Why China's Directors Love to Hate Japan

POLITICAL SCRIPT MOST WATCHED: With an estimated 1.8 billion viewers by 2006, “Tunnel Warfare” (1964) is said to be the world’s most-watched movie. REUTERS/KIM KYUNG-HOON Tokyo-bashing World War II dramas help underpin Communist rule – but are raising tensions between East Asia’s giants. Why China’s directors love to hate Japan BY DAVID LAGUE AND JANE LANHEE LEE HONG KONG/HENGDIAN, MAY 27, 2013 hi Zhongpeng dies for a living. For 3,000 yuan battle. On the set of the television drama “Warning ($488) a month, the sturdily built stuntman is Smoke Everywhere,” which has just finished shoot- Skilled over and over playing Japanese soldiers ing here at the sprawling Hengdian World Studios in war movies and TV series churned out by Chinese in Zhejiang Province, he suffers a typically grisly fate. film studios. “I play a shameful Japanese soldier in a way that Despite his lack of dramatic range, the 23-year- when people watch, they feel he deserves to die,” Shi old’s roles have made him a minor celebrity in China. says. “I get bombed in the end.” Once, Shi says, he perished 31 times in a single day of For Chinese audiences, the extras mown down in SPECIAL REPORT 1 POLITICAL SCRIPT CHINA’S DIRECTORS LOVE TO HATE JAPAN a screen war that never ends are a powerful reminder of Japan’s brutal 14-year occupa- tion, the climax of more than a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. About 170 Japan war dramas were approved for production in 2012 alone, according to a Reuters analysis of scripts submitted to China’s official broadcast watchdog, the State Administration of Radio Film and Television. Japanese foreign-policy scholars say more than 200 were made last year. One Chinese scholar estimates that seven out of 10 TV dramas involve Japanese war themes. This well-nursed grudge is now a com- bustible ingredient in the dangerous territo- rial dispute over a group of rocky islands in the East China Sea, the most serious row between the two Asian powers since Japan’s 1945 defeat. It is debatable which side has the better case for ownership of the islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in REPLAYING ATROCITIES: Chinese actors in World War Two Japanese uniforms watch a playback of China. The United States, Japan’s security- scenes in which they die horrible deaths. REUTERS/ALY SONG treaty partner, refuses to endorse either claim, only insisting the dispute be settled peacefully. But decades of officially sanctioned ha- China watchers believe Beijing’s leaders television version of a 2011 action film of tred for Japan in China means Beijing is nurture anti-Japanese hatred to bolster the same name. In one scene, Jing and his now caught in a propaganda trap of its own their own legitimacy, which is coming comrades scramble through a village to making. It has little room to negotiate or under question among citizens livid over reach a new firing position. In an interview step back now that forces from both sides problems ranging from official corruption between takes, the actor rejected sugges- are circling in a potentially deadly stand- to rampant environmental pollution. tions that politics drives the output of these off. Nationalism in Japan also makes con- TV dramas and films. POLITICS DRIVES OUTPUT cessions difficult for Tokyo. But the stakes “It’s a theme people have liked for a long are potentially higher for China’s ruling As sparring continues in the East China Sea, time,” he said, wearing his Chinese Nationalist Communist Party under its new, strongly open hostilities rage on Chinese screens. uniform with its distinctive German-style, nationalistic leader Xi Jinping. On the hilly, forested set of “Warning coal-scuttle helmet. “That’s a fact.” “It is going to be very hard for the cur- Smoke Everywhere” at Hengdian, the The film original, starring veteran Hong rent Chinese leadership if they want to world’s biggest film lot, lead actor Jing Kong actor Tony Leung Ka-fai, was also compromise,” said He Yinan, a professor Dong plays a young Chinese sniper tak- released for foreign audiences with the at New Jersey’s Seton Hall University who ing on the invading Japanese in a second English title, “Cold Steel.” Adapted from studies the impact of wartime memory on a popular Internet novel, it tells the story Sino-Japanese relations. “It will be rejected of Mu Liangfeng, a young hunter who is by the public, and the leaders know it.” It is going to be very hard for drafted into the Nationalist army for his The tensions and the propaganda go far the current Chinese leadership to marksmanship. He duels with a ruthless beyond the current spat. Underneath it all compromise. Japanese sniper, Captain Masaya, in a series lies a struggle for power and influence in of bloody