In 1990, Beijing Olympics opening ceremony director Zhang Yimou (張藝謀) had a rare and affecting starring role in A Terra-Cotta Warrior, a fantasy about a Qin Dynasty general pursuing the love of his life over thousands of years.
In the final scene, the latest incarnation of the woman he adores, played by Gong Li (鞏俐), visits the terra-cotta warrior exhibition in Xian as a tourist. Eternally waiting for her among the statues is Zhang — and the credits roll.
This week saw new allegations by the Dalai Lama of a massacre of Tibetans, placing the Olympics under new pressure for providing cover for a government that will not change its terrible ways.
But it was Zhang’s comments to the Chinese media this week that deserve comment here. Given what has happened in the lead-up to the Games, his words have showed him up as a terra-cotta warrior for “rising China” — a man as politically ossified, obnoxious and enslaved as any of his compatriots.
When the creators of the opening ceremony were named, director Steven Spielberg took the heat, largely from actress and Darfur activist Mia Farrow. She warned Spielberg he might become the next Leni Riefenstahl, one of the most talented artists to aid the Nazi regime, for lending the Chinese credibility.
For Spielberg, a Jew who has invested years of his life and money documenting and recreating the horrors of the Holocaust, this was no small accusation. Yet when he had the sense and decency to withdraw, the spotlight — and Riefenstahl tag — did not encumber Zhang, presumably because his Chineseness exempted him from considerations of morality.
This week, basking in his success, Zhang revealed a glimpse of the philosophy that girded the spectacle.
Based on his experiences directing operas in the “West,” Zhang mocked labor rights and the troublesome nature of human rights in general, while gushing on the superiority of the Chinese spirit: “We can make our human performance reach such a level, through hard and smart work. This is something many foreigners cannot achieve.”
For Zhang, it turns out, comparisons with North Korea are a source of pride.
It is likely that Riefenstahl never predicted that the rise of Germany’s National Socialists would set off a chain of war and slaughter on a scale that would turn her into an eternal villain of the industry.
Zhang, on the other hand, is a man all too familiar with China’s modern history of repression, and was himself victimized by the state. He knows that the state and social oppression he depicted in films like To Live continues, though in refined form, much more selectively and with the tacit complicity if not full support of the nouveau riche. Yet he rationalizes suffering as a thing that dignifies his compatriots.
As the Chinese government reaps the propaganda harvest of this Olympics, Zhang is bound to suffer for it outside his country. His personal and artistic agenda sits too easily with the trashing of principles others have defended over countless decades: human rights and freedom from government oppression.
In the context of a country with poor labor protections and widespread abuse, Zhang’s puerile statements on the nature of Chineseness — there is national virtue in bitterness, weakness in individuality and justification for exploitation — deserve to be widely known.
Film festival organizers stunned by Zhang’s casual stereotyping of “Westerners” (probably code for all foreigners) may care to think twice before inviting China’s leading propagandist to their events. Acclaim for Zhang from the “Western” film industry, it seems, offers no insurance against 5,000-year-old prejudice.
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