COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Filmic discourse on ethnic minority women in Chinese cinema: Womens liberation and national

identity in the Seventeen Years Period

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction

of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts

in East Asian Languages and Cultures

by

Laura Damara Brown

2012

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 1

CHAPTER II: CHINESE ETHNIC MINORITES AND NATIONAL IDENTITY .............. 5

CHAPTER III: FILM PRODUCTION IN POST-LIBERATION CHINA .......................... 12

CHAPTER IV: THE WOMENS LIBERATION MOVEMENT .......................................... 19

Lusheng Love Song (lusheng liange, 1957) ............................................................................ 25

People of the Grasslands (caoyuan shang de renmen, 1953) ................................................ 33

The Dai Doctor (moyadai, 1960) ............................................................................................. 38

CHAPTER VI: CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 45

FILMOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................ 48

BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 50

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TABLE OF FIGURES

FIGURE1OPENINGCREDITSSEQUENCE,LUSHENGLOVESONG(1957).....................................................................................26FIGURE2ALAHUMANPLAYINGAFLUTEDURINGAFESTIVAL,LUSHENGLOVESONG(1957)..........................................................28FIGURE3ALAHUWOMANPLAYINGADRUMDURINGAFESTIVAL,LUSHENGLOVESONG(1957)....................................................28FIGURE4CLOSEUPOFZATUO,LUSHENGLOVESONG(1957)................................................................................................29FIGURE5OPENINGCREDITSSEQUENCES,VICTORIESININNERMONGOLIA(1951)ANDPEOPLEOFTHEGRASSLANDS(1953)..............34FIGURE6SARENGEPETTINGASHEEP,PEOPLEOFTHEGRASSLANDS(1953)................................................................................35FIGURE7SARENGEADDRESSINGTHEVILLAGERS,PEOPLEOFTHEGRASSLANDS(1953).................................................................36FIGURE8FINALSCENESFROMPEOPLEOFTHEGRASSLANDS(1953),LUSHENGLOVESONG(1957),ANDTHEDAIDOCTOR(1960)....38FIGURE9YILAIHANSPINNINGYARNWITHADAILOOM.........................................................................................................41FIGURE10COMRADCAOANDAIWAN,THEDAIDOCTOR(1960)...........................................................................................42FIGURE11AFEMALEPLADOCTOR(LEFT)WELCOMESYILAIHAN(CENTER)................................................................................43FIGURE12YILAIHAN,AFTERHERMEDICALTRAINING,ONHERWAYTOAVILLAGE.......................................................................43

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ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Filmic discourse on ethnic minority women in Chinese cinema: Womens liberation and national

identity in the Seventeen Years Period

by

Laura Brown

Master of Arts in East Asian Languages and Cultures

Columbia University, 2012

This study examines filmic discourse on women in three films from the post-

revolutionary cinema of the Peoples Republic of China from 1949 to 1966. It argues that women

representing the ethnic minorities or non-Han nationalities of China were used as significant

rhetorical figures, conveying both aspects of the liberated Chinese Revolutionary woman and

also the eroticized, primitivized Chinese ethnic minority. The image of minority women as

masculine warriors stresses their servitude to the Communist state and ideological

identification with the Han model Revolutionary woman. Unlike the de-sexualized model Han

females described by Dai Jinhua as the classical revolutionary cinematic mode, however, the

focus on the costume, dance, singing, and romantic affairs of ethnic minority women place them

as the object of a gendered gaze, underscoring the eroticized femininity of them and the ethnic

minorities they represent. Following the work of Dru Gladney on the building of national

identity and Louisa Schein on the positioning of Miao women in the context of culture-building,

I explore how the bodies of minority women in Chinese films produced in the Seventeen Years

v

Period serve as sites for the contradictory methods in which minorities are co-opted in the

construction of a socialist China and Han-centered national identity. Female protagonists in films

such as Lusheng Love Song (1957) People of the Grasslands (1953), and The Dai Doctor (1960),

however, are also endowed with athletic prowess, cunning, heroics, and ideological idealism on

level with and surpassing male counterparts. I conclude by probing whether the fact that minority

womens femaleness, a gender identity longed for by their Han counterparts, used as a function

of internal Orientalism devalues the seeming versatility and freedom it provides for its onscreen

beneficiaries.

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1

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

For modern China, the first 50 years of the twentieth century had been a prolonged period

of turmoil and change. At the end of these five decades, national leadership was formally

assumed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which set up the Peoples Republic of China

(PRC) in 1949. This marked a new era of the modern Chinese national identity; Marxism-

Leninism-Maoism became the official political mandate that reorganized the countrys social

institutions and practices for the modernization of China as a socialist nation state. New internal

and external political challenges, however, still arose. Within the communist nation-state, the

influence of the Republican Party (guomindang, abbreviated as KMT) was still present, resisting

with military forces.1 Outside the new Peoples Republic, the worlds political map was slowly

developing into the two Cold War opposition blocs. The new Chinese governments commitment

to Communism automatically put it onto the opposite side from most of the developed countries.

Its involvement in the Korean War, beginning in late 1950, further sealed itself off from the

entire Western world, and within the Communist bloc, Maos relationship with Moscow was

tenuous. 2 Within the precarious unity of the new nation lived more than 400 million people with

different ethnicity, languages, political loyalty, economic conditions, and religious beliefs.

Constructing a reassuring and empowering national identity became one aspect of the long-term

political mission to turn this immense amalgamation of different people into a unified

community.3

In the Seventeen Years Period, which began in 1949 and led to the rise of the Cultural

Revolution, filmmaking became a powerful new ideological tool. Art in this period was largely 1FrederickC.Teiwes,PoliticsandpurgesinChina:Rectificationandthedeclineofpartynorms,19501965(Armonk,NY:M.E.Sharpe,1993)7071.2FrederickC.Teiwes163164.3FrederickC.Teiwes80.

