建国大业 (The Founding of a Republic)

I dug into my collection of mostly pirated Chinese DVD’s this sickly week and, in one dizzy 48-hour period, watched the following: Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her & Made in the USA, Oliver Stone’s W., recent James Bond film Quantum of Solace, and the Chinese blockbuster epic The Founding of a Republic. I spent the following 24 hours coming down, my mind a dense mass of jumbled images and tangled thoughts about consumer culture, Chinese nationalism, American imperialism, and the effects of technology on interpersonal relationships. Don’t think that because I’m a PhD student I’m smarter than you. Who else but academia would have taken me?

According to the Chinese lunar calendar, the coldest time of the year is this week and the one preceding it, the last fierce gusts of winter as the year of the ox readies to gives way to the year of the tiger. As predicted, this week has been all bitter winds and single-digit temperatures. I am typically a fan of winter until it gets REALLY cold, and even then I wouldn’t mind so much if not for the maddening cabin fever. I like very much to walk about and look at things but this is less fun when I can’t feel my fingers.

It would be ideal if I could take advantage of this weather to get all settled in my new fieldsite, but my “boss” there, who has taken a rather maternal attitude towards me, has forbidden me to come in until the weather warms up a bit. Auntie Zhang and Uncle Mu have taken the predictable stance that I should avoid going outside at all so as not to catch cold or fall on the ice and even many of my friends of my own age have been sending me texts of concern saying pretty much the same thing. But the sky is so blue and the air is so fresh! I think, and then I go out walking and get so cold so fast that I duck into a shop to warm up and come out with yet another item of apparel bearing a neck bow.

Although cautioned against it I’ve still been going out daily, at the very least to the gym or the grocery store, until a recent bout of food poisoning trapped me completely. I’ve always had a rather masochistic work ethic and feel slightly decadent just lying around watching movies but I could only spend so much time pacing my room and cutting my bangs. Besides, watching Chinese movies is almost work, especially if the movie in question is the highest-grossing domestically produced film in history and takes as it’s subject the years of civil war leading up to the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and the establishment of the PRC.

Star-studded, big-budgeted (allegedly much of the funding came from the central government) and released to coincide with the PRC’s 60th anniversary last October, The Founding of a Republic was a blockbuster times a historical epic riding a tide of national optimism. The film was also hotly anticipated by the local expat community, most of whom were cynically curious about just how history would be officially spun.

What stood out most about the film, however, was just how impressive the casting was. Mao imitators seem to exist in China in almost Elvis proportions, as the image below implies.

I doubt there is much in the way of opportunities for Mao impersonators at used car sales or quicky weddings but there is no shortage of historical television dramas touching on various episodes of the leader’s life.

The performer who played Mao Zedong in the film, Tang Guoqiang, was a dead ringer for the big guy and managed to convey a great deal of the charisma and intelligence he surely possessed.

If he also came across as entirely beneficent and pure of heart that was more a factor of the script, which often placed him in scenes like the one below, where he and Zhou Enlai give piggyback rides to Mao’s daughters through a field of flowers.

More realistically, Mao was portrayed, as were many of his comrades, as incessant chain smokers. I was particularly amused by a scene in which a few of the top brass are forced to recognize that reform must proceed slowly when they realize that one thing capitalists are awfully good at is providing junkies with their fix:

Characters of little historical significance were often played by huge stars in tiny cameos. Jackie Chan, in heavy make-up, played a reporter in one small scene; in another Zhang Ziyi played a delegate to the women’s committee commenting on the flag design to be chosen for the new nation. The effect was slightly bizarre, like Brad Pitt suddenly showing up to fix the clock in Independence Hall in a film about the founding of the United States, or Julia Roberts in a brief cameo as Betsy Ross.

The most confounding casting choice of all was to put an Australian man, speaking with an Australian accent, in the role of the American Ambassador. How the hell did that happen?

In any history, however politically motivated, it is typically important to pay as much attention to what is omitted as what is included. The Founding of a Republic side-stepped many a sensitive area by leaving out individuals and moments that may have provoked discomfort or in any way dampened the patriotism the film attempted to stoke in its viewers (assuming few of you are scholars of Chinese history, I’m going to leave out what they left out). What remained was a vivid, rousing story with struggles and glories where the good guys win and the bad guys go to Taiwan.

Well not quite. One great surprise of the film was that Chiang Kai-shek (head of the Nationalist government or KMT), long reviled as a cruel, power-hungry dictator and a puppet of the Americans, came off as a guy who basically meant well but was too weakened by the corruption of his regime to challenge the mighty tide of Communist reform.

It may have been difficult to portray him any other way, as the audience knew from the start that he was going down quick. In the face of his inevitable defeat, the villain becomes tragic. That, to me, is one of the most troubling inherent flaws of historical drama of any kind: the way it makes events seem obvious, necessary, predestined and makes our view of them omniscient. I hope kids these days are still getting at least some of their history from books that add, rather than subtract, complexity and ambiguity. Failing that, I hope they at least are getting their history from films that don’t portray American ambassadors as possessing Australian accents.