hero, the Bildungsroman historicizes time by picturing “the image of man in the process of becoming.” What Bakhtin emphasizes as the central attribute of the Bildungsroman is the revolutionary quality of the protagonist’s Bildung: “He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other.… He is forced to become a new, unprecedented type of human being.” 5 Pawel Korchagin can be viewed as a representative of the “new, unprecedented type of human being” between the epochs that see Russia’s transition from czarism into socialism. By adapting narrative conventions of the classical Bildungsroman, Ostrovski’s How the Steel Was Tempered integrates the personal development of a youth into Russia’s revolutionary history. Into an individual’s growth process, the novel invokes all kinds of disciplines that denote “political correctness,” such as the submission to party authority, never-ending self-criticism, and the abandonment of “all-too-human” weaknesses. Pawel Korchagin’s Bildung consists of a series of tests and challenges that enable him to be constantly aware of his own inadequacies and thus to make every attempt to perfect his personality according to ever-higher political and ethical standards. In order to gain such a “correct” political awareness, he has to sacrifice and relinquish many things associated with individuality and even “humanity,” such as his first love Tonia, a member of the bourgeoisie; his romantic relationship with the Komsomol cadre Rita, which is let go simply because of Pawel’s over-devotion to his work; and his health, both physical and mental. All these losses and perils function as the required method for making a good piece of steel out of Pawel, and his will only grows

4 The most influential definition of the Bildungsroman is found in Wilhelm Dilthey’s analysis of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and other German novels that form the canon of the German Bildungsroman: put more simply, the Bildungsroman depicts the formative experience, especially the spiritual development, of youth. Dilthey’s definitive passage reads: “Beginning with Wilhelm Meister and Hesperus, they all depict the youth of that time, how he enters life in a blissful daze, searches for kindred souls, encounters friendships and love, but then how he comes into conflict with the hard realities of the world and thus matures in the course of manifold life-experience, finds himself, and becomes certain of his task in the world.” See Wilhelm Dilthey, 1993, 29. 5 M. M. Bakhtin, 1986, 23.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access 98 Mingwei Song stronger. When Pawel decides to perform a last service to the Party by writing his life story into a novel, he creates a self-image of the strong-willed, emotion-free, super-human hero as a model for youths. Korchagin actually tries to emulate another literary hero, a British revolutionist nicknamed “the Gadfly” in Ethel Voynich’s The Gadfly (1897). Comparing these two works, Rudolf Wagner finds that “Ostrovski’s text, however, retains hardly anything of the complexity of the relationships prevailing in The Gadfly. The Gadfly is reduced in Pawel’s mind to a revolutionary super-hero, complete in his devotion and self-control, while Voynich’s text shows a man deeply hurt, cynical and at the same time overwhelmed by love for his father/priest and for the woman who drove him away.”6 In comparison with the romantic character of “the Gadfly,” Pawel Korchagin is a more simplified character who shows no signs of inner, emotional drama when abandoning his lovers, seeing his health deteriorate, and practicing stoic self-training and self-criticism. He has no complaint or regret. In this sense, Pawel Korchagin is an idealized product of the political education promoted by the Communist Party. His “steel-like” will is tempered by his unconditional submission to Party authority, and his personal development can be summarized as a process of relinquishing individuality while successfully adapting himself to the Party’s institutions. It is no wonder that the novel served as a handbook for behavior of youth in a communist world. How the Steel Was Tempered was first introduced to Chinese readers in 1937 through a second-hand translation from the Japanese, but the translation was only half done, with nine of its chapters printed in .7 The most widely read Chinese version of the novel is based on the 1937 English translation (see note 1); this Chinese version was published in 1942,8 and later reprinted forty-eight times between 1952 and 1965, with more than 1.5 million copies sold.9 Today, more than thirty new translations, including a few based on the original Russian edition, are available in China.10 As the critic Dai Jinhua points out, it is “one of the very few texts constantly available in a socialist China that repeatedly breaks its historical memory and cultural genealogy with radical social reforms; it is undoubtedly one of the red canons and ‘route signs’ for youths in the 1950s to

6 Rudolf Wagner, 1995, 475. 7 This version was published by Shanghai Chaofeng chubanshe in 1937. The translators were Duan Luofu and Chen Feihuang. Only the first volume, consisting of nine chapters, was in print. 8 The translator was Mei Yi, and the work was titled Gangtie shi zenyang liancheng de (How the Steel Was Tempered, published by Shanghai xinzhi shudian); it was a complete translation. This edition was reprinted by Renmin wenxue chubanshe in 1952, and has remained the most popular Chinese edition of the novel. 9 Cf. Zha Mingjian and Xie Tianzhen, 2007, 596. 10 Ibid., 849–50.

