In China, nationalist fervor tends to overlap with pop culture. These two things often make one forget the differences between officialdom and the populace, between rich and poor, or between the coastal and inland areas. They cause people to hurl themselves into collective passion and expectations.
From the perspective of pop culture, last year was a dramatic year for China. The country's soccer team made it to the World Cup for the first time ever. China's adjusting to accession to the WTO and Beijing's successful bid to host the 2008 Olympic Games filled the country with a feeling that China had become a powerful country, poised to vie for the top spot. But Chinese soccer fans came to know how far away China was from the top spot when their team failed to score a single goal or win a single match in the World Cup.
By the end of the year, however, the soccer despair had been superseded by a new frenzy. The ascendance of Chinese professional basketball player Yao Ming (
We can use Zhang Yimou's (
In the past, China's image in the eyes of Euro-Americans was perfectly reflected in the scenes from the movies Zhang made in the early 1990s -- an undeveloped, impoverished region with yellow clouds of dust and disgruntled women in the harems of ancient palaces.
This was in fact an image deeply embedded in the Euro-American mind. Zhang used it adroitly and won many film awards as a result. (Of course, this is not to deny his artistic achievements.) But China has always paid a great deal of attention to its image problem. That's why Chinese officialdom banned Zhang's movies.
China has remained largely unchanged in outsiders' eyes even after foreign companies began to invest heavily in Beijing and Shanghai. Chinese films that have won awards in Europe and the US in recent years indicate a China undergoing economic and social change. Xiao Wu (
Chinese officialdom, which wants to change China's image, naturally dislikes this state of affairs. Ang Lee's (李安) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon brought new hope for China's film-making circles. While Lee is used to producing films on relatively small budgets, China has vast resources at its disposal. It has some of the world's most ancient historic sites and a large cast of cheap extras who can be mobilized to create grand epic scenes. More important to Chinese officialdom, however, the movie has a good theme. Now that Ang Lee has primed the overseas market with a new brand of Chinese martial arts films, a movie like Hero may satisfy curiosity for a mysterious China while at the same time changing the image that Chinese movies have projected in the past.
Hero has started a craze in China, but it is also possible that the movie will fail to make an impact among non-Chinese -- just like New Year's Eve TV shows in China. Apart from martial arts forms, Crouching Tiger also featured some intellectual depth and some refreshing creativity. It also studied some issues that are of interest to Euro-Americans -- women's sexual desire, for example. In comparison, something seems to be missing from Hero despite its all-star cast and breath-taking scenes.
Hsu Tung-ming is a freelance writer based in Beijing.
Translated by Francis Huang
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