Representing the Korean War on screen

The Korean War (1950–53) constitutes a singular moment in the global history of the Cold War as well as the national history of the People’s Republic of China. On a global scale, the Korean War, being one of the few ‘hot’ wars in the era of the Cold War, was one of the most intense forms of confrontation between the two ideologies and two major world powers. To the recently founded People’s Republic of China, the decision to enter the Korean War and aid the North Koreans effectively helped the Communist Party to consolidate its political legitimacy. It not only cemented China’s internationalist alliance with North Korea in resisting a major Cold War rival – the United States of America – but also firmly asserted the leadership of the ruling Communist Party ‘to maintain the inner dynamics of the Chinese Communist revolution’.⁴

After China’s entry into the Korean War in October 1950, photographers and filmmakers were sent to the front alongside the Chinese People’s Voluntary Force (CPVF) to document China’s war efforts. War footage was later edited into several newsreel documentaries that broadcasted sentiments of nationalism and resistance to the domestic audience, most notably Beijing Film Studio’s Resisting the Americans and Assisting the North Koreans series (1951 and 1952). In addition to documentary film, artists were commissioned to represent the subject of the Korean War across a variety of forms, including literature, performing arts and fiction film. The deployment of mass media for the purpose of political mobilization, as historian Matthew Johnson aptly pointed out, allowed the nascent People’s Republic of China ‘to communicate new imperatives and to reshape the institutional reach of the state’.⁵ Among these state-sanctioned artworks on the Korean War, Shanggan Ridge and Heroic Sons and Daughters were unparalleled in their long-lasting popularity and strong emotional impacts on the audience. Both films were enthusiastically praised at the time of release by both filmmakers and ordinary audiences as ‘spiritually inspiring’ and conveying strong ‘revolutionary optimism’.⁶

Typifying the Maoist tradition of war films, both Shanggan Ridge and Heroic Sons and Daughters affirm the central role played by the army in guarding national security and feature stories of war heroes to educate the audience morally and ideologically.⁷ The didactic function, however, was hardly the sole consideration for socialist filmmakers, who were then laboriously searching for a cinematic language that could make such moral lessons accessible, memorable and pleasurable. In the cases of Shanggan Ridge and Heroic Sons and Daughters, the deployment of theme songs and the gendered performance of music helped to synthesize education and entertainment and created cinematic attractions which went beyond ideological indoctrination. In my analysis, I pay particular attention to the intersection between music and gender in the two films and explore how such gendered performance of music contributed to both audiovisual pleasures and a more complex emotive spectrum spanning from lyrical sensibilities to revolutionary enthusiasm. Contextualizing the two films within the genealogy of Chinese sound cinema, I trace the convention of associating female characters with musical expressions back to the media culture of 1930s Shanghai. However, unlike the solo singing of the female vocalists in Shanghai filmic culture, Chinese filmmakers in the Maoist era appropriated this cinematic convention to accompany the female leads’ performance with the choral singing of the mass. In this process, the bourgeois songstress is reincarnated into socialist heroines, who acquire a new and more organic relationship with the revolutionary masses, and the aesthetic of decadent sentimentalism is transformed into that of revolutionary lyricism.

Moreover, situating the representation of these socialist heroines within the cultural history of Chinese socialism, I uncover the fast-changing politics of gender from the 1950s to the 1960s: while gender was meaningfully engaged in Shanggan Ridge, it became abstract and devoid of substance by the mid-1960s, when Jiang Qing, Madame Mao, who was in charge of cultural work, rose to power and implemented the ‘two-line struggle’ in the film industry: the struggle between the proletarian and the bourgeois.⁸ This shift, I argue, epitomized how the politics of socialist feminism surrendered to that of class struggle on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, when gender, emotion and interiority were removed from the radical politics of ‘continuous revolution’.

The making of Shanggan Ridge

Shanggan Ridge depicts the military confrontation between the CPVF and the United Nations Command near Shanggan Ridge from October to November 1952.⁹ Despite repeated attempts by the United Nations Command to seize the Chinese-controlled military pass, the Chinese army managed to defend their position on Shanggan Ridge, but they also suffered severe losses and casualties in the process. The eponymous film, based on this critical battle that took place in the last stage of the Korean War, was meant to glorify the sacrifice and heroism of the Chinese army in accomplishing such an unusual victory.