2

dictated by Maoist cultural policy, and a major stylistic focus was Soviet-style Realism. This

period saw a boom in minority film production, films set in the north or southwest border areas

and which took newly designated Chinese ethnic minority groups as their subject. The magnitude

of the impact of the ethnic minority films was apparent not only in their sudden emergence in the

country, which had seen little ethnic minority presence on the silver screen prior to 1949, but

also in the sheer quantity and popularity of these films.4

The identification of these groups within China as minorities and the recognition of the

Han as a unified majority played a fundamental role in forging a unified Chinese nation and

building a national identity. To create a national style, a logical place to start would be the

nations tradition and history. As Chinas political and cultural revolutions in its modern history

were essentially anti-tradition, however, traditional cultural elements were often deemed

politically suspect. When Chinese filmmakers discovered the subject of ethnic minorities and

the creative freedom that the official approval of preserving ethnic culture brought, it quickly

became a rich reservoir of materials for constructing a national style (minzu fengge).5 As the

new Chinese national identity was officially established as a multi-ethnic one, it was the ethnic

minority subject, represented in particular by women, which was key in the creation of tradition

and local culture amidst Chinas vacillation between modernity and tradition.

At the same time, the archetypal image of the emancipated woman in films of this period,

what Harry Kuoshu calls the Socialist Revolutionary Super Woman, also played a key role on

the national scene.6 The CCPs policy for womens emancipation was based primarily on a

Soviet model, defined in part by their participation in the work force. It was also revolutionary-4ZhangYingjin,"FromMinorityFilmtoMinorityDiscourse:QuestionsofNationhoodandEthnicityinChineseCinema,"TransnationalChineseCinemaIdentity,Nationhood,Gender(Honolulu:UniversityofHawaii,1997)94.5IwilladdressthistermingreaterdetailinChapterTwo,seeLouisaSchein,MinorityRules:TheMiaoandtheFeminineinChina'sCulturalPolitics(Durham:DukeUP,2000)95.6HarryKuoshu,LightnessofbeinginChina:Adaptationanddiscursivefigurationincinemaandtheater(P.Lang:NewYork,1999)87.

3

based, inscribed by the official ideology of class struggle in the 1950s and 1960s. Dai Jinhua

notes that as part of Womens Liberation, the gender opposition and distinction between men

and women therefore disappeared and were replaced by class and political difference. 7 In The

Red Detachment of Women Soldiers (hongse niangzijun, 1961), for example, the protagonist is a

purified, female warrior who represents the ideology of merciless struggle. In films such as

The Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge, 1959) and Li Shuangshuang (1962), narratives focus on

sexual hierarchy to foreground various contemporary social and political issues in representation.

All of these films promoted, to varying degrees, female protagonists who are ideologically and

physically aligned with the ideal revolutionary soldier. It was the Chinese ethnic minorities as

embodied by the onscreen female who played the key role in combining the foreign concept of

womens liberation with Chinese essentialism into a unified national identity. What is of interest

here is the contradictory conceptions of these women in the symbolic or cultural sphere as well

as in the filmic circumstances that reproduce and maintain such contradictions.

The politics of Chinas liberation and modernization in the Seventeen Years Period is not

only of interest to the historian or the political scientist, but for the arts as well. National

restructuration of social discourses and practices in this period had long-term implications for

both the position of Chinese ethnic minorities and for Chinese cinema. By undertaking

interpretation and analyses of film and its relationship with the new structuring of national

identity and the promotion of womens liberation in the PRC from 1949 to 1966, I hope to

integrate a critical studies approach to the film text with a cultural studies perspective on cinema

as a social institution.

7DaiJinhua,InvisibleWomen:ContemporaryChineseFilmandWomensCinema,Positions3:1,DukeUniversityPress,Spring1995:258.

4

Beyond this introduction, the thesis will be divided into four chapters followed by a

conclusion. In Chapter Two I will analyze the relevance of ethnic minorities to the Chinese

national identity and to majority minority discourse. Chapter Three overviews the development

and characteristics of minority film production. Chapter Four will focus on the womens

liberation movement and its appearance in cinema. Chapter five will examine in detail the role of

ethnic minority women in three films of the period. The conclusion will gather the main points of

the prior chapters and suggest how analysis of the cinematic content of this period can be helpful

in revealing how the positions of ethnic minority women in Chinese cultural productions today

continue to play an integral part in the shaping of national identity and social discourse.

5

CHAPTER II: CHINESE ETHNIC MINORITES AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

The translation of the term minzu, which I define as ethnicity in this paper, has

evolved historically in literary and cultural studies through the last half of the twentieth century,

including terms such as nationality, ethnic group, and race, a translation Chris Berry

promotes in his 1992 article on the issue.8 Zhang Yingjin argues that this emphasis on

designating a singular translation has resulted in not so much a clarification as a conflation of

several distinct categories in Chinese film studies.9 Louisa Schein notes it is useful to think of

minzu categories as positionalities, for much of the maneuvering that has taken place within and

around them has to do precisely with social and political locations.10 Indeed, regardless of the

terminology chosen, the notion of minzu in the Seventeen Years Period was intimately

connected with the construction of national identity and the promotion of the Han as the majority

minzu of a multi-minzu China.

The designation of distinct minzu or ethnic groups in China began in the early 1950s;

in 1956, the original set of self-identified groups, numbering in the hundreds, was collapsed into

51 officially recognized minority nationalities.11 Today there are 56 officially recognized groups,

including the majority Han. According to Fei Xiaotong, a prominent Chinese social

anthropologist, Chinese understanding of minorities was heavily influenced by the Soviet models

of Joseph Stalin. To be identified, each group had to convince the state that it possesses a

common language, locality, economy, or psychological make-up, what Stalin later called

culture.12

8ChrisBerry,Race:ChineseFilmandthePoliticsofNationalism,inCinemaJournal,312(Winter,1992),4558.9ZhangYingjin,81.10LouisaSchein,MinorityRules:TheMiaoandtheFeminineinChina'sCulturalPolitics(Durham:DukeUP,2000)96.11LouisaSchein,84.12FeiXiaotong,Towardapeople'santhropology,(Beijing:NewWorldP,1981)67.