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1970s, and it’s one of the very few books that avoided the fate of being banned during the .”11 The most famous quotation from the novel is Pawel’s monologue in front of his comrade’s grave; it is a message of political morality: “The thing one prizes most is life. Life comes to us but once and it should be possible to live one’s life in such a way that looking back one would feel no regret for years lived pointlessly; no shame for a petty worthless past—so that as one died one could say: All my life and all my strength has been given to the most beautiful thing in the world—the struggle for the freedom of mankind.”12 This paragraph is often taken out of its context and used as one of the key maxims in Chinese political education. How the Steel Was Tempered also loomed large in PRC’s intellectual life because it was widely accepted as a truth-claiming text. Its content can be said to index both real events and a myth of communism. Readers are instructed to equate Pawel to the author Ostrovski so that Pawel’s story becomes a record of real events, and thus as a signifier of History. The slogan “to learn from Pawel,” on the other hand, evokes a transcendental meaning in its tendency to transfer the ideal into life, highlighting every youth’s chance of growing from nobody into a super-hero.13 But during Mao’s era, How the Steel Was Tempered also enlightened PRC youths about two other aspects of life in a more subtle and unorthodox way. First, Pawel Korchagin’s heroic image not only implies political meanings, but also evokes an aesthetic sensation. The accepted image of Korchagin is suggestive of a mythical power which alludes to the essence of youth: devotion, enthusiasm, purity, and idealism; but its translation into visuality motivated an even more liberal imagination. Korchagin, via the descriptions in the original novel as well as the visual sense conveyed in the film14 and the serial picture adaptations,15 is strikingly different from the standard image of youth in Mao’s era: he is not a red-cheeked, healthy-looking, happy, dynamic young person, but instead he looks morbid, hysteric, meditative, and melancholic. The Russian actor Vasily Lanovoy, who played the role of Korchagin in the 1956 film version of the novel, was believed to have best resembled the actual “original” Pawel Korchagin, that is, the author Nicholai Ostrovski. It is Lanovoy’s performance that establishes the

11 Dai Jinhua, 2003, 524. 12 Nicholay Ostrovsky, 1937, 280. 13 “Learn from Pawel” was a popular slogan in Chinese propaganda during Mao’s era. 14 Kak Zakalialas Stal was made into a film twice in the Soviet Union, in 1942 under the same title as the novel, and in 1956, titled Pawel Korchagin. The 1942 film was dubbed into Mandarin by Shanghai Film Studio and released in China in 1951. The 1956 film was dubbed into Mandarin by Changchun Film Studio and released in 1957. 15 The serial picture book version of How the Steel Was Tempered was written by Wang Su and illustrated by Yi Jin. People’s Arts Publishing House printed the first volume in 1959 and the second volume in 1963. In 1972, an abridged version was published.

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“standard” portrait of Pawel Korchagin: a young Bolshevik who looks more like a poet than a soldier. Except for his portraiture of Korchagin, Lanovoy is also famous for playing the roles of noble characters such as Tolstoy’s Count Vronsky and Prince Anatole Kuragin. The charms of a classical Russian nobleman and the manners of a soul-searching passionate lover are brought by Lanovoy into the visual incarnation of Korchagin, which gives leeway to allow the audience to freely imagine a romantic inner life outside the stereotypes of the communist heroes. Second, the depiction of the amorous relationship between Pawel and Tonia is one of the few literary descriptions of the physical love available in official publications during the puritan age of Mao’s era. The young lovers’ mutual attraction, their relishing of the sweetness of love, and their indulgence in embrace and fondling obviously transcended class difference, inspired a liberal imagination of the nature of (class-free) love, and served as one type of sentimental notion to become available to PRC youth. This un-revolutionary relationship, which ends after Pawel realizes that he has to abandon his bourgeois girlfriend in order to achieve political progress, is not denigrated in the narrative, while the same kind of relationship often suffers negative portraitures in the Chinese revolutionary Bildungsromane such as Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge, 1958). The love of Pawel and Tonia is depicted as natural, pure, and beautiful, and it is essentially related to Pawel’s characterization in the popular imagination of Chinese readers. Without the relationship with Tonia, Pawel will not appear as charming as he is. In the post-Mao literature, many authors reincarnate the love of Pawel and Tonia in stories about their own adolescent love in the age of revolution. In works like the “sent-down youth” writer Liang Xiaosheng’s short story “This Is a Marvelous Land” (Zhe shi yipian shenqi de tudi, 1982), a young man’s sensibility is sharpened by the yearning for love, which is imagined as a stirring sensation, as evoked in Pawel and Tonia’s story. These two aspects paved the way for Pawel Korchagin’s rebirth in today’s China after his reputation had suffered a rapid decline after the Cultural Revolution, something that is evidenced by a recent debate over “who is more heroic: Pawel or Bill (Gates)?” led by PRC’s leading youth newspaper Beijing Youth Journal (Beijing qingnian bao).16 It seems that the individualistic values found in Gates’ entrepreneurism have, in the age of market economy, outshined Pawel’s selfless devotion to the revolution. But the new generation of Chinese youth simply finds that these “unorthodox” elements in Ostrovski’s revolutionary Bildungsroman invite new interpretations that correspond to the changed ethical and political codes of contemporary China.