The planning of the film began as early as 1954, less than a year after the end of the Korean War. In March 1954, film director Sha Meng embarked on a trip to visit North Korea, where he would meet soldiers who experienced the Battle of Shanggan Ridge and gather materials about heroic stories and military tactics that emerged from the battle.¹⁰ In his North Korean trip, Sha Meng keenly read Konstantine Simonov’s Days and Nights (1945), a recently translated Russian novel on the Battle of Stalingrad during the Second World War. Simonov’s highly engaging characterization of war heroes urged the Chinese director to consider how he could shape his raw materials from the Korean War to make a story comparable to the Soviet fiction.¹¹

In his diary, Sha Meng confessed to having encountered some practical challenges when collecting and processing materials for the upcoming film production. For instance, he was quite frustrated at his poor interview skills, which often resulted in unproductive conversations. He also expressed disappointment when talking with the soldiers, who – in his view – were unable to meaningfully narrate their experiences and were often obsessed with insignificant details.¹² For instance, when a soldier recalled how his regiment managed to defend Shanggan Ridge with tactics of tunnel warfare, which later became the central plot of the eponymous film, his recollection was narrated plainly and uneventfully, as if there were nothing heroic of this extraordinary accomplishment.¹³ The discrepancy that Sha Meng felt between the requirement of film storytelling and the soldiers’ largely fragmented recollections is illustrative of what historian Huw Halstead perceived as a distinction between history as an authoritative narrative and history as an everyday mode of experience, with the latter being ‘diffuse, noisy, messy, often confusing, sometimes troubling’.¹⁴

While Simonov’s Days and Nights served as a major source of inspiration and exemplified to Sha Meng the importance of constructing a central theme in film narrative, the director also endeavoured to preserve life-like, everyday details that he collected during the interviews. In this process, Sha Meng came to the epiphany that: ‘The central theme in an artwork is decisive. Life is meaningful only when it can heighten the expression of the central theme … [The representation of life] should follow a realist principle.’¹⁵ In other words, as Sha Meng prized the creation of a central theme over the authenticity of life experiences, he also recognized the necessity of exhibiting the richness of life with realist techniques. This realization informed what the director later practised in the making of Shanggan Ridge, namely a neo-realist style that combined realism and romanticism to foreground the film’s central theme while displaying kaleidoscopic life experiences.¹⁶

The juxtaposition between realism and romanticism, on the one hand, results in stylistic heterogeneity in the audiovisual language of the film and, on the other, contributes to complex emotive expressions beyond the uncritical celebration of war heroes.¹⁷ The transition between the two styles is most elaborately represented in the culminating scene of the film; that is, when after another round of attacks by the United Nations Command, the Chinese brigade is terribly defeated and cornered in a cave. In this scene, the camera uses a series of close-ups that meticulously visualize the injured bodies and painful looks on the faces of the soldiers. The realist representation forces the audience to directly confront the cruelty of war and to imagine the corporeal experience of bodies in pain. The physical setting of the cave, a cramped, dark and muddy space, further enhances the sense of defeat and despair.

It is at such an overwhelmingly realist moment that the director introduced the singing of ‘My Motherland’ by Wang Lan, the heroine of the film and a military nurse taking care of the wounded soldiers. Up to this point, the film deploys predominantly realistic sound effects to reenact the soundscape of war. These sonic expressions of war, from the blasts of bomb explosions to the cracking rattle of wounded bodies, not only heighten the sense of military emergency that the Chinese brigade faces but also stir up much psychological anxiety in the mind of the audience. However, when Wang Lan, sitting in the cave with an aura of tranquility, starts to sing, the cacophony of war is suddenly disrupted, and instead the ears of the audience are met with the mellow and soothing voice of the singing heroine.