6

To address the necessity of distinct majority and minority ethnic groups the formation of

national identity, we may look to Benedict Anderson. Anderson has led the way for a host of

theorists in suggesting that national identity is best understood as historically contextualized: a

socially constituted and constitutive process of imbuing imagined communities with the belief

that they are somehow naturally linked by common identities. 13 Minzu tuanjie or ethnic

unity, formed as a slogan in the 1950s to urge the countrys nationalities to come together for

the good of the country.14 According to Schein, although there were extended periods in which

cultural difference was in fact suppressed, the overarching vision was one of creating solidarity

out of protected forms of diversity, and this goal meant the establishment of certain permissible

forms of difference, together with the occlusion of all other sorts of unruly heterogeneity.15

These permissible forms of difference took the form of national style (minzu fengge),

which played a large role in the invention of culture, a crucial part of nation-state formation,

according to E.J. Hobsbawm.16 Although the new proletariat national identity created by the

CCP was politically powerful, there existed the danger of it being culturally pale. The dominant

revolutionary ideology of the period had largely denied the cultural producers access to Chinas

traditional culture, as the large body of literature and arts from Chinas pre-modern history were

now scrutinized through the lens of class struggle and were often regarded unsuitable for the

contemporary needs of a socialist country. With this marked absence of the most important

reservoir of cultural materials, cultural producers in China adopted the image of ethnic minorities

as one of the major sources of inspiration during the Seventeen Years Period. The siphoned out

13BenedictAnderson,Imaginedcommunities:Reflectionsontheoriginandspreadofnationalism,(London:Verso,1991)30.14DruGladney,DislocatingChina:ReflectionsonMuslims,Minorities,andOtherSubalternSubjects(Chicago:UniversityofChicago,2004)231.15LouisaSchein,7273.16Hobsbawm,E.J.,andT.O.Ranger,TheInventionoftradition(Cambridgeshire:CambridgeUP,1983)4.

7

national style took the form of, as Louisa Schein calls it, ethnic minority surface features.17

This included colorful costume and jewelry; embroidered scarves, pouches, and head-wraps;

songs and dances; instruments; and athletic competitions such as horse racing, archery, and

wrestling; all surface features notably appreciated but never performed by Han observers.

According to Jie Chen, with the state sponsoring ethnic culture development, images of

ethnic minorities emerged and flourished in literature, painting, films, music, dance, and other

performing arts during this time. She describes the Central Nationalities Song and Dance Troupe

(zhongyang minzu gewu tuan), Chinas flagship minority performance troupe, which was

established in September 1952 to introduce ethnic minority performers and their songs and

dances to the nation. 18 Local minority performance troupes were also established in various

ethnic autonomous provinces and regions, and the Central Nationality Institute was founded in

1951 to promote the involvement of ethnic minority population in the new nation.19 Many

painters also went to ethnic minority regions for inspiration and materials during this period. For

oil painting in particular, the Seventeen Years Period produced a large amount of portraits and

landscape paintings with minority subject.20 The proliferation of ethnic minorities films during

this period was therefore only one element in a much larger system of cultural production that

was centered around the image of not only ethnic minorities, but specifically ethnic minority

women.

The use of ethnic minorities to represent Chinas national style touches upon a larger

concept included in such terms as internal orientalism, internal othering, or oriental

17LouisaSchein,84.18JieChen,Nation,Ethnicity,andCulturalStrategies:ThreeWavesofEthnicRepresentationinPost1949China,PhDDissertation,DepartmentofComparativeLiterature,RutgersUniversity(2008)57.19MaYin.China'sminoritynationalities(Beijing:ForeignLanguagesP,1989)29.20JieChen,54.

8

orientalism.21 According to Laura Marks, writing about contemporary filmmakers within the

Asian diaspora, the concept of colonial fetishism, or what Partha Chatterjee calls oriental

orientalism, involves the seizing upon aspects of the colonized culture in order to maintain a

controlling distance from it, not only at the level of narrative content.22 According to Chatterjee,

the objectification of the minority other and the majority self in China is a derivative discourse,

stitched from Chinese, Western (mainly Marxist and Morganian), and Jap ideas of nationalism

and modernity; the state is intimately tied to and in control of, and provides funding for, the

politicized process of portraying the other.23 In Edward Saids terms, the state has turned its gaze

upon the internal other, engaging in a formalized, commodified oriental orientalism.24 Aside

from Chatterjee and Said, critics such as Johannes Fabian, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Homi Bhabba

have skewered this fetishistic quality of colonialism decisively.

According to Gladney, constructing minority identities in this manner is directly related

to the identity of the majority.25 In this case, at the same time that ethnic minority identifying

practices such as music, foods, and costume, were raised and adopted as the signifiers of Chinese

national culture, their adherence to these practices and lack of modernity was fundamental to the

idea of majority Han and Han unity, which was incorporated by the Communists into a Marxist

ideology of progress with the Han people at the forefront of development and civilization. In the

Communist portrayal, minority primitivity is contrasted with supposed Han modernity; the

Han were placed in the vanguard of the peoples revolution, and the minorities were induced to

21LouisaScheincitesLitz,Harrell,andDiamondinadditiontoherselfasscholarswhohaveusedtheterminternalorientalism.Sheusestheterminternalotheringin"Theothergoestomarket:Thestate,thenation,andunrulinessincontemporaryChina,"(Identities21996)197.22LauraMarks,Theskinofthefilm:Interculturalcinema,embodiment,andthesenses(Durham:DukeUP,2000)79.23ParthaChatterjee,Nationalistthoughtandthecolonialworld:Aderivativediscourse?(London:ZedBooksfortheUnitedNationsUniversity,1986)10.24EdwardSaid,Orientalism(NewYork:Vintage,1979)6.25DruGladney,83.

9

follow the Han example. 26 Minorities become a marked category, characterized by sensuality,

colorfulness, and exotic custom, which contrasts with unmarked nature of Han identity. The

more primitive the minorities are, the more advanced and civilized the Han seems, and the

greater the need for a unified national identity.27 The depiction of minority subjects in film, as I

will demonstrate, reaffirms these minority ethnic groups as a primitive subject, the target of CCP

civilizing projects.