16 Beijing qingnian bao, Mar. 11, 2000.

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In his 1996 essay, “In Memory of Tonia with Love” (“Jinian Dongniya”), the Chinese intellectual Liu Xiaofeng offers a completely new interpretation of Ostrovski’s socialist literary classic. By choosing to conjure up the memory of Tonia instead of Pawel, Liu highlights the value of individuality above revolution. In order to struggle for the freedom of mankind, Pawel, according to Liu Xiaofeng, “must bid farewell to his contingent existence as an individual and, through devoting himself to revolution, devote himself to the permanent existence of mankind.” But, in contrast, Tonia who loves Pawel, a poor, uneducated boy from a different class, never loses her respect for individualistic values; as Liu Xiaofeng believes, Tonia “wants to maintain the position occupied by her body as a contingent existence, and wants to have a normal life that only and completely belongs to her own.”17 Opposing the usual criticism of Tonia’s weak-mindedness, Liu Xiaofeng argues that it is Tonia instead of Pawel who is more determined, principled and morally decent, as she never betrays her own conscience: she loves Pawel without concern over his class status, protects him from the prejudice of her own class, and breaks up with him because she does not want to assume a blind belief in collectivism as her new guiding principle. By showing contempt for Pawel, whose characterization denotes revolutionary ethics, and expressing admiration for Tonia, whose existence reminds one of the spiritual strength of Russian’s great literary tradition, Liu Xiaofeng poses a “farewell to revolution” position, and this position best illustrates contemporary Chinese intelligentsia’s common yearning for a new political and ethical order that is based on the values of individuality. Liu Xiaofeng’s memory of Tonia epitomizes a new trend of literary writing that creates nostalgia for “lost” love in the age of revolution; it also leads to Chinese reincarnations of Tonia in contemporary novels and films, such as the “female college student named Color” in Wang Xiaobo’s Love in the Age of Revolution (Geming shiqi de aiqing, 1994), Milan in Wang Shuo’s Ferocious Animals (Dongwu xiongmeng, 1990) and Jiang Wen’s film adaptation In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi, 1995). In an earlier version of Jiang Wen’s film, the protagonists Ma Xiaojun and Milan even directly address each other as “Pawel” and “Tonia” in the former’s dream, though this sequence was eventually deleted from the release version.18 If we borrow Liu Xiaofeng’s argument, we may want to say that the nostalgia for the love with these Tonia-like characters foregrounds personal desires and individual existence above the background of the revolution, and separates the individual’s story from revolutionary history. In the meantime, contemporary Chinese media’s variously articulated appropriations of Pawel Korchagin’s image and story are essentially related to the ambiguity of Chinese politics. In the official media, How the Steel Was