In this scene, the film seamlessly synthesizes the heroine’s singing and the theme song on the soundtrack to create a cinematic illusion of the heroine singing on screen. The careful representation of her performing body – especially when the camera first takes an extreme close-up to her face and later uses a medium close-up to her body – illustrates that the act of singing is a richly embodied experience, of the melodic vibrations of the vocal folds and the rhythmic movement of the female body. As she sings about the vastness of the Chinese landscape and the bravery of the people, the camera crosscuts between the individual faces of the soldiers resting in the cave, who are shown to play musical instruments or join her in singing. An unlikely and yet extraordinarily romanticist scene, the aural intensity of the episode is most emphatically captured through a contrast between sound and sight: a seriously injured soldier, his eyes covered by a bandage, listens attentively to the heroine’s voice and hums along the same tune. The loss of vision, therefore, could hardly be considered as a form of deprivation, but is shown to be an enabling process that gives one a new voice, and by extension rejuvenated strength. As the soldiers join the heroine’s singing one by one, the solo performance is transformed to group singing, which allegorizes the birth of a collectivized subject. The film’s lighting also changes accordingly with the advent of the romanticist soundscape: the dim, narrow and crowded space of the cave is gradually lit up, and the camera transitions from inside the cave to present sequences of panoramic shots of the magnificent landscape and industrial construction of the motherland, the same kind of imageries that the collective singing of ‘My Motherland’ fondly conjured up.

The film, by self-consciously representing the acts of singing and listening and reflecting on the synchresis between the auditory and the visual, invites the audience to engage with the expanded aural space constructed by film music. Instead of the awe for heroes or hatred for enemies that a conventional historical war film elicits, the romanticist staging of ‘My Motherland’ creates a much more complex emotive spectrum. Diegetically, it serves as a turning point in the development of the story that boosts the morale of the brigade, and audiovisually it mitigates the sense of depression brought by the realist representation of war and cultivates alternative sentiments of nostalgia, affection and the sheer joy of music. The elaborate depiction of the singing and listening bodies, and the subsequent montage sequence between an acousmatic voice singing about the motherland and shots of China’s vast landscape, furthermore contributes to the construction of an organic relationship between the individual and the collective, the personal and the national. In lieu of the ideological indoctrination of patriotism and nationalism, this relationship is forged through the irreducible concreteness of vocal resonance, corporeal experience and affectionate memories about one’s compatriots and native soil.

According to Liu Zhi, the songwriter of ‘My Motherland’, when Sha Meng first approached him for film music, the director presented lyrics about the determination of the Chinese soldiers to guard their motherland. Such plain, straightforward and politically cliched verse, as the musician perceived, could hardly evoke sincere patriotic passions from the film audience.¹⁸ As a result, Liu Zhi recommended Qiao Yu to write the lyrics for this central piece. Qiao’s lyrics, without any direct reference to the political event of the Korean War, began with the imagery of a river, a symbol that could immediately arouse a sense of familiarity and nostalgia associated with the local community to which one belonged, and thus the lofty sentiment of nationalism could be translated into a lyrical sensibility of the attachment to specific people and places.¹⁹

Adapting ‘Reunion’ to Heroic Sons and Daughters

In March 1952, seventeen high-profile artists left Beijing for North Korea, organized by the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Their task was to collect first-hand materials of the Korean War to better represent the heroism of China’s Voluntary Force. Ba Jin, an accomplished realist writer, was appointed as head of the delegates and led the group to interview Chinese soldiers and North Korean civilians. Nine years after the visit, Ba Jin published ‘Reunion’, a novella based on his personal experience during the Korean War. Despite the author’s fame, the novella received little recognition by state cultural institutions, nor was it consumed widely among popular readership.²⁰ With a quick glimpse into ‘Reunion’, one can immediately discern how the novella departs from the convention and expectation of Maoist war culture. Yet when ‘Reunion’ was adapted into Heroic Sons and Daughters in 1964, all such dissonant elements were eliminated to create a model work that celebrated the Chinese army in the Korean War.

The novella is narrated from the first-person perspective of a writer, Li Lin, a character who mirrors Ba Jin’s personal experience of the Korean War. Commissioned to report on the heroics of Chinese soldiers, Li Lin arrives in North Korea. There, he comes across a senior commander, Wang Wenqing, and a young girl from the army’s art troupe, Wang Fang. It soon turns out that the two are father and daughter who were forced to separate eighteen years ago in Nationalist-ruled Shanghai. The father and the daughter, with the help of the girl’s stepfather, eventually reunite with each other.