encounters. Both marksmen are Asia between China and Japan - and po- He Yina in love, Mu with a war widow and Masaya litical struggles within China itself. Many Seton Hall University professor of diplomacy with a Japanese military nurse. But the film SPECIAL REPORT 2 POLITICAL SCRIPT CHINA’S DIRECTORS LOVE TO HATE JAPAN draws a clear distinction between the moral Tongji University. “The people who make plunging ties between the two nations. qualities of the two combatants. TV think that only through anti-Japanese “Yes, the Nanjing massacre did happen,” “I want to marry a samurai, not a mur- themes will they be applauded by the nar- Yasuhiro Matsuda, a professor at Tokyo derer,” Nurse Ryoko tells Masaya after ac- row-minded patriots who like it.” University and a former Japanese defence cusing him of massacring civilians. Zhu estimates war stories make up ministry researcher, told the seminar. “Yes, In the remake, director Li Yunliang says about 70 percent of drama on Chinese tele- Japan did invade China. These are facts. But, he isn’t trying to demonize the wartime ene- vision. The state administrator approved 69 when there are more than 200 movies com- my. “The Japanese soldiers in our drama also anti-Japanese television series for produc- ing out, you can imagine the negative effect.” have emotions,” he says. “It’s the war bring- tion last year and about 100 films. Reports When Tokyo nationalized the disputed ing suffering to both China and Japan.” in the state-controlled media said up to 40 islands last September, buying them from The Communist rulers in Beijing of these were shot at Hengdian alone. State a private Japanese owner, it provoked will still find much to like. Pre-publicity television reported in April that more than sometimes violent anti-Japanese protests material suggests the new storyline will 30 series about the war were filming or in in cities across China. In a telling indica- have a harder political edge, concen- planning by the end of March. tor of the hostile mood in China, demand trating more on the martial qualities of On any given night, state-owned tele- for Japanese products is falling across the Communist forces who formed a united vision channels bombard Chinese view- board. Japanese exports to China for the front with the Nationalists. ers with the heroics of the two major year through March dropped 9.1 per cent Communist armies in combat with the to 11.3 trillion yen, according to Japanese WAR STORIES Japanese, the Eighth Route Army and customs figures. Some film reviewers in China say that with New Fourth Army. Elaborate plots tap the Out in the East China Sea, both sides the censors declaring so many other sub- period’s rich history of deception, betrayal are so far exercising restraint. The risk of jects off limits, it is only natural that the war and collaboration. conflict through accident or miscalculation, dominates story-telling in a competitive In January, a tense seminar in Hong however, remains high. Under Xi, China market for viewers and advertising. Kong brought together opinion makers has intensified an air and sea campaign that “Only anti-Japanese themes aren’t lim- from both sides, including senior retired military experts believe is aimed at wearing ited,” says Zhu Dake, an outspoken cul- military officers. There, the role of wartime down Japanese forces around the poten- ture critic and professor at Shanghai’s drama was singled out as a major factor in tially resource rich islands. Anti-Japanese films were instrumen- tal in fashioning some of the Communist Party’s foundation myths. In the early years of the People’s Republic, these films showed Mao Zedong’s patriotic Communist guerrillas leading a heroic re- sistance. In contrast, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists were portrayed as corrupt, in- effective and aligned with treacherous foreign powers, principally the United States. A vast majority of Chinese born before the 1970s remember the black-and-white clas- sics from this period. One of them, “Tunnel Warfare”, is the world’s most-watched film, with an estimated 1.8 billion viewers by 2006, according the August First Film Studio in Beijing, the Chinese military production house that turned out the 1964 landmark and many oth- HEROIC POSE: Stautes of Red Chinese army soldiers from World War Two dot the sprawling ers like it. In “Tunnel Warfare,” Maoist guer- Hengdian movie studios in Zhejiang provincee. REUTERS/PALY SONG rilla strategies inspire resourceful peasants to SPECIAL REPORT 3 POLITICAL SCRIPT CHINA’S DIRECTORS LOVE TO HATE JAPAN MESSAGE TO JAPAN: The wounds from World War Two are never far from the surface in China. Seven of 10 TV dramas made in China ar about the war.

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