17 Liu Xiaofeng, 1996. 18 Jiang Wen, 1997, 396.

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Tempered has not lost its ideological significance as a canonical text of communist education—it remains on the Chinese Communist Youth League’s recommended reading list for Chinese youths. But the media’s new interest in the heroic image of Korchagin often posits awkward questions about the vitality of the revolutionary legacy, even though it is inclined to affirm its validity. This can be best illustrated by the combination of politics and commercialism in CCTV’s adaptation of the novel into a 20-episode TV series in 2000. By using only Ukraine actors and settings, the show ostensibly aims to create a sense of authenticity; but its creators have not hesitated to make extensive changes in the plotline. The most controversial change is the strengthening of the love story of Tonia and Pawel, and the show ends with the lovers’ reunion, implying a happy ending that denotes not only Pawel’s political achievement but also his retrieval of a lost love. The change in Tonia’s part echoes Liu Xiaofeng’s call for a more favorable memory of Tonia, and it more than anything else transforms the hero’s revolutionary pilgrim into a sentimental melodrama. The TV version of How the Steel Was Tempered can be viewed as a typical work of what Dai Jinhua calls the “Rewritings of Red Canons,” which recapitulate and reappropriate the political connotations of the revolutionary literary classics for an ostensibly commercial purpose as they fulfill the contemporary audience’s nostalgia for the socialist past. Even though they simultaneously revive the specter of an older ideology, which is leftism, in a contemporary cultural context, the specter has put up a new face which is an individual. The production of this TV series signifies the reinvestment of Pawel’s heroism as a new cultural capital in contemporary China’s political/cultural imagination. The show displays the paradoxical ideological features of China’s reform: on the one hand, it attempts to keep alive its socialist dream, and on the other hand, it realizes this dream through making it into a commodity. Beneath this paradox is a collapsed value system, and from its depth pops up the fragments of totality now reincarnated in individual existences.

The Making of Steel: The Contemporary Rewriting

One contemporary film that subtly illustrates the cultural politics of appropriating the image of Korchagin is the sixth-generation filmmaker19 Lu Xuechang’s debut feature Becoming a Man (Zhangda chengren, 1997). The title Lu originally wanted to use is “The Steel Was Tempered in This Way” (Gangtie shi zheyang

19 The “Sixth Generation” is what a group of young Chinese filmmakers are called by film critics in order to differentiate them from the earlier “Fifth Generation.” This younger generation, including such filmmakers as , , , and Lu Xuechang, emerged as important directors in the 1990s. For their cinematic style and major works, see Chen Qingsong and Huang Ou, 2002.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access The Rebirth of Pawel Korchagin in Contemporary Chinese Media 103 liancheng de), and the official English translation of the film’s current title remains The Making of Steel, both of which clearly point to the novel How the Steel Was Tempered. In Lu’s film, Korchagin is the hero that the film’s protagonist, the rock ’n’ roll guitarist Zhou Qing, admires and tries to emulate. The dialogue with Ostrovski’s novel is the foundation of Lu’s idea for making the film, and it heavily affected the plotline, characterization and political undertones, as well as its actual production. Becoming a Man occupies a unique place in the development of the sixth generation’s film movement. It is the first sixth-generation film that gained the approval of the PRC censors to be commercially released in state-owned theaters, only after it was revised and reedited eleven times and dropped its original title The Steel Was Tempered in This Way.20 Lu Xuechang is literally the first sixth generation filmmaker willing to take extra measures to re-cut his film in order to pass the censorship. He spent two years working on the final version of the film, when he was probably walking a dangerous narrow path between political standards and artistic integrity. The final approval of the film’s release means a certain compromise the director had to make, and it marks a significant step in this generation’s artistic journey turning from being subversive to being submissive to the authority. The release of Becoming a Man represents the beginning of the sixth generation’s institutionalization, while this group had been hitherto reluctant to relinquish their “underground” identity. Correspondingly, the compromised artistic style of this film points toward a change in this generation’s cinematic self-fashioning. The sixth generation filmmakers, including Lu Xuechang as well as his classmates Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai and Lou Ye, who all graduated from ’s Department of Direction in summer 1989, was once considered more politically subversive than the fifth generation. The younger directors, starting to shoot films after 1989, intentionally resisted the interventions of the state ideology; they created an “independent,” or “underground,” cinema by seeking artistic freedom outside state institutions. They were reluctant to inherit the fifth generation’s cultural nationalism: instead of totality and harmony, they were more concerned with antagonism and adversaries. They were better at bringing the audience’s attention to self and reality, and not so much to society and history. In the early 1990s, sixth-generation films created a series of independent personalities through portraits of avant-garde artists, rock ’n’ roll musicians, behavior artists, and even criminals, who are outcast, rebellious, decadent, sometimes mentally abnormal, and always hostile to the established