The story, as well as the metafictional structure of ‘Reunion’, reveals several layers of dissonance that undermine the intended effort of the novella to propagandize the war. During his visit to the battlefields, the narrator seems to be so preoccupied with the foreign landscape and musical culture in the army that from time to time he confesses to his inability, or even indifference, to portray the heroics of the Chinese soldiers. Such frustration in writing and the indecision in his selection of politically meaningful materials reveals the discrepancy between the political demands of war propaganda and the narrator’s (and, to some extent, Ba Jin’s) creative mind.

A most profound irony of ‘Reunion’ lies in the fact that although Li is commissioned to celebrate the bravery and sacrifice of the Chinese army, he ends up presenting a story of family melodrama: a subversive decision of which the writer/narrator was acutely aware. Towards the end of ‘Reunion’, as Li reflects,

I initially planned to write reportage on Wang Fubiao (the father of a martyred soldier), but what I actually did with was a story about Commander Wang and Wang Fang (the father and the daughter)… I dare not to show the story to Commander Wang, as I fear that he would tear off my draft.²¹

In Heroic Sons and Daughters, the storyline of family reunion is still present, but the central plot of the film is completely altered to revolve around the martyrdom of Wang Cheng, a soldier who is only mentioned in passing in the novella. The shifting focus from the novella to the adapted fiction film, as literary scholar Piao Jie argues, exemplifies the changing cultural ecology of 1960s China, when the subject of war was promoted in state-sanctioned cultural production and the character of soldiers was extensively celebrated.²² Unlike in the novella, where the narrator repeatedly expresses his frustration over his failure to adequately represent the heroics of the Chinese soldiers, such indecision was completely erased in the film. The act of glorifying war heroics is no longer the solitary, personal quest undertaken by a writer but is turned into a publicly staged event, in which the talented female singer Wang Fang narrates the heroism of Wang Cheng, and by extension the Chinese army, through her very act of singing a praise for them. In this way, heroism is hardly an elusive subject that could not be articulated in language. Instead, it becomes a spectacular performance that is to be witnessed, and participated in, by the collective.

Like Shanggan Ridge’s deployment of its theme song, the most emotionally impactful moment in Heroic Sons and Daughters similarly takes place at the musical performance of the heroine, Wang Fang. The camera first zooms into Wang Fang’s performance of ‘Ode to Heroes’ as its female lead in front of a group of performers on a makeshift stage. The lyrics of the song open with the lines: ‘Amid the raging flames, I sing the hero / Mountains on all sides turn their ears to listen.’ The self-reflexive references to the acts of singing and listening from the very beginning reveal the performative, ritualistic nature of the event, and the theatricality of the scene is further reinforced through the film’s visual language. The camera gradually zooms out to present a panoramic view of the audience – both the immediate off-stage spectators and the imagined audience of Chinese soldiers. The visual representation of the collective is matched with the aural performance of choral singing, when Wang Fang’s voice is joined by the chorus who jointly acknowledge and glorify the sacrifice and bravery of Wang Cheng. Furthermore, to sublate the collective passion of affection towards the hero and anger over the enemy that the performance of singing elicited to an unambiguously articulated political message, a poignant speech is given at the interlude of the song. In the speech, the heroism of the sacrificed soldier is interpreted through the lens of internationalist struggle, in which Wang Cheng is praised for being a loyal soldier of Mao, who ‘harbors profound love for the North Koreans and hatred for the imperialist invaders’. In this way, the revolutionary enthusiasm evoked through the experience of singing and listening is elevated, and yet simultaneously regulated, by a political analysis of Cold War geopolitics as a fundamental conflict between socialist internationalism and capitalist imperialism, thus gesturing towards an ideological leap from spontaneity to consciousness.

