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 ’s directors love to hate Japan

By David Lague and Jane Lanhee Lee /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 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 ap- proved for production in 2012 alone, ac- cording to a Reuters analysis of scripts submitted to China’s official broadcast watchdog, the State Administration of Radio Film and Television. Japanese for- eign-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

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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 for- eign 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 esti- mated 1.8 billion viewers by 2006, accord- ing 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

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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. REUTERS/ Aly Song

dig extensive tunnel networks beneath their recognition from Japan and also sought to In the sacking of Nanjing, the Nationalists’ village homes, from which they emerge to ha- drive a wedge between Washington and its capital, Communist forces played little or rass the occupying Japanese. most important regional ally. Strict censor- no role in defending the doomed city. Regular screenings during an era of tight ship ruled out researching or publishing JAPANESE ATROCITIES REVISITED political control and virtually no alternative material about Japanese atrocities. In a move entertainment meant generations of view- that would be unthinkable today, Beijing This changed in the early 1980s when ers saw these movies many times. They treated convicted Japanese war criminals le- Chinese film makers began to turn their are often crude, with voiceovers making niently at the 1956 war crimes trials it held cameras unsparingly on Japan’s wartime sure viewers get the point. The brutality of in Shenyang and Taiyuan. None of the 51 behaviour. Beijing had already won diplo- Japanese troops toward Chinese combat- prisoners who stood trial were executed or matic recognition from Japan in 1972, and ants and civilians is a staple, but the films sentenced to long terms. when the disastrous Cultural Revolution paradoxically avoided over-vilifying the Textbooks from this time mentioned ended in 1976, the Communist Party un- invaders. Japanese characters are rarely key events and battles but played down the der Deng Xiaoping abandoned its ruinous developed. Plotlines concentrate on Mao’s scope and impact of Japan’s occupation. economic policies and began experiment- triumph in leading the resistance, rather Film makers avoided the dramatic poten- ing with market reforms. than the clear battlefield superiority of the tial of atrocities such as the 1937 Nanjing For a ruling party desperate to recover invaders, which had Chinese forces in re- Massacre. Some historians suggest the its prestige and stamp out demands for po- treat right up to the end of the war. Communists were also determined to sup- litical change, revisiting Japanese atrocities In this period, Chinese film makers press movies or detailed historical accounts provided a useful distraction, historians say. conformed to a wider geopolitical strategy, of major campaigns: Otherwise, attention In contrast, the party still vigorously sup- where Beijing was anxious to avoid alienat- would have been drawn to the role of the presses any effort to document or publicise ing Tokyo, historians say. Nationalist armies, which bore the over- the calamities of its own making, including The Communist Party wanted diplomatic whelming brunt of fighting the Japanese. the starvation of tens of millions following

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Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward. The official desire to foster national- ism intensified after the 1989 Tiananmen protests shook the party to its founda- tions. “Maybe the leadership realized that a memory of collective suffering at the hands of an external enemy is more effective in bringing people together,” said Kristof Van Den Troost, a film and history researcher at Hong Kong’s Chinese University. One of the best known films of the era, “Red Sorghum” from 1987, based on a novel by 2012 Nobel prize winner Mo Yan, launched the careers of actress Gong Li and director . It pulled no punches, switching from a rich love story set in rural China to a blood-drenched climax in which the Japanese order a lo- OUR ISLANDS: A Chinese actor playing a World War Two Japanese soldier holds a flag asserting cal butcher to skin alive a prisoner. “Skin Chinese sovereignty of islands claimed by both Japan and China. REUTERS/Aly Song him,” the Japanese interpreter screams at the butcher, who in an act of mercy stabs the prisoner to death and is immediately banned in China. It mocks the confusion pieces. In another scene from the same series, machine-gunned. The butcher’s assistant of peasants in a village in northern China a Japanese soldier’s intestines are wrenched is then forced to skin another live prisoner, entrusted with holding a captured Japanese out of his abdomen in a fight sequence. later revealed to be a communist guerrilla. soldier and his translator. Though the movie Under the weight of ridicule and disgust, As war museums and memorials opened ends in a bloodbath for the villagers, censors officials from the State Administration of all over China, film makers were free to ex- attacked it for its sympathetic treatment of Radio Film and Television this month ordered plore the orgy of killing and rape at Nanjing. the Japanese prisoner and failure to depict a crackdown, insisting studios make “more se- Chinese estimates put the Nanjing death the Chinese as selfless patriots. rious” dramas. toll at 300,000. Japanese and some other Even Shi, the busy stuntman, is tiring of his LUDICROUS PLOTS foreign estimates are lower. role as a Japanese victim. Today, while hewing to the official anti- While studios continue to pump out dra- “I’m not good-looking so I play a Japanese Japanese line, some of these films are more ma, there are now signs scriptwriters are soldier,” he said. “I would really prefer play- subtle than their forerunners. In the 2009 scratching for material. Critics inside and ing a soldier in the Eighth Route Army.” box office hit, “The City of Life and Death,” outside the government have been scath- director Lu Chuan controversially included ing about the ludicrous and violent plots of Editing by Bill Tarrant a relatively sympathetic Japanese charac- some of the more recent productions. ter. Sergeant Kadokawa, played by Hideo Some directors have merged war dra- FOR MORE INFORMATION Nakaizumi, stands apart from his comrades mas with semi-mystical, martial arts action David Lague amid the orgy of violence in Nanjing. where virtually unarmed Chinese slaughter [email protected] But film makers can go too far. Jiang Wen, platoons of hapless Japanese. Jane Lanhee Lee the male lead in “Red Sorghum,” ran afoul of In the television series “Anti-Japanese [email protected] the state film administrator with “Devils on Knight,” an unarmed Chinese martial art ex- Bill Tarrant, Enterprise Editor the Doorstep,” his second film in the direc- pert tears a Japanese soldier in half from head [email protected] tor’s chair. The film won the Cannes Grand to crotch, the divided corpse suspended in Michael Williams, Global Enterprise Editor Jury Prize in 2000 but was subsequently the air with a skein of blood connecting the [email protected]

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