20 There are different accounts of the film’s revision process. Here I refer to the director Lu Xuechang’s own account. Cf. Chen Qingsong and Huang Ou, 2002, 209.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access 104 Mingwei Song order. 21 The “artist films” of the sixth generation converge on a peculiar self-image that implies oppression by and opposition to social norms. This self does not care to soften the conflicts with the society but instead relies on them to bring into focus distinctively independent and antagonistic personalities. For example, the appearance of the rock ’n’ roll singer Cui Jian and his band in Zhang Yuan’s film Beijing Bastards (Beijing zazhong, 1993) marks a climactic moment in the sixth generation’s creation of images of their own cultural heroes. Becoming a Man, the first sixth-generation film that general Chinese audiences had access to through broad distribution, brought to the big screen a different, or older, type of hero whose cultural archetype was none other than the familiar communist soldier Pawel Korchagin. Lu Xuechang’s film dramatizes the well-tried themes of sixth generation cinema, such as personal growth, rock ’n’ roll, and self-fashioning, but from a different perspective: the protagonist Zhou Qing is fed up with the decadence and corruption of his fellow musicians, yearns for a healthier life style, and his inspiration comes from Pawel Korchagin. I want to argue that the film’s recapitulation of Korchagin’s story and appropriation of its cultural elements in a post-Mao and post-1989 context contribute to a revisionist representation of the sixth generation’s self-fashioning, which is more reflective than expressive. Becoming a Man shows the tremendous difficulty of becoming a man like Pawel Korchagin in contemporary China, but by emulating Korchagin, the film tries to establish a new antagonistic position that requires, first of all, self-criticism. Lu Xuechang probably wishes that through his film he could bid farewell to the “immature” period of the sixth generation, and that the self-centered avant-garde artists could begin to ponder the appropriate methods of socialization that do not require the loss of self but instead signify a more efficient way of realizing ideals. By following the steps of Pawel Korchagin, Lu Xuechang’s protagonist looks beyond the isolated selfhood toward a larger world. However, Becoming a Man, or The Steel Was Tempered in This Way, despite its positive answer to the question of How the Steel Was Tempered, cannot present again a complete process of hero-making because of its contextualization in contemporary Chinese politics. The rewriting of Korchagin within the cultural context of contemporary China provides space for new interpretations of the meanings of the self, ideals, and heroism that enable the film to idealize, virtualize and eventually deconstruct the heroic image of the original novel. While showing the possibilities and impossibilities of becoming a man like Pawel Korchagin, the film reveals a series of symptoms of the cultural politics of a changing China in the post-Mao and post-1989 ages.

21 Such as the characters in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Days and Frozen, Lou Ye’s Weekend Lovers, Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards, and Guan Hu’s Dirty Hair.

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In Becoming a Man, Zhou Qing’s first reading of How the Steel Was Tempered is presented as a “chance encounter”: in the last year of the Cultural Revolution, the teenager Zhou Qing runs away from home, when he picks up a serial picture book at the foot of the Great Wall. A close-up shot shows the pages of the book, when the voice-over tells us its content:

This serial picture book, judged from its cover, should be followed by a second volume. It tells the story of a poor boy living in faraway Ukraine. The book is titled How the Steel Was Tempered. I was puzzled by the meaning of the title, as the story has nothing to do with the making of steel or even iron. I guessed that this was because I only picked up the first volume so I only got to know the first half of the story.22

What is rather startling in this voice-over narration is the political innocence of the protagonist. Growing up in the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Qing seems to know nothing about Ostrovski’s socialist classic. This assumption in the plot can be understood as an intentional resistance to the usual political understanding of Korchagin’s story. Zhou Qing’s naïve response to the content of the book empties its stereotypical ideological message and makes his reading experience into a purely individual activity. What unfolds thereafter is the development of Zhou Qing’s personality, which is shaped by his attachment to Pawel’s heroic quality as an individual. In this sense, this film seems to show its cultural relevance to the contemporary tendency to emphasize the individualistic and humanistic elements in Ostrovski’s novel, as we have seen in Liu Xiaofeng’s essay “In Memory of Tonia with Love.” While Pawel Korchagin receives revolutionary education in his youth, Zhou Qing is enlightened to a totally different value system and takes part in a new revolution: the liberation of the individual from the established order. When Zhou Qing picks up the serial picture book, an earthquake shakes the stones of the Great Wall, which can be viewed as a not-very-original metaphor for the coming reforms that will shake China’s politics and economics in the following decade. Zhou Qing shares the common growing-up experience of Chinese youths in the 1980s, and Lu Xuechang employs a series of popular cultural signs to epitomize the changes in his life: the love songs of Teresa Teng, Hong Kong pop music, newly imported Western social dance, and rock ’n’ roll bands. In Zhou Qing’s world, ideological control is loosened, individuality increasingly gains respect, and these pave the way for the cultural revolt movement of the 1980s and provide the cultural basis for the sixth-generation cinema’s antagonistic self-fashioning. It seems that Zhou Qing’s story so far is not very different from