This primitivization extends to the important role eroticization of the engendered

minority other plays in the Han construction of self. As discussed by Louisa Schein, at the same

time that nationalist ideology assumes that all national subjects share a certain essential character

(or, more likely, because it assume this), it also tends to police the borders of certain other

essentialized differences one of the most important being that between the sexes. Among

national subjects, sexual difference constitutes what Schein has called a site of permissible

difference. Not just permissible but sometimes, more accurately, compulsory: nationalist

ideologies are often predicated on notions of proper sexuality and gendered behavior that allow

little room for sexual dissidence. As Schein further demonstrates, nationalist thinking often

defines proper sex differences against an improper Other. 28

According to Scheins own research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, one of the most

common characteristics applied to minority women was that of sexual availability and

promiscuity. She notes that at the same time, however, accounts such as this were attended by a

repulsion and repressive fear of the implied baseness and breaches of morality that made these

women so other.29 The bodies of non-Han women were safely couched within a context of

26DruGladney,45,57.27DruGladney,13.28LouisaSchein,"TheConsumptionofColorandthePoliticsofwhiteskininpostMaoChina."SocialText11994:14143.29LouisaSchein,MinorityRules:TheMiaoandtheFeminineinChina'sCulturalPolitics(Durham:DukeUP,2000)

10

barbarian wildness where they could be both desired and distanced through the dispassionate

scrutiny of the ethnological gaze. She notes that juxtaposed with a number of scantily clad

(minority) male bodies, their otherwise provocative nudity shed its moral charge and was instead

euphemistically rendered as simply a more primitive way of life.30 Like Schein, I will explore the

tension between conceptions of the Chinese woman and her dual Other the ethnic minority

woman.

Although her analysis deals with the image of minority women in contemporary China,

many of these images and ideas were first widely disseminated in films of the Seventeen Years

Period. In films such as Lusheng Love Song, A Horse Caravan (shanjian lingxiang mabang lai,

1954), and Victories in Inner Mongolia (neimeng renmin de shengli, 1951), minority women

could be both ornately and scantily dressed, could dance and sing for both onscreen and off-

screen male Han viewers, while still upholding the intrinsic spiritual virtues of good socialist

female compatriots. Further, in films of this period, distinctions in dress between Han and other

ethnicities are strictly maintained; ethnic minority men often wear tank tops or no shirts at all,

while minority women always wear form-fitting, brightly-colored outfits, which are often dresses

or skirts paired with sleeveless tops. This is in contrast to the onscreen male and female Han

characters that are usually clothed in Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) uniforms and doctors

coats, occasionally appearing in equally androgynous baggy button-down shirts and chinos. As

Gladney notes, the minorities are generally depicted in nature and dressed in costumes while

majorities merely wear clothes.31 The enforced prudishness and controlled fertility among the

Han reflected in their androgynous and conservative clothing, as opposed to represented minority

sensuality, serves the states national project of emphasizing Han solidarity, civility, and

123.30LouisaSchein,153.31DruGladney,65.

11

modernity. It is because the construction of the Han identity is so tenuous, so questionable, and

the position of the Han superiority so insecure, that the portrayal of the other as sensual, immoral,

and barbarous becomes important.

Gladney notes in a frequently cited quote that, minority is to the majority as female is to

male, as Third World to First, and as subjectivized identity is to objectivized identity.32 This

reveals his idea that representation of the minority in China reflects an objectivizing of a

majority nationality discourse that parallels the valorization of gender and political hierarchies.

Although it is tempting to extend this notion to create an overly polarized parallel dichotomy

between gender and ethnicity, the production of alterity, which Louisa Schein refers to as

internal othering, should be kept in mind when examining the unique imaginings surrounding

minority women.33

32DruGladney,47.33LouisaSchein,25.

12

CHAPTER III: FILM PRODUCTION IN POST-LIBERATION CHINA

Prior to 1949, filmmaking in China had been predominantly run by both domestic and

foreign-owned companies and individuals, with various levels of control and censorship imposed

by the KMT, Communists, and Japanese.34 In the years following the founding of the PRC, the

CCP paid extremely close attention to the workings of the film industry, quickly establishing

control over all matters relating to production and exhibition. Within a few months of the

Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) troops May 1949 liberation of Shanghai, the CCP established

the Central Film Management Bureau and the Film Guidance Committee to oversee film

production within Shanghai and the rest of the country.35 By creating a unified body to take over

film production and regulate all forms of created and distributed media, the state took a much

larger role in peoples lives. Louisa Schein equates this to Antonio Gramscis formulation in

which, The state is no longer conceived as simply administrative and coercive apparatus, it is

also educative and formative.36 According to Schein, it is this condensation that defined the

newly formed dominance of the CCP in peoples lives. Film production became another tool for

ideological dissemination; mobile projection units were set up in order to ensure the largest

possible audience for their films, including areas outside the major metropolitan centers. These

projection units rose in number from a hundred in 1949 to 522 in 1950 and 4,400 by 1956;

audiences, bolstered by the fact that batches of tickets were routinely given out to the work units

and attendance was mandatory, rose from 47 million in 1949 to 146 million in 1950 and 752

million in 1953.37

Yomi Braester, in an essay which examines films produced in the Seventeen Years Period,

34JulianWard,"TheRemodelingofaNationalCinema:ChineseFilmsoftheSeventeenYears(194966),"TheChinesecinemabook,bySongHweeLimandJulianWard(Houndmills:PalgraveMacmillan,2011)12.35JulianWard,87.36GramscisRelevancefortheStudyofRaceandethnicity,InLouisaSchein,165.37JulianWard,88.

13

notes that the political campaigns or, as they are referred to in Chinese, [mass] movements

([qunzhong] yundong) not only shaped politics and everyday life in the PRC, but also had a great

impact on cultural production.38 Braester demonstrates that filmic conventions, including themes,

imagery, and intended audiences, took on characteristics of specific political agendas and

focused political campaigns of the period, including the Good Eighth Company campaign, the

urban restructuring of the early 1950s, and the liberation of Tibet in 1959.39 These specific

renderings of history, along with war and government policies and campaigns, were further

supported by campaigns of criticism in newspaper articles, posters, and street postings.40 Ban

Wang, who focuses on Seventeen Years Period revolutionary films (which depict the course of

the Chinese revolution before 1949), argues that the revolutionary cinema functioned as the most

effective apparatus in the Communist endeavor to build a mass political culture.41

In her dissertation, Ching-Mei Esther Yau also profiles the types of villains represented in

films of this period, which include local and petty bourgeoisie, members of the KMT, Japanese

army, and American military, all figures representative of the major class enemies espoused by

