You don’t have to channel flick for long through China’s deluge of melancholy soaps and anaemic news to find shots of gallant revolutionaries striding through hails of Japanese bullets, freeing the people from the corrupt Guomindang, and foiling the schemes of their villainous foreign backers in a stroke. The wars of the 1930s and 40s (or, to use the Chinese phrase, the Liberation) remain after almost a century a constant feature of Chinese programming. Granted, past wars are relived worldwide, but in no country, or at least none that I have visited, are the wars of a single era so firmly embedded in television schedules, broadcast at all hours of the day, to an audience that has long since grown bored of them.
This last point is interesting. War dramas here are not only omnipresent, but bad – the film is dull, the acting unoriginal, the action mimed, on a par with those weird battle re-enactments you probably watched in history classes. Even the Chinese themselves poke fun at the recurring technological anachronisms – peasant soldiers shown firing missiles and the like. The point is not that the Chinese make bad shows, but rather that such a casual treatment of one of the most vicious periods of China’s history does not seem utterly absurd. In the West, the horrors of war have to be relived in full, gory detail to seem anything other than crassly disrespectful to the millions sent against their will to die in terrified agony, but here historical disaster is legitimate fodder for anyone with a camera and a few thousand yuan.
There are two main reasons for this. First is the simple fact that setting a program in the era is one of the only ways to get a bit of action, so corrosive to ‘harmony’, past China’s censors – thus, it is an easy choice for script writers. The second and more important reason is that the battles of the era, which, as the story goes, freed China from over a century of foreign exploitation and humiliation, are viewed by most Chinese in black-and-white terms. In those heady days, the line separating Communist good for foreign or Nationalist evil was yet to be blurred by the grim aftermath of the revolution. Without trying to downplay the callous exploitation of the Chinese by the West in the Opium Wars, the brutality of the Japanese invasion, or the corruption of the Nationalist government, the era is discussed among the Chinese with a total lack of moral ambiguity (the Communists committed their fair share of brutality as well), and a genuine passion that can come as a shock to more ahistorical Westerners.
It’s because of this lack of sensitivity to the moral ambiguities of those conflicts, born out of a strong sense of righteous victimhood, that such casual treatments of war fails to raise eyebrows in China. Revolutionary battles sit comfortably on daytime TV only because there is no doubt in the minds of the audience that the dead deserved to die – the Nationalists for their corruption, the Japanese for their barbarity; Westerners earn contempt for their shadowy attempts to hold back the revolution (which, to be fair, is entirely accurate). Though the events concerned have long faded from the public consciousness in the West (they are, for example, rarely taught in schools), the image of China as the victim of foreign oppression still hangs heavily over the interactions of the Chinese with the West.
Take, for example, the virulently nationalistic protests that erupted in many Chinese cities a year ago, after a show of Japanese defiance in a dispute over a few islands. The anger both on the streets and in the press was rooted not in the importance of the islands themselves, but in Japan’s past crimes against China, and outrage that such a past sinner would not cave in to Chinese demands. Despite dozens of apologies, not to mention the fact that Japanese yen, through both commerce and aid, have powered much of China’s rise, the occupation remains far from forgotten.
Equally, polls, op-eds and much debate online is shot through with a lingering suspicion that Western nations are conspiring to keep China weak and servile, and prevent it taking it’s perceived rightful place as a great power. Western complaints, from support for Tibetan independence, to calls for political reform, even requests for a revaluation of the yuan, are framed as insidious plots to ‘split’ China, and keep it weak. However large a pinch of salt the rantings of the official press may be taken with these days, that latent suspicion remains firmly ingrained in the minds of many Chinese, especially those whose contact with the outside world is kept to a minimum by low income and education.
I’m not, of course, arguing that such attitudes were created by war dramas. Such grievances were embedded in the rhetoric of all the original revolutionary factions, and are sustained today by the Patriotic Education Campaign that began in schools after the Tiananmen crackdown, to play up the role of foreigners in China’s troubles and divert attention away from the Party’s own wrongdoings. Even less am I trying to argue that this anger is not genuine, or somehow a government con – a classmate of mine was harangued only yesterday by a taxi driver about the destruction of a Beijing palace by foreign powers over a century ago.
The war dramas are in a sense China’s answer to America’s 24. Political paranoia that normally lies beneath the surface of public discourse is played out and climatically resolved in a straightforward conflict between good and bad of the sort that only violence can provide. Our views of China are invariably coloured by its recent, terrible, history, yet the Chinese perspective is still to this day determined by conflicts and crimes that foreigners barely remember, let alone consider relevant to the modern day. Whether the Chinese will move on within our lifetimes is difficult to say, but for a while the sight brave revolutionaries charging into the face of foreign adversity, no matter how low-budget, will continue to warm the heart of many a disgruntled patriot.