22 Transcribed from the subtitles of Becoming a Man. Beijing Film Studio, 1997.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access 106 Mingwei Song that of the other sixth-generation directors. However, when Zhou Qing begins to copy Pawel Korchagin’s heroic deed in his own life, the film manages to voice a straightforward criticism of the individual-oriented type of cultural reform that makes up Zhou’s world. The first significant impact of the Korchagin story comes in a sequence showing Zhou Qing’s finding a gun, stealing and burying it, and then using it to assassinate (unsuccessfully) the gun’s owner, Ji Wen—the entire sequence is almost completely copied from Ostrovski’s novel. Here, the film reveals through the character of Ji Wen the vicious and morally indecent aspects of the new liberal individualism. Ji Wen profits from the reform but his own success is based on greed and cruelty. Zhou Qing’s contempt for Ji Wen leads to his resistance to the new values that benefit individual ambitions. His imitation of Korchagin indicates the ethical influence of the latter on his life, and predicts his “heroic” stance against the “vices” of the new social order that emerges with the economic reforms. In the next stage of Zhou Qing’s personal development, he consciously takes up Pawel as his role model. The visual similarity between him and his hero is established in a sequence that shows Zhou Qing working in railway station’s boiler room, which is exactly Pawel’s first job! More interesting is how Zhou Qing’s clothes also change to indicate his transformation from a rock ’n’ roll singer to a “proletarian” worker. Instead of T-shirt and blue jeans, he is now often dressed in a dirty, heavy coat and cotton trousers, visually resembling the screen image of Pawel Korchagin as one who stands for the masses. Zhou Qing’s proletarian identity is further solidified when he is bullied by the chief of the boiler room’s workers, just as Pawel experiences in the original novel. But Zhou Qing’s education will not be completed until he meets his mentor, a locomotive engineer he warmly calls “Zhoukhraï.” The name in fact parallels the name of Pawel’s revolutionary mentor in Ostrovsky’s novel, but that Zhoukhraï was a sailor who guides Pawel to become a professional revolutionist. In Lu’s film, “Zhoukhraï” enlightens Zhou Qing to a new outlook on life. The actor who plays “Zhoukhraï” is , a fifth-generation director as well as the producer of Becoming a Man (he gained a reputation as the sixth generation’s “godfather” after completing this film).23 The character of “Zhoukhraï” embodies some qualities missing in the self-fashioning of the sixth generation; he, like Tian Zhuangzhuang and Chen Kaige in real life, was once a Red Guard in Beijing, and then a sent-down youth working in the wilds of Northeast China; he met a

23 Tian Zhuangzhuang was banned after he sent his film Blue Kite to the Tokyo International Film Festival without the permission of the PRC censors. During his hibernation as a director, Tian offered his support for sixth-generation filmmakers, working hard to help their films pass censorship. Michael Berry, 2005, 71–72.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access The Rebirth of Pawel Korchagin in Contemporary Chinese Media 107 woman “who would live and die with him”; he has the confidence to solve problems by himself, and never loses himself in corruption, complaints, indulgence or negative attitudes toward life. His gaze shines with enthusiasm and determination; he is, above all, an idealist. A medium shot shows the movie’s “Zhoukhraï” reading the novel How the Steel Was Tempered under a lamp. Under his guidance, Zhou Qing finally reads through the story of Pawel Korchagin. On the cue of the voice-over’s announcement that “I am now seeing myself as the poor boy living far away in Siberia” (which is not correct, since Pawel Korchagin lives in Ukraine) there begins a series of fast moving shots that imitate the shots that gave us a war scene in the 1956 Russian film Pawel Korchagin. A follow-shot shows Zhou Qing running wildly while shouting out Pawel’s military slogans as if he were fighting bravely in a war; a parallel montage combines his toward-the-camera movements with the quick movement of the train operated by “Zhoukhraï,” creating a grandiose aura of revolution. But Zhou Qing does not grow into a new Pawel. He is run over by the train and breaks his leg. When the surgeon says a bone transplant operation is needed, “Zhoukhraï” donates his bone. After Zhou Qing gets out of the hospital, “Zhoukhraï” has disappeared from his life, supposedly having entered a university in the south. Some conclusions can be drawn regarding the first part of Zhou Qing’s personal story that establishes an inter-textual relationship with How the Steel Was Tempered: The inspirations from Pawel Korchagin enable Zhou Qing to develop his will differently from his contemporaries. Drawing inspirations from a socialist heritage, he uses them to defend his integrity against the corruptions of the new social trends; Zhou Qing’s self-fashioning features a double “corrective” function in both criticizing society and reflecting on his self-image. Moreover, “Zhoukhraï” further enforces these influences by strengthening the idealistic quality of the Korchagin-type personality. “Zhoukhraï” can be regarded as a better Pawel than Zhou Qing in the sense that he is the one who stands in for Zhou Qing to prevent his suffering. It qualifies him as a Pawel-like hero who sacrifices his body to strengthen his will. His character more fully incarnates the ideal personality tempered by socialist education, but his idealism also transcends the political limitation of this same education by displaying a strong individualistic color. As the director has elsewhere explained, “Zhoukhraï” is a character coming from the jianghu (the world of stateless wanderers), because he stands out as a righteous, strong person but meanwhile tries everything to stay at a distance from the authorities.24 While trying to become a man like Pawel or “Zhoukhraï,” Zhou Qing cultivates an idealistic passion that enables him to remain critical of the mainstream social trends as situated in China’s intellectual