Communist doctrine.42 As she notes, the narratives in these films mapped out political

confrontations and social contradictions already laid out in Maos master texts. Harry Kuoshu

reiterates this theme in regard to ethnic minority films in particular, expresses the belief that they

were employed to embody the PRCs ideological myths, warning of the threats of foreign spies

and intrigue, promoting the idealism of the great leap forward in socialist construction,

38YomiBraester,"ThePoliticalCampaignasGenre:IdeologyandIconographyduringtheSeventeenYearsPeriod,"ModernLanguageQuarterly692008:121.39YomiBraester122.40JulianWard,88.41BanWang,Thesublimefigureofhistory:AestheticsandpoliticsintwentiethcenturyChina(Stanford,CA:StanfordUP,1997)129.42ChingMeiEstherYau,"FilmicDiscourseonWomeninChineseCinema(19491965):Art,IdeologyandSocialRelations,"Diss.UniversityofCalifornia,LosAngeles(1990)234.

14

rebuking class exploitation, and calling for class struggle.43 This research all reinforces the

focused political and social function of films and their content produced in this period.

The style of film-making as a powerful new ideological tool changed rapidly after 1949, as

the CCP sought, in the words of Guo Moruo, speaking in 1950, to eliminate the poisonous

imperialist films gradually and strengthen the educational nature of the peoples film industry.44

Art in the Seventeen Years Period (and continuing on in a more intensified form through the

years of the Cultural Revolution) was largely dictated by Maoist cultural policy. One of the most

important moves Mao made on this front was his 1942 speech on the role of literature and arts in

communist China. In this speech, he situated the audience at the center of the artistic process,

saying, The writer loses his primary importance, while the audience gains immensely in relative

status. The relationship is now defined as one in which the write serves the peoplethere is no

longer even the theoretical possibility that writers may be on the side of the masses and yet write

for a different audience.45

In following, the major stylistic focus of films of the Seventeen Years Period was based

on Soviet-style Realism. This included the use of typical characters and events, an avoidance

of naturalism or critical realism (which, as Chris Berry notes, can often make films from this

period seem sentimental to modern Western eyes), and the emphasis placed on the writers of film

and scripts.46 The White-Haired Girl (Wang Bin and Shui Hua 1950), for example, based on a

local opera performed in Yan-an during the war years, was an early model film that set standards

both for the depiction of heroes and villains and the adaptation of existing works. Operating in

similarly safe territory were two biopics of renowned communist martyrs Zhao Yiman (Sha

43HarryKuoshu,97.44JulianWard,87.45BonnieS.McDougallandMaoZedong,MaoZedong's"TalksattheYan'anconferenceonliteratureandart":Atranslationofthe1943textwithcommentary(AnnArbor:CenterforChineseStudies;UniversityofMichigan,1980)16.46ChrisBerry,ChineseCinema:CultureandPoliticsSince1949,(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress,1987)94.

15

Meng, 1950), about a woman executed by the Japanese, and Liu Hulan (Feng Bailu, 1950), the

tragic tale of a fifteen year-old girl killed by the Nationalists, which presented the new approved

version of the selfless female role model.47 As Braester notes, in this early period, cinematic

inadequacies were irrelevant: what was important was the methods that were adopted to ensure

the audience did not miss the message.48

Berry narrows the Chinese-produced films from this period down to six categories,

including revolution films, film about contemporary life, musicals, May Fourth adaptations, and

history films.49 The largest genre, both in number produced and in visibility to Chinese film

audiences, is that of the ethnic minority films. Although ethnic minorities in China have never

amounted to more than around six percent of the total population since their designation in the

1950s, between 1949 and 1966, the film studios of the PRC produced 47 feature films with

ethnic minority subject matter.50 These films took newly labeled Chinese ethnic minorities as

their subject, which included Mongols, Tibetans, and Uighurs in the north and northwest, the

Miao, Yi, Zhuang, and Bai minorities in the southwest, and Koreans and Manchus in the

northeast.

Berry summarizes the reoccurring notion regarding the tone and content of Seventeen

Years Period minority films, noting that they generally fall into two categories: those focusing on

the hard northwest minorities such as the Mongols, Kazaks, and Uighurs, which feature

foreign intrigue and class struggle, and those of the soft southwestern minorities including the

Miao, Yi, Zhuang, and Bai, which feature happy, smiling natives and were more conducive to

47JulianWard,89.48YomiBraester,132.49ChrisBerry,ChineseCinema:CultureandPoliticsSince1949,(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress,1987)94118.50YingHong,Xinzhongguodianyingshi[HistoryofNewChineseCinema](Changsha:Hunanmeishuchubanshe,2002)63.

16

love stories.51 This generalization is usually deduced from handful of minority films commonly

known in China today and most cited by scholars, including Serfs (nongnu, 1962) and Five

Golden Flowers (wuduo jinhua, 1959), along with Third Sister Liu (liu san jie, 1962) and the

musical, Ashima (ashima, Liu Qiong, 1964). and The tone and content of these films, however,

particularly the first two, do not typify that of the genre. Serfs, for example, is

uncharacteristically dark both visually and in its content; scenes depicting the abuse of Tibetan

peasants with little dialogue, heavy contrast and few cuts dominate much of the film. The casting

of this film was also rare; although Han actors usually filled most of the roles, including those of

ethnic minority characters, over 90 percent of the Tibetan roles in Serfs are played by Tibetans.52

Five Golden Flowers, on the opposite end of the spectrum, is often cited as a soft film

that focuses on aesthetic excess, dancing, and songs, with only an indirect reference to

Communist movements like the Great Leap Forward (derived from its emphasis on communes

and production).53 Writing on the film, which was instantly successful when released and is still

popular with audiences today, Jie Chen notes that because Five Golden Flowers was mainly an

ideological tool in the Seventeen Years Period, the beauty and spectacle of this film along with

its toned down emphasis on ideology was likely a main reason for its success.54 In fact, even in

ethnic minorities films set in the south and with prominent focus on romance, dance sequences,

and elaborate costume, a complete absence of armed combat or conflicts between classes was a

rarity. Most films actually featured a combination of serious content including themes of

oppression, class struggle, and warfare, with lighter entertainment including romance narratives,

song, dance, and other elements of national style. The Dai Doctor, for example, focuses on a

51ChrisBerry,99.52ChrisBerry,97.53ChrisBerry,97.54ChennotesthatFiveGoldenFlowersmetwithhugesuccesswhenitwasreleased,thissuccesshascontinuedtomoderntimes:in2005itwasvotedoneofChineseaudiencestenfavoriteChinesefilms(ChongfangWuduojinhua).SeeJieChen,72.

