April is the month of spring and the launch of another peak in the entertainment industry after the New Year. This year, movie theaters in mainland China launched some classic movies in March and early April to gather popularity, including old movies such as “Avatar” and “Lord of the Rings”, which received good results. However, audiences soon discovered that many cinemas had pulled Lord of the Rings and allocated their slots to so-called “red movies”.
The Communist Party’s National Film Bureau recently issued a Notice ordering cinemas to show at least two officially designated red movies a week from April 1 to December to coincide with the authorities’ propaganda campaign. Some theaters will show at least five films per week and organize screenings in rural areas, urban communities and campuses.
What are these “red films”? Let’s take a look at this list. Here is a poster of a film exhibition organized by the Ministry of Propaganda. The films are: “The Southern Expedition”, “Shangganling”, “The Railway Guerrillas”, “The Red Army of Women”, “Mine War”, “Red Sun”, “Little Soldier Zhang Ga”, “Children of Heroes”, “Nanchang Uprising”, “The Battle of Hundred Regiments”, “Battle of Xiangjiang” and “Vajra River”.
Among the 12 films, 9 are remakes of old films made before the Cultural Revolution and 3 are new films made after the Cultural Revolution. Basically, the films are all about the Communist Party’s seizure of power and the early years of its political establishment, and are evenly distributed, with three from the Red Army period before the 1930s, five from the Anti-Japanese War period, one from the Civil War period in the 1940s, and three from the Korean War with the Americans.
The Ministry of Propaganda has requested that a total of 100 “red movies” be released around the centennial of the founding of the Communist Party on July 1 this year to celebrate the birthday of the Communist Party, and this is the first installment. Naturally, Western films like Avatar and Lord of the Rings have to give way.
The Chinese film industry was in a desperate situation in the 1990s, producing few and poor films that were not well received by the Chinese people. Later, the Chinese Communist Party relaxed the standards a bit, and introduced Hong Kong and Taiwan film companies and production teams, as well as some modern film concepts, gradually improving the situation. However, in the last two years, the number of so-called joint ventures has been decreasing, and the number of bad movies has been increasing.
In recent years, the Ministry of Propaganda has stepped in as a subordinate agency and started to cooperate with the Americans, but this cooperation is different from the previous ones. In the past, usually Hong Kong or Taiwan funding, the foreign team to adapt the script of mainland China, but also with Hong Kong and Taiwan stars, directors and production teams. But in recent years, most of the cooperation with the Americans has been with the Chinese Communist Party, which pays for the script, and then the American director and team complete it.
Presumably the CPSC felt the time was ripe to go it alone, and this time, the 100 red plays were planned and produced by the CCP itself alone.
Unfortunately, the red plays launched in early April did not work well and caused a great deal of public resentment.
Among the 12 red plays, except for “Vajrachuan” and “The Hundred Regiment War”, which made some gains at the box office, the rest of the movies basically did not make any money at the box office, or even made zero money at the box office. A friend told me that he was at a Red Drama screening where there were only 6 or 7 people in the cinema. Subsequently, the only two movies left in the box office information announced by the CCP were also “King Kong Chuan” and “The Hundred Regiment War”, with other movies missing.
Some fans sarcastically said: “A bad movie is always a bad movie”; some internet vloggers mocked: “The Lord of the Rings” was withdrawn and re-screened as a war movie. Share a piece of hot knowledge: take away the gold and the sand won’t shine!”
According to Radio Free Asia, recently, governments in Fujian and Guangdong issued a document urging local governments to organize people to watch red movies. However, some locals said they would not go to see such brainwashing red movies.
That said, the Chinese Communist Party relied heavily on the film industry for its beginnings, and before the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, Shanghai was the largest film production center in China and Asia, with many films that could be considered world-class. The film industry in Shanghai at that time was also full of fierce people, but it was also the place with the highest concentration of leftists. It was a bit like Hollywood now.
For example, Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong, was a movie star in Shanghai at that time.
In the 1980s, most of the films that Chinese people saw in Hong Kong were basically the films of the Great Wall and Phoenix, which were about the decadence and darkness of Hong Kong’s capitalist society, in which the people of Hong Kong lived in misery and suffered from the oppression of the capitalists.
In the early days, most of the Hong Kong studios were leftist with influential Communist background. It was only after the Cultural Revolution that the leftists in Hong Kong became bourgeois, and a large number of leftist stars and directors returned to China to be criticized, and some even died by suicide, before the decline of leftist films, Shaw’s film industry became a monopoly. Thanks to this, the Hong Kong film industry and television industry became extremely developed.
The film industry in mainland China was at a low point during the Cultural Revolution, and the only films that could be shown year-round were the eight model plays, plus early Soviet films, and films from North Korea, Albania and Vietnam.