24 Chen Qingsong and Huang Ou, 2002, 205.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access 108 Mingwei Song life after 1989 in the second part of the film. When Zhou Qing reappears, he is an adult who has returned to Beijing after studying music in Germany; he had been in Germany in 1989. As an officially released film, Becoming a Man contains no direct allusion to the student demonstrations and aftermath, but the adult Zhou Qing first appears when he is looking at the crowd (tourists?) on Tiananmen Square from the taxi he rides, which quietly passes by the square. His expressionless face may reveal his position as an onlooker detached from what is or has been happening on the square. It later turns out that he is actually also detached from everything and everybody that he sees in a changed Beijing. He is disgusted by the pretentiousness, spiritual void and pseudo avant-gardism he finds in the circles of Beijing artists and musicians. He comments on their mental degeneration: “These people have healthy bodies, but already lost their healthy minds.” He also sees his old foe Ji Wen who has become incredibly rich by taking advantage of China’s market reforms; this only solicits more negative comments from Zhou Qing about Ji Wen’s moral depravation. It seems that the returning Zhou Qing would rather remain an outsider to society, and occupy a position reminding us of the “superfluous” nihilists of prerevolutionary Russian novels. He even remains an outsider to his family, since he cannot help feeling disturbed by his parents’ quarrels, his sister’s complaints, and the triviality and absurdity of life itself. Zhou Qing soon finds himself to be an individual alienated by all kinds of institutions including his circle of friends and his family life. At this point, he thinks again of “Zhoukhraï.” He rethinks “Zhoukhraï” when confronted with corrupt contemporary minds and the abysmal meaninglessness of life, against which the idealism and heroism of “Zhoukhraï” seem bright. Zhou Qing begins to look for his former mentor, and later learns more about his heroic deeds: “Zhoukhraï” fights bravely with thieves, protects the weak and poor, and sacrifices his own happiness for the sake of others’ benefits. “Zhoukhraï” is still missing, but Zhou Qing cannot help imagining him still quietly battling with the evils of the society even as a crippled and blinded person. The memory of “Zhoukhraï” enables Zhou Qing to find a positive way to respond to the problems of society and the self, fills in his own spiritual void that tortures and weakens him, and strengthens his will when he is trying to stand against the new social order that gives birth to injustice. Standing in the shadow of “Zhoukhraï,” Zhou Qing is turning himself into a contemporary hero. In this part of the film, however, the absence of “Zhoukhraï” probably is a prerequisite for that character’s moral perfection and charismatic personality. What is missing is the best part; his absence only implies the virtualness and idealization of the image of “Zhoukhraï” in contemporary society. In this sense, while “Zhoukhraï” stays on Zhou Qing’s mind as a super-ego to control his