17

Dai village, an ethnic group mainly distributed around southwest China in Yunnan province.

Although the film opens with the palm trees and water typical of this soft minority setting, the

first major action sequence is the horrifying burning of the main characters mother on a stake,

accused by an evil local landlord of using magic to kill children in the town. Later, the house of

the protagonist is burned down, she is ostracized from the village, and her father dies. Despite

this tragic subject matter, the film still features multiple music and dance sequences, and a

romance between the protagonist and a Dai boy functions as a strong subplot returned to

repeatedly throughout the film.

As far as the appeal of these films, Paul Clarks theory of film as exotica, which has since

been criticized by Zhang Yingjin, asserts that Chinese cinematic interest in national minorities is

partially related to a cultural desire for the exotic. Since this desire has been gratified in different

degrees by the Western films in pre-PRC (1949) and post-Mao (1976) China, the national

minority genre is primarily a popular cultural repertoire that circulated between these two dates

when Western films were ousted.55 Zhang counters that, taking into account the politicized

climate of the 1950s and 1960s, minority films functioned not as exotica but rather as an

effective means by which the nation-state objectifies minority peoples through stereotypes and

co-opts them in the construction of a socialist China.56 This was just one of the many outcomes

of the construction of a new Chinese national identity.

As Zhang stresses, it is important to note that during this initial reform period, there was a

hierarchical/vertical mode of mainland cultural production charted by scholars like Louisa

Schein, in which privileged urbanites and minority elites monopolized cultural production while

rural folk and ethnic minorities were rendered as objects for exoticist consumption in a dynamic

described in Chapter Two as internal orientalism. This argument corresponds with Paul

55PaulClark,18.56ZhangYingjin,89.

18

Clarks notion of early ethnic minority films - they were, at the most literal level, material: the

human objects of the ethnographic gaze had no access to media technologies nor to circuits of

distribution. In this unilateral relationship, it was a basic premise that the represented had no

control over the means of representation, that they were muted if not distorted in the process of

their imaging by others.

It is important to note that until the onset of the Cultural Revolution, however, the climate

was protean, punctuated by periods of ebb and flow between the severest strictures of Socialist

Realism and the Anti-Rightist campaign (beginning in the late 50s) and relative relaxation; Julian

Ward, for example, notes the use of so-called Middle Characters in the early 1960s.57All these

trends, however, came to an abrupt end in the mid-1960s, by which time the film industry was

severely restricted and Jiang Qing, Mao Zedongs wife who had herself been an actor in

Shanghai in the 1930s, was lashing out at films previously considered anodyne, including Lei

Feng (Dong Zhaoqi, 1964) and Red Crag (Shui Hua, 1965).58 This was the beginning of the

Cultural Revolution, marking a decisive moment in modern Chinese history; this is why the

period from the founding of the PRC in 1949 to 1966 is known as the Seventeen Years Period.59

57JulianWard,87.58FordetailsonthefilmsattackedbyJiangQing,see.59JulianWard,87.

19

CHAPTER IV: THE WOMENS LIBERATION MOVEMENT

Chinas attention to womens rights (nu quan, a term which also evokes womens power)

has, historically, been linked to larger political agendas. Public denunciation of traditions

oppressing women began around the time of the Reform movement of 1898 and attacked foot-

binding, infanticide, concubinage, womens illiteracy, their economic dependence, and social

deprivation.60 Debates prior to and following the May Fourth Movement (in 1919) centered on

how outdated marital arrangements, restraints on divorce, illiteracy, economic dependence, and

prostitution victimized women. Thus, from the very beginning, womens rights and womens

liberation have been socially defined for nationalist purposes.

The CCPs policy for womens emancipation in the Seventeen Years Period, like earlier

womens movements in China, stemmed from foreign concepts. Based primarily on a Soviet

model, it was defined largely by womens participation in the work force; some of the details

regarding this woman work (funu gongzuo), such as the placing of women in production

groups and directions on administration of women as laborers and part of the mass, were laid out

in a decision issued by the Central Committee of the CCP on December 20, 1948.61 Though

womens emancipation and connected policies initiatives were therefore foreign concepts, they

were key to Chinas proletariat national identity in the Seventeen Years Period, to be digested

and indigenously rooted in order to benefit the internal renewal of the nation.

Chinese scholars in the last few decades have criticized the womens liberation movement

in post-revolutionary China, claiming it was actually a male-oriented concept which forced

women to occupy two gender roles: assume the responsibilities and roles of traditional women

60ChingMeiEstherYau,17.61ChingMeiEstherYau,57.

20

but also become masculine warriors.62 According to Dai Jinhua, it was also this male-oriented

feminism, the institutional integration of womens emancipation with national interests, which

robbed women of their subjective identities. Because equality between men and women

obliterates the difference and opposition between male and female, women ceased to operate

within the norms and role regulations produced for women by a male-dominated culture. Male

standards and norms (not the norms that men make up for women, but the norms and standards

of and for men) therefore became the only and absolute set.63 Women, womens discourse, and

womens self-expression and self-inquiry, Dai continues, therefore became unnecessary and

impossible because mainstream ideological discourse had erased sexual difference. Chinese

women came to share with men a power of discourse, but it was a discourse that deprived them

of their gender identity.64

By removing womens subjective identities, womens bodies became a social,

institutionalized language and an open space for cultural signification. In this vein, Yau argues

that filmic discourses on revolutionary history in the Seventeen Years Period and beyond

appropriated womens personal histories and rewrote them within the dominant historiographical

project, supporting the CCPs authority and its leadership in pursuit of social transformation in a

climate of social stability.65 Chen Xiaomei addresses womens representation in the Chinese

model theater if this period and through the Cultural Revolution, noting that women in the

theater were often transformed into symbols and denied a sense of female agency; the narrative

of womens destiny, for example, became a signifier for the shared destiny of the laboring

masses.66 According to these critics, while womens emancipation therefore acquired an

62DaiJinhua,259.63DaiJinhua,257.64DaiJinhua,258.65ChingMeiEstherYau,264,215.66ChenXiaomei,258.