The genealogy of the songstress

If we contextualize these representational strategies deployed in Korean War films within the history of Chinese sound cinema, the practice of using music performance to intensify the audiovisual appeals and emotive intensity of cinema could be traced to the tradition of the songstress in 1930s Shanghai film culture. In Jean Ma’s study of the filmic tradition of the songstress, she argued that the gendering of lyrical sensibilities and the association of femininity with musical expressions was a signature expression of sound cinema. The expanded urban space of movie theatre, concert hall and dance hall, together with the emerging media technologies of gramophone, music recording and sound cinema, gave rise to a vibrant mediascape in semi-colonial Shanghai of the 1930s. As sound cinema, especially cinema that featured musical performances by singing women, became a prominent form of cultural production in this period, the songstress emerged as one of the most enamoured figures in the media culture of Shanghai. With the ascendance of the songstress on the Shanghai silver screen, the music that they performed became discrete sonic attractions for the moviegoing public and led to a proliferation in the use of theme songs in sound cinema. The popularity of the Shanghai songstress was further boosted through a circuit of intermedial transactions between screen and stage, in which the image and voice of songstress were reproduced and consumed intermedially in film, popular music and print culture.²³

However, even though songstresses entered the central stage and became heroines in sound cinema, their images were often presented as ‘passive objects to be disciplined, sacrificed, rescued, or redeemed’.²⁴ Songstress Red Peony (1931), the earliest sound film that used wax discs to play recorded singing, is a prototype of this narrative convention. The film narrates the misfortune of a Shanghai songstress, Red Peony. Despite the exceptional singing skill of the heroine, her voice, rather than empowering the talented songstress, was shown to cause tragedy in her life and her loss of agency.

As China faced a more urgent need for national salvation after the Manchurian Incident in 1931, theme songs began to convey more complex and urgent messages of political mobilization and mass agitation, and the figure of the songstress also changed. At this time, musicians bricolaged a plethora of musical traditions, from yellow music to Soviet agitprop, to introduce march music and choral singing to the soundtrack of Chinese left-wing cinema.²⁵ Nie Er, the most accomplished leftist musician in this period, collaborated closely with the burgeoning film industry and Pathé-EMI to produce nearly fifty mass songs.²⁶ The invention of the politically charged theme song, as Jean Ma argued, signals the gradual disappearance of the songstress, in which ‘the female singing voice was joined by male voices and eventually swallowed up in a revolutionary chorus’.²⁷ In other words, the songstress, a quintessential embodiment of Shanghai’s ‘decadent’ modernity, was sidelined by an emerging political culture that demanded mass mobilization and revolutionary action.

Xiaobing Tang’s study of sound cinema in 1930s Shanghai, however, provides a different angle for conceptualizing the changing representation of the figure and music of the songstress. Rather than lamenting the disappearance of the singing heroine, Tang contended that the popularization of left-wing cinema and its theme songs contributed to an emerging voice for working-class women on screen. This updated musical culture, therefore, enabled the exploration of the expressive capacity of human voice to both engender a new sonic expression and foster a new national vocal community.²⁸ Building on Tang’s insight, we may infer that the songstress did not disappear altogether but that she was transformed from a powerless, passive object of vocal attraction to an agitated, awakened modern woman. This awakened modern woman was now capable of articulating an assertive voice for herself and acquiring a new, and perhaps more organic, relationship with the revolutionary masses. In this renewed revolutionary convention of sound cinema, singing was no longer perceived as an ‘unfortunate gift’, as told in the story of Red Peony, but became an expressive and corporeal instrument for empowerment at both the personal and national level.

Returning to the characterization of singing women in the two Korean War films, we could see how both films were indebted to the representational tradition in 1930s Shanghai sound cinema, both in terms of the sonic pleasure and emotional intensity that the figure of the songstress evoked and the emerging female subjectivity that left-wing cinema envisaged. Such transhistorical borrowing also attests to Paul Clark’s historiography of Maoist film culture. Despite the transformation of the cultural ecology of China after the establishment of the People’s Republic, the tradition of Shanghai film did not dissolve completely but converged with the Communist tradition of filmmaking in Yan’an to create an accessible and yet politically meaningful mass culture for the public.²⁹ Singing, first of all, exemplifies the creation of an audiovisual language that reconciles the task of entertainment and that of education in Maoist film culture. Moreover, as singing is depicted as a gendered gift reserved for revolutionary heroines, it is increasingly associated with women’s attainment of political subjectivity and revolutionary agency in Chinese socialist cinema. Therefore, in these Korean War films, we can see how different types of heroism are demarcated along the lines of gender: while men fight the battles for the cause of nationalism and internationalism, women sing in an effort to mobilize and agitate the spectators, both on- and off-screen.

