A new dimension to promoting love of country
Starting with Zhang Yimou’s The Shanghai
Triads (1995) and Chen Kaige’s Temptress
Moon (1996), directors have played up the lawlessness of 1930s China for very different ends: Jiang Wen’s Let the Bullets Fly and Derek Yee Tung-shing’s The Great Magician
are allegories about present-day China, while Feng Xiaogang’s A World Without Thieves and Wong Jing’s The Last Tycoon are more simplistic entertainment.
Whatever their directors’ intentions, these films were passed by censors because they did not explicitly mention or address the social and political turmoil in China after 1949. Instead, they produced what can be seen as a chaotic prologue to the establishment of the People’s Republic and its ending of the anarchy, superstition and social injustices of Kuomintang rule.
This take on history is evident in so-called main melody films – those showing past military engagements or profiling first generation Communist Party leaders – such as
Beginning of the Great Revival and The Founding of an Army, in which Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his associates are largely depicted as arch-villains of a decadent era.
Does Wong Jing’s Chasing the Dragon, with its patriotic repackaging of Hong Kong underworld history, lend a new dimension to promoting love of country that other filmmakers can echo? Before China resumed sovereignty over the city, then-public security minister Tao Siju praised some Hong Kong gangsters as patriotic, a remark some saw as a request for their help in stabilising the city ahead of its handover from British rule.
If real-life gangsters could be brought onside in such a way, no doubt films portraying them could play their part in promoting the virtues of unity. — South China Morning Post