21

institutional presence and a symbolic significance, it came to serve a male-oriented, nation-

centered view of social order and progress.

The image of the ideal liberated woman, championing womens so-called equality with

men, was popularized in posters and other means of visual culture.67 The visual representation

of the liberated woman was linked to Maos broader emphasis on physical education. This

dates back as early as 1917, when an article by Mao appeared in the April issue of New Youth

(xin qingnian) in which he extolls bodily strength as the precondition for developing the other

aspects of an all-around individual.68 According to Ban Wang, in the Chinese context, the

discourse on the physical body was a metaphor for a vast concern for the bodily as well as

spiritual health and vitality of a culture.69 In this context, Wang notes, Chinese women are again

either systematically written off or viewed as subjected to masculinization; the male soldier body

serves as a model for females with masculinity presented as a moral quality.70

As noted in Chapter Three, CCP-produced films were highly valued as ideological tools.

Thus, beginning in the 1950s, examples the physically and mentally ideal liberated woman

appeared onscreen in a range of roles; most prominent was perhaps that of the female soldier.

Tina Mai Chen, writing on the influence of imported Soviet films and their female stars on

Chinese cinematic heroines of the Seventeen Years Period, notes that Han women soldiers were

often based on the Soviet model military role of women seen in Soviet films distributed in China

during that time. She notes that even aspects of Xiers character in The White-Haired Girl (bai

mao nv, 1950), who is not a soldier, echo those of the characters played by Soviet film star Vera

Maretskaia.71

67ChenXiaomei,75.68BanWang,58.69BanWang,59.70ChenXiaomei,266267.71TinaMaiChen,"Socialism,AestheticizedBodies,andInternationalCircuitsofGender:SovietFemaleFilmStarsin

22

One of the most well known films portraying women soldiers and dealing the subject of

women being liberated is The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun, 1961). The film

shows how Wu Qunhua, a woman slave, first has her body emancipated by the Party (through an

underground agent), and then has her narrow spirituality emancipated through her experience as

a woman soldier in a Party-directed troop; she learns that revolution is not meant for personal

revenge but for changing society. Model liberated women, however, werent just depicted as

soldiers, they filled all types of onscreen roles. As mentioned above, films such as The White-

Haired Girl and Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge, 1959) both feature combative, strong female

protagonist, and both purify their protagonists and intensify the class antagonistic exacerbation.

These women become bearers of Communist ideology and firm champions of the party, their fit

bodies serving as an embodiment of the female warrior figure championed by the CCP. As

Kuoshu describes it, the ideology of merciless struggle during those years of political unrest

reinforced itself by representing the equally martial figures, often in the form of women.72

The 1962 film Li Shuangshuang presents another example of what Kuoshu calls a

typical socialist feminist narrative.73 The heroine of the film, Shuangshaung, eventually pulls

her husband, Xiwang, into her ideological world, reinforcing the idealized new order of the

changed life within the Chinese communes in the countryside. In this film, Shuangshuang

presents a strong physical presence, working in the field and caring for her children, and firmly

supports both Communist ideology and the CCP cadre-initiated community projects. One iconic

scene illustrating the physical strength and endurance of liberated Chinese women occurs

during the harvest scene near the end of the film. A long take shows a group of women busily

working among the fully-grown crops, singing the films theme song, which occurs again near

thePeople'sRepublicofChina,19491969,"JournaloftheCanadianHistoricalAssociation18(2007)70.72HarryKuoshu,93.73HarryKuoshu,86.

23

the end of the film. When Xiwang and the other men come back from a business trip (and here

we must remember business was then considered a distracting endeavor that should be curbed

from interfering the agriculture production); a deep focus shot depicts a group of men on one

side of the frame watching a line of women walking into the distance on the other side. After that,

there is a close-up of the facial expressions of the three men one by one; they are touched and

feel ashamed.

According to Kuoshu, the editing of this sequence clearly puts the women on the positive

side of the socialist ideology. Looking closely at the sequence, one can infer even more about the

representation of these model revolutionaries. In this scene, which actually begins before the

men arrive, every one of the women shown in medium or medium long shot has either short hair

or hair pulled back into simple low-hanging braids. Further, they are all clothed in loose, high-

collar, and mostly long-sleeved shirts, with loose pants falling below the knees. This creates

silhouettes devoid of curvy, feminine features; in the brief long shot of women filing across the

field, their figures are barely distinguishable as female. They also sing happily, each carrying a

pole with two large loads of hay on each end. Although the sequence, including the mens arrival,

lasts only about two minutes, an array of shot angles and scales are rapidly edited together, with

cuts every 3 to 4 seconds. This sequence devotes special attention to displaying these womens

bodies, which are models of the androgynously dressed, physically fit, and ideologically aligned

liberated woman. He notes that the lyrical scene of women is intended to be educational: they

no longer provide the alluring visual traits embodied by American and European female film

stars, but rather they have been turned into purely symbolic entities.74

74HarryKuoshu,87.

24

The model that these women create is one that the men, watching from the side, pale with

in comparison. Indeed, the narrative of the film hinges on the female lead character being more

progressive and ideologically in line with the Party than the male, demonstrating that Chinese

women on screen were elevated to positions of even greater physical and ideological purity than

their onscreen counterparts. Further, while both male and female heroes populate films of this

period, the archetypal villains, ranging from landlords to merchants to foreigners, are almost

never women.75 By polarizing the divide between women and evil, these films further purified

their female characters, simultaneously stripping them of their own subjective identities.

Harry Kuoshu notes that even films that were used as vehicles to introduce and reinforce

socialist ideological movements such as social changes in the countryside, the process of

collectivization, and the need for a larger labor force, all worked in conjunction with the

ideological attack on the patriarchal family that prohibited women form participating in

collective production and social life.76 The CCP-defined version of womens rights, represented

by the liberated woman, was thus a highly visible issue in nearly all CCP-produced films of

the Seventeen Years Period, including ethnic minority films.