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access The Rebirth of Pawel Korchagin in Contemporary Chinese Media 109 thinking, he becomes an increasingly idealized figure, more conceptual than corporeal. In addition, there is the even more interesting absence of Pawel Korchagin in the adult Zhou Qing’s thinking. “Zhoukhraï” has obviously replaced Zhou Qing to become a contemporary Pawel, while Zhou Qing looks up to him as an ideal example. This transference of Pawel’s spirit from Zhou Qing to “Zhoukhraï” not only annuls the further development of Zhou’s Bildung, because another person, actually his mentor, substitutes for him as the hero of his own Bildungsroman, but also further betrays the virtual and imagined nature of “Zhoukhraï.” Thus neither Pawel nor “Zhoukhraï” exists in Zhou Qing’s world, making Zhou into an abandoned orphan paralyzed by the spiritual banality of a world vacated by his heroes, an orphan who desperately seeks opportunity to carry out any action that could revive the spirits of his lost heroes. Zhou Qing’s only “action” comes at the end of the film, which presents an ironic twist by interpreting Korchagin’s heritage through a new social environment. Zhou Qing finds the criminal who hurt “Zhoukhraï” and wants to take revenge by stabbing him with a kitchen knife. In a sequence of graphic violence, which looks dreamlike in the illogical editing, Zhou Qing jumps at the criminal and battles him furiously. The sequence is later revealed indeed as a dream scene, when we hear the voice-over confessing that what we saw on screen is all imagined and that Zhou Qing actually has chosen to report the criminal to the police so that he could be legally punished. This double ending is probably the result of the forced reediting of the film, but it also lays bare the dilemma of Zhou Qing: he is yearning to fight a heroic battle with the social vices, as did “Zhoukhraï” or Pawel, but he has no means to realize this ideal by himself in contemporary society; he is eager to challenge institutional rules, but he still has to rely on them to do away with the transgressions that give rise to “evildoings.” An earlier sequence implies that Zhou Qing may have reported to the police about his fellow rock ’n’ roll musicians’ drug use, which leads to arrests and places him in a rather awkward moral position: his criticism of these musicians’ degeneracy aligns him with the police. This plot device is likely borrowed from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, but it contains a different ethical code. While Leone’s film dramatizes the individual’s ethical commitment, Zhou Qing’s choice shows his ethical concern with being “normative,” something like surrendering to the coercive normality of mainstream society. The tricky part of Lu Xuechang’s film is that it starts with portraying the positive influence of Korchagin’s heroism on Zhou Qing, a contemporary social rebel, but ends up showing that Zhou Qing’s most radical heroic deed turns out to be a revisionist effort, thus returning him to the embrace of the state. In other words, Pawel Korchagin’s old pedagogical impact surfaces in the creative mind of the new generation, signaling a revival of the socialist ethics desired by China

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access 110 Mingwei Song for building a stable social order. Lu Xuechang is probably reluctant to make a final compromise by clearly delivering the above message. He tries his best to make an ambiguous ending for his film: Zhou Qing leaves Beijing to look for “Zhoukhraï.” Or, he is now also absent from our sight. That the film Becoming a Man rewrote the venerated story of How the Steel Was Tempered, but now in a different social context, probably annoyed the censors. Yet, this also provided a golden opportunity for the film to pass censorship, since it carried the seeds of a more orthodox understanding of China’s current cultural politics. The film’s prudence in dealing with Pawel Korchagin’s heritage, its ambiguity in enclosing the narrative with a virtual idealism, and its morally paradoxical attitude toward the protagonist, a contemporary youth who aspires, but has no chance, to become a man like Pawel Korchagin, all simultaneously voice the criticism of the liberal individualism of the 1980s and the yearnings for a return to “normative” social and ethical order. Lu Xuechang’s film may not have functioned as a turning point in the history of the sixth generation cinema, but it best represents the change of that generation’s self-fashioning, marking the most significant retreat in contemporary China’s cultural revolt.

Coda

Since the middle of the 1990s, a tendency to return to normative social order and to depersonalize the individual has been noticeable in young directors’ recent films about China’s reality. A good example is Zhang Yuan’s first officially released film Seventeen Years (Guonian huijia, 1999), which plays up the aspiration for a normal family life from the perspective of a remorseful convict. In films like (Biandan guniang, 1997) and (Shiqisui de danche, 2001), the sixth generation’s typical self-image as one of avant-garde artists is substituted by that of the peasant worker, who is, like the artist, struggling on the margins of society. But the artists and the peasant workers are very different. For example, the despairing artist like the mentally disturbed painter in Days (Dongchun de rizi, 1993), the first film directed by Wang Xiaoshuai, completely gives up hope of finding a home in society, whereas a peasant worker comes to the city with the hope to settle down and then become a part of the mainstream society. There is no heroic deed like the one achieved by Pawel Korchagin in these stories of peasant workers. What truly is culturally significant is Becoming a Man’s appropriation of Korchagin’s image in order to bridge the gap between the isolated self and normative society, which both underwrites the ethics of idealism. For the first time in the history of Chinese cinema, Becoming a Man provides a new definition of self-fashioning through

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:42:46AM via free access The Rebirth of Pawel Korchagin in Contemporary Chinese Media 111 revitalizing the spirit of Pawel Korchagin within China’s current cultural politics: becoming a man who carries on the ideals of the past but whose actions only complicate the same ideals.

References

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