The dangerous rise of China’s nationalist cinema
Cynthia Lee/Alamy
If you live in the west there is a good chance you haven’t heard of, far less seen, the highest grossing global movie of 2021. It isn’t the latest Bond film, nor some Marvel flick. Rather a war epic, The Battle at Lake Changjin, claims the top spot. In many ways it’s typical of the genre, reflective of the type Californian studios have been pumping out for decades. A small force, barely subsisting on frozen potatoes, defeats a far superior enemy via pluck and smart tactics. But there is one crucial difference from your standard Hollywood fare. This time the bad guys are the Americans. And our heroes? The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The Battle at Lake Changjin is well worth watching, though as much because of what it tells us about Chinese politics as for the performances. Unable to find it at any of my local cinemas, I had to make a trip to a tiny screening in London’s Leicester Square. The film is set during the Korean War, which it insists on calling “the war to resist America and aid Korea”. A Chinese Communist Party (CCP) production, it purports to tell the story of the 1950 Battle of Chosin Reservoir, a major Chinese offensive which pushed US and UN forces out of north-eastern North Korea.
As a movie, it’s pretty good. The acting is generally solid and the plot naturally makes you side with the PLA protagonists. From a historical perspective, it is almost entirely illiterate. The film portrays the Americans as aggressors, entirely ignores the initial North Korean invasion of the South and treats the battle as an underdog story, whereas in reality the Chinese outnumbered their opponents by four to one. Mao Zedong makes a brief appearance, during which he is treated as a jovial “father of the nation”, rather than as he was: one of humanity’s most ruthless butchers.
The film’s message almost perfectly reflects CCP ideology in the age of Xi Jinping. Whilst the CCP itself is warmly portrayed, the movie largely ignores communist ideology and class war. Instead, the message is purely nationalistic. The gutsy Chinese accepting great hardship to overcome an aggressive United States. Our heroes are defined by their Chinese, rather than their proletarian, characteristics.
In this respect The Battle at Lake Changjin reflects a growing nationalist and militarist bent in Chinese cinema. The second highest grossing film of 2020 globally was The Eight Hundred, another Chinese war epic. Based around the 1937 defence of Sihang Warehouse from Japanese attack, 452 Chinese soldiers (they pretend to have 800 – hence the name) gallantly resist against overwhelming odds. Their sacrifice provides an important moral boost, and impresses European and American observers in Shanghai’s foreign concessions.
Similarly, the top grossing Wolf Warrior action movies, released in 2015 and 2017 respectively, depict a maverick Chinese special forces veteran fighting villainous American and European mercenaries. Wolf Warrior 2, by some margin the most commercially successful, sees our hero rescue Chinese civilians from the hired-guns in an African civil war. The film’s tagline, “whoever attacks China will be killed no matter how far the target is”, could scarcely be more explicit. Critics may point out Hollywood has long produced movies that glorify the US military, and celebrate American patriotism. This is of course true, but also misleading. To be approved Chinese films have to reflect, or at least not challenge, state ideology. We may be seeing China’s answer to Rambo and Hacksaw Ridge, but don’t expect their version of Platoon or Full Metal Jacket anytime soon.
The CCP has, through its history, proven to be quite the ideological chameleon. From Mao’s peasant-based Marxism, through Deng Xiaoping’s pro-market reforms, to Xi Jinping’s increasingly belligerent nationalism. State approved Chinese cultural output has, inevitably, reflected these changes. The message of The Battle at Lake Changjin and Wolf Warrior 2 is that violence and sacrifice to defend Chinese interests, embodied by the CCP, is a virtue. And, perhaps most significantly of all, that China’s primary enemy is American.
With China replacing the US as the world’s biggest box office in 2020, the influence of its cinema is only likely to increase. Despite blatant self-censorship, such as the removal of a Taiwanese flag from Tom Cruise’s jacket in Top Gun 2, foreign films are finding it increasingly difficult to gain approval to screen. It seems quite possible that world politics, over the next few decades, will be defined by a herculean confrontation between China and the United States. A second Cold War, though perhaps minus the chilly part. As such the West can no longer afford to ignore Chinese popular culture, nor the political messages it is spreading to more than 1.4 billion people.
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