The changing politics of gender

Given the similar subject and audiovisual techniques of the two Korean War films, one may conclude that they both belong to the distinctive socialist filmic tradition that utilizes musical spectacles to glorify military struggles and revolutionary heroism. However, if we scrutinize the representation of gender in the two films, we begin to discern how they differ in their characterization of heroines and engagement with gender issues. Such divergence, as exemplified in Shanggan Ridge and Heroic Sons and Daughters between 1956 and 1964, is indicative of the changing cultural politics of gender in the socialist era, from the early visibility of gender to its eventual erasure on the eve of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).

The Maoist era witnessed the prominence of female images across almost all mediums of cultural representation. Women were celebrated as exemplary model workers as well as positive fictional characters, embodying a gender egalitarian ideal promised by the socialist state. Despite the favourable status of women, a popular thesis argues that the Maoist era witnessed an ‘erasure of female gender’. Mayfair Yang’s research on the image of labouring women in Women of China in 1960s is representative in this regard, as she argues that ‘gender became an unmarked and neutralized category, its role as a vessel of self-identity was greatly diminished, and it lost its significance for gender politics, which was replaced by class politics’.³⁰ Such a statement, however, overlooks the radical socialist feminist imperative to advocate women’s representation in the public and cultural arena, and it further treats the entire history of the socialist period as a monolith dominated by the politics of class struggle.³¹

In Finding Women in the State, feminist historian Wang Zheng argues against this prevalent misconception and recognizes heterogeneous articulations of gender in the socialist years. For instance, she traces the critical role played by socialist feminist filmmakers, in particular Chen Bo’er and Xia Yan, who spent their formative years under the May Fourth feminist tradition, in creating revolutionary heroines and transforming gender norms in socialist China. With films such as Daughters of China (1949) and Eternity in Flames (1965), the feminist filmmakers introduced ‘images of brave, selfless revolutionary heroines’ as well as powerful critiques of the patriarchal social system to China’s mainstream film production.³² However, before much of their feminist agenda could be actualized, the valorization of revolutionary heroines was soon subsumed by the politics of class struggle on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Although women continued to be featured in model operas engineered by Jiang Qing, the female protagonists in these artworks ‘were not only situated squarely in previous men’s turf as leaders but also absolutely detached from familial responsibilities and kinship relations’.³³ In other words, gender was no longer considered as a relevant or meaningful issue with which to engage, and class contention became the focal point of those narratives.

If we come back to the heroines in the Korean War films with the hindsight of the historical trajectory of socialist feminist cultural politics, we can immediately recognize how gender is transformed or erased from Shanggan Ridge to Heroic Sons and Daughters within the short span of a decade. In Shanggan Ridge, the film heroine, Wang Lan, belongs to the genealogy of revolutionary heroines that socialist feminist filmmakers carefully carved. Being a military nurse, she is depicted as affectionate, caring and brave towards the injured soldiers, a character who comes to embody the spirit of revolutionary optimism. Aside from her professional responsibilities, the film also presents the interiority, emotions and gendered experiences of the heroine, and in particular her unexpressed affection towards the commander. Although the private self of the heroine is shown to be occasionally in conflict with and eventually regulated by the public – a narrative convention demanded by socialist cultural production – the acknowledgement of such conflicts nevertheless indicates a process of negotiation and allows for an openness of interpretation.