The eight model plays also told the stories of the Chinese Communist Party during the Red Army, the War of Resistance, the Communist Civil War, and the so-called Anti-US and Anti-Korea period, as well as the post-statehood period. These films share a common theme of glorifying the Communist Party, and the ideological core of all the films is not communism, but hatred.
For example, in “The Red Lantern”, Li Tie Mei sings, “Bite the hatred, bite the hatred, hatred into the heart to germinate;” for example, in “Wisdom of the Mountain”, Yang Zirong sings, “To avenge the injustice, blood debts must be paid with blood. The White Maiden” was originally an opera, but later changed into a modern ballet, in which a song sings: I hate, hate can not smash this grandmother temple, I want to, I want to bury you, all.
The Red Army of the Maiden” has a plot in which Wu Qinghua, a female Red Army soldier, does not observe discipline and runs off on her own to take revenge, resulting in the loss of the Red Army, and is educated after returning to the big blackboard with a big line, “The proletariat must first liberate all mankind before it can finally liberate the proletariat itself.” This is the most theoretical paragraph in the model play, said to be first from the “Communist Manifesto”, later summarized by Lenin. It is also a high summary of hatred and the reason why the communist regime is particularly aggressive and must export revolution.
Many people may feel that these red movies and plays, like the various propaganda of the Communist Party, do not play much of a role. This is true in some cases, especially, brainwashing must take place in closed environments, such as concentration camps, and prison like brainwashing classes. In an open environment, such brainwashing would be much less effective.
However, even in an open environment, such brainwashing still has a role to play. This effect is first of all metaphysical, such as the belief that only the CCP and its leaders are wise and great, but more importantly, this kind of brainwashing can have a serious impact on the way people think. After accepting this way of thinking subconsciously, you will look at the world very negatively, everyone else has wronged me, it builds a victim mindset, anything bad, go to find the problems and faults of others. And the way to solve the problem is to fight, to fight, to take revenge, to figure out how to fight brutally with these “others”, to do everything.
Many people who have left mainland China for a long time, even if they have been overseas for many years, and even if they do not like the Communist Party or are even anti-communist, they unconsciously continue to see the world and themselves in this mode of thinking. In the eyes of others, such people are not confident, have delusions of persecution, have their nerves on edge at all times, and are always ready to fight to defend themselves. This can lead to a lack of rational logic in certain areas and can easily go into extreme emotional states, making it difficult to communicate and get along.
At this year’s two sessions, Xi Jinping said that the Chinese “can look at the world from a level perspective. Many people perceive this statement from the perspective of the CCP’s perceived rise and growing arrogance. This makes sense, especially since the performance of the CCP’s war wolf diplomats seems to be a footnote to Xi’s speech. But it seems to me that the performance of these war-wolf diplomats is precisely a lack of self-confidence and overreaction, typical of a victimized paranoia.
I don’t know many people who have ever seen a real wild animal. I mean real wild animals living in the wild, not animals in zoos.
When I was in Tibet, I had lived in the wild and seen real wild animals, such as sheep, deer, roe deer, foxes, wolves and whatnot.
I remember once seeing a leopard near the camp. Our tent was at the bottom of a hill, and the leopard, either a money leopard or a snow leopard, or just an ordinary leopard, was slowly walking over the hill not far away. It was evening, the sun was going down, and the leopard walked up the ridge from the edge of the woods then slowly disappeared, the view was beautiful. I was suddenly touched, and then I thought about it, the reason I felt touched was because the leopard was very soft and calm, unlike other wild animals that are very nervous. Animals in general are very nervous and ready to run or fight. The leopard was lazy, walking slowly across the hillock, sometimes stopping to look at us, very calmly.
Because in that place, the leopard is the top of the food chain inside the forest, basically there are no enemies, it is very confident, that’s why it has that calm feeling.
The Tibetans say that the weakest animal has its bones on the outside; the fiercest animal has a soft exterior and its bones on the inside. It makes sense. The world’s weakest animals are shellfish, shells without bones inside; sharks and tigers, the outside of the fur are very soft, but the most lethal, the most terrible.
When Xi Jinping said he was “looking at the world from a level perspective”, the Chinese diplomats showed that they had grown their bones to the outside, which is a sign of lack of self-confidence. If you really have self-confidence, you can really have the so-called “flat view”, which requires introversion of power, tolerance, more tolerance, and a real knowledge and understanding of the world and self, because the reason we are afraid of fear is often because of the lack of understanding of the external world.
The probability is that the so-called “100 Red Plays” launched by the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party for the centenary of the founding of the Party will, like the model plays, once again promote an ideology centered on “hatred”, which actually distorts the minds of the Chinese people, especially the young. The Chinese people, especially the young, will be turned into psychotic, victimized paranoiacs, which is the opposite of a normal “flat” view of the world, so to speak. If “flat view” is a sign of rise, then the CAC’s approach is the exact opposite.
Of course, it is basically Xi Jinping’s own self-contradiction.
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