In the case of Heroic Sons and Daughters, we can see clearly how class politics was upheld as a central narrative structure, as well as in structuring feeling in the film, at the cost of the erasure of gender and gendered experiences. The narrative and emotional spectrum of the film is by essence sustained both by the positive bondage between the Chinese and the North Koreans and the negative opposition between the Voluntary Force soldiers and the American aggressors. Although Heroic Sons and Daughters still preserves the storyline of the reunion of Wang Wenqing and Wang Fang, in lieu of the reunion of the biological family, the film asserts the construction of an expanded, class-based family of the soldiers and the masses. In this process, the traditional form of family is rendered an empty signifier in which biological ties are displaced, and the trope of the family becomes a miniature of class fraternity that substantiates the new political order of class struggle. Moreover, the film features extensive cross-cultural exchanges between the Chinese and the North Koreans to explore the making of an international(ist) family. The heroine Wang Fang is oftentimes shown as interacting with the North Koreans, dressing herself in Korean attires and diligently learning about Korean folk culture. While the presence of North Korean elements embellishes a foreign attraction in this film, more importantly it helps to situate the heroine within a transcultural contact zone and allegorize the formation of an international family between North Koreans and the Chinese that was founded on a shared national experience of imperialist aggressions. As Ban Wang observed, the establishment of this transnational family structure illustrates ‘a particular feature of Chinese nationalism that projects an internationalist dimension’.³⁴ In this process, the mourning for her deceased stepbrother that Wang Fang performs through her singing of ‘Ode to Heroes’ is no longer personal or familial, but is transformed into a more abstract glorification that aims to inspire young revolutionaries to resist enemies, be they imperialist or class. In this light, it is hardly surprising that Heroic Sons and Daughters was among the very few fiction films that were still allowed to be screened openly during the Cultural Revolution, a period in which the principle of class struggle became the orthodoxy in cultural production.

Coda

In One Second (dir. Zhang Yimou, 2020), a contemporary Chinese film about a group of ‘cinephiles’ during the Cultural Revolution, a central conflict takes place at the screening site of Heroic Sons and Daughters in a poorly equipped movie theatre in Northwest China. Even though the audience have watched the film many times, they still eagerly line up and cram into the movie theatre to see it. As One Second later reveals, people come to see Heroic Sons and Daughters for a variety of reasons: to see the newsreel attached to the film, to join in the communal ritual of moviegoing and to enjoy the power of exhibiting a film, but crucially none of them are for the ideological lesson or revolutionary enthusiasm orchestrated by the Korean War film.

This revisionist citation of Heroic Sons and Daughters illustrates, perhaps, as much the complex emotive terrain of ordinary Chinese people in the socialist era as the changing mediascape of contemporary China.³⁵ When political passions about class, nation and revolution become exhausted or obsolete, what else could account for the continued emotive appeal of these Korean War films to socialist and post-socialist audiences? While the present chapter focuses predominantly on the mechanisms of cultural production, Zhang’s cinematic remediation illuminates a different angle of approaching gender and emotion in Chinese revolutionary war films: to recognize the highly individualized cinematic experiences and understand the plural ways of making sense (and sensibility) of socialist cinema.

Notes

1. 1.  H. Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 286.

2. 2.  D.D. Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. x.

3. 3.  B. Wang, ‘Review of The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis’, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), 37 (2015), 218–20, at p. 220.

4. 4.  J. Chen, China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 215.

5. 5.  M. Johnson, ‘International and Wartime Origins of the Propaganda State: The Motion Picture in China, 1897–1955’, PhD dissertation (University of California San Diego, 2008), p. 452.

6. 6.  See Liu Zuyi, ‘A Brief Discussion of the Portrayal of Film Characters in Shanggan Ridge’, China Film, 3 (1957), 54–5 at p. 54 and Zhao Lantian, ‘On Heroic Sons and Daughters’, Film Art, 1 (1965), 16–17. Even in the post-socialist era, they are fondly remembered as ‘red classics’ and widely cited and remediated in the contemporary Chinese mediascape; for instance, a recent blockbuster on the Korean War, Sacrifice (2020), paid homage to Heroic Sons and Daughters by employing the same theme song as the 1964 film.

7. 7.  B. Wang, ‘Art, Politics, and Internationalism’, in C. Rojas (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 252.

8. 8.  The ‘two-line struggle’ refers to the struggle between the proletarian and the bourgeois. While the theory was first formulated by Mao, Jiang Qing adopted it to the realm of culture and prescribed that the depiction of class struggle was the sole legitimate subject in socialist cultural production, and henceforth the Manichean class feeling became the dominant structure of emotion in the subsequent decade of the Cultural Revolution. See Z. Wang, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1964 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), p. 218.

9. 9.  Shanggan Ridge is commonly known as Triangle Hill in English.

10. 10.  M. Sha, ‘Diary When Conducting Interviews for Shanggan Ridge’, in L. Kailuo (ed.), Approaching Sha Meng (Beijing: Beijing dianying chubanshe, 2002), p. 66.

11. 11.  M. Sha, ‘Diary When Conducting Interviews for Shanggan Ridge’, pp. 67–75.

12. 12.  M. Sha, ‘Diary When Conducting Interviews for Shanggan Ridge’, p. 66.

13. 13.  M. Sha, ‘Diary When Conducting Interviews for Shanggan Ridge’, p. 76.

14. 14.  H. Halstead, ‘Everyday Public History’, Journal of the Historical Association, 107 (2022), 235–48 at p. 236.

15. 15.  M. Sha, ‘Diary When Conducting Interviews for Shanggan Ridge’, p. 75.

16. 16.  L. Meng, ‘Neo-Realism and the Heroic Epic’, in L. Kailuo (ed.), Approaching Sha Meng (Beijing: Beijing dianying chubanshe, 2002), p. 121.

17. 17.  Because of the intensely realist depiction of the war, the film was heavily criticized during the Cultural Revolution as such realism risked undermining the positive image of the Chinese army. See L. Meng, ‘Neo-Realism and the Heroic Epic’, p. 124.

18. 18.  Z. Liu, ‘The Experience of Composing for Shanggan Ridge, Heroic Sons and Daughters, and Ode to the Motherland’, Zongheng, 22 (1997), 41–2.

19. 19.  The composition of ‘My Motherland’ borrows both from folk music and resistance music produced during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). The pre-Communist origin of the music and the ordinary folk imageries deployed in the lyrics, however, make ‘My Motherland’ a patriotic song but without direct reference to socialism. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the song could evoke so many different layers of emotions that may not align entirely with official ideology. This echoes what Anna Toropova observed in Feeling Revolution about the porousness and polysemy of emotion that defies, escapes or exceeds official values. See A. Toropova, Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affect under Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 10–12.

20. 20.  N. Chen, ‘Not Just the Travel of a Story: A Study of the Adaptation of “Reunion” and Heroic Sons and Daughters’, Literature and Art Forum, 10 (2014), 179–83 at p. 180.

21. 21.  Ba Jin, ‘Reunion’, Shanghai Literature, 8 (1961), 15–29 at p. 29.

22. 22.  J. Piao, ‘Reading Heroic Sons and Daughters: The Internal Logic of the Production of the Image of Hero in the People’s Republic of China’, Literature and Art Studies, 11 (2020), 100–11 at p. 103.

23. 23.  J. Ma, Sounding the Modern Woman, p. 5; Z. Zhang, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 315.

24. 24.  Ma, Sounding the Modern Woman, p. 17.

25. 25.  A. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 69.

26. 26.  J. Howard, ‘ “Music for a National Defense”: Making Martial Music during the Anti-Japanese War’, Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 4 (2015), 1–50 at p. 10.

27. 27.  Ma, Sounding the Modern Woman, p. 12.

28. 28.  X. Tang, ‘Radio, Sound Cinema, and Community Singing: The Making of a New Sonic Culture in Modern China’, Twentieth-Century China, 45 (2020), 3–24, p. 10.

29. 29.  P. Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 25.

30. 30.  M. Yang, ‘From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women’s Public Sphere in China’, in M.M. Young (ed.), Spaces of Their Own (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 41.

31. 31.  Z. Wang, ‘Creating a Socialist Feminist Cultural Front: “Women of China” (1949–1966)’, The China Quarterly, 204 (2010), 844.

32. 32.  Z. Wang, Finding Women in the State, p. 198.

33. 33.  Z. Wang, Finding Women in the State, p. 216.

34. 34.  B. Wang, ‘Art, Politics, and Internationalism’, p. 264.

35. 35.  Z. Ma, ‘War Remembered, Revolution Forgotten: Recasting the Sino-North Korean Alliance in China’s Post-Socialist Media State’, Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 22 (2017), 54–82 at p. 74.

References

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