75Amongtheapproximately20minorityfilmsIwatchedfromthisperiod,onlyone,TheDaiDoctor,featuredafemalecharacterwithvillainousqualities.Thedaughterofthewealthylandowner,shebetraysAiWen,YiLaiHansloveinterest;thisbetrayalispresentedasaresultofhisdenyinghersexualadvances.HercharactersheightenedflirtatiousnessandsexualityissimilartothatoftheupperclassShanghaifemalecharacterinSentinelsUndertheNeonLights(nihongdengxiadeshabin,1964),arevolutionfilmaboutaPLAtroopstationedinShanghaiandthecityscorruptioninfluences.Theseattributeswereusuallyreservedforupperclass,urbanwomenwhohadbeencontaminatedbyforeigncapitalism.76HarryKuoshu,86.

25

CHAPTER V: MINORITY FILMS

Ethnic minority films of the Seventeen Years Period were similar to other genres of the

period in their structure; their use of foreign, KMT and class enemies; themes tied to political

campaigns and agendas; and Socialist Realism stylistics including typical characters and

events, including the appearance of the model liberated woman. Some important elements that

other films of the period did not have, however, were beautiful tropical forest and grassland

settings, costumes, choreographed dances, music and singing performances, practices such as

embroidery and water pipe smoking, and, of course, beautiful women. While it is tempting to

write off these films as exotica meant to replace phased-out Hollywood fare, a closer look

reveals that these films create a much more complicated image of the ethnic minority female, one

which is integrally linked to national identity, womens liberation, and the complex positioning

of both Han and non-Han women in the Seventeen Years Period.

Lusheng Love Song (lusheng liange, 1957)

The first ethnic minority film I will discuss is Lusheng Love Song. The film, directed by Yu

Yanfu and written by Peng Jingfeng, takes place in a village made up of the Lahu ethnic group in

Yunnan province. The film begins after the CCP liberation, when PLA soldiers hiking through

the woods together with Lahu soldiers from the village are attacked. A flashback by an elder

Lahu men then cuts to one year before the liberation. During that time, members of the

Republican Party (Kuomintang, abbreviated as KMT) occupy the village and steal their livestock

but are run out by the villagers, led by a young Lahu man Za Tuo. Za Tuo then courts a Lahu girl,

Na Wa, and they fall in love. When the KMT mounts an attack, the Lahu men rally a defense and

send the rest of villagers away, including Na Wa. Before they have finished the evacuation, the

KMT attack, burning and ravaging the city and killing many women and children. Na Wa,

distraught, heads back to the village to find Za Tuo. On the way she is captured by a KMT leader,

26

but manages to trick him and escape. Za Tuo, who has survived, begins living in seclusion,

continuing to follow the KMT soldiers and periodically attack them, along with any other

soldiers he runs into. The CCP soldiers finally find Za Tuo and discover it is he who has been

attacking them; they convince him they are not from the KMT, and he is reunited with Na Wa

and the rest of the villagers.

In the film, the opening credits sequence runs over the image of palm trees over a blue

sky (fig. 1). This is accompanies by the sound of drums and flutes, instrumental noises which

reoccur during dance and song sequences later in the film. The use of introductory scenes

displaying nature and landscapes particular to a certain region was a common practice in these

ethnic minority films; similar examples can be found in Third Sister Liu, whose opening credits

feature a series of iconic Guilin mountain landscapes, Mystery Partners (shenmi de lvban, 1955),

whose opening sequence features a long pan across forested mountains, and Victories in Inner

Mongolia (neimeng renmin de shengli, 1951), whose credits run over a long shot of a large

grassy field dotted with yurts and horse carts. In addition, there is music that is shown later in

the film played on instruments by Lahu village members; Third Sister Liu also opens with the

protagonists memorable singing voice, which is featured several times throughout the film.

FIGURE1OPENINGCREDITSSEQUENCE,LUSHENGLOVESONG(1957)

27

Visuals of nature and the use of distinctive music do establish the setting of these films,

which scholars like Paul Clark point out were often a big draw thanks to their remoteness from

more centrally-located Han viewers. More importantly, however, they serve as what Schein calls

the surface features that characterize ethnic minorities as distinct from the Han majority, while

simultaneously serving as elements of the national style that represent the Chinese nation. The

iconic association of nature and forests with Chinese ethnic minorities is even repeated in

revisionist films, such as the opening descent into the forest taken by the main character in

Zhang Nuanxins Sacrifice of Youth (qing chun ji, 1985). By featuring the tropical scenery of

Yunnan Province in southwest China or the grasslands of Inner Mongolia in the north, these

films also reinforce ethnic unity, reminding viewers that these remote areas are, in fact, part of

the Chinese nation.

In the opening scene, Ah Qi, a village elder, tells the PLA soldiers that this day was a

Lahu holiday. This initiates the flashback into the first dance sequence, where there are a series

of shots all used to highlight the instruments, dancing, and elaborate costuming and jewelry.

There are several close-ups of men blowing large pipes (which make a flute-like sound), women

tapping on drums, and foot choreography (figs. 2 and 3). There are also longer shots and even a

high-angle shot of women performing synchronized dance moves in full costume, which

includes necklaces, earrings, and embroidered head scarves and dresses. This type of time and

attention devoted to costuming, instruments, singing, and choreography in village dance or

singing sequences is typical of nearly every minority film I have seen. Even Victories in Inner

Mongolia, which is set in the cold northern plains of Inner Mongolia and has a more serious tone

characterized by scenes of torture and hard labor, features a dance scene with ornately-dressed

Mongolian women performing for both the film viewers (often making direct eye contact with

the camera) and an onscreen wealthy landlord. What makes the Lahu distinctive in Lusheng

28

Love Song are these surface features, ones associated with entertainment, beauty, and the new

definition of national culture.

FIGURE2ALAHUMANPLAYINGAFLUTEDURINGAFESTIVAL,LUSHENGLOVESONG(1957)

FIGURE3ALAHUWOMANPLAYINGADRUMDURINGAFESTIVAL,LUSHENGLOVESONG(1957) In the first scene of the film, the group of cadres that travels through the forest includes

two Han women who are dressed, like their fellow PLA cadres, in western-style button-down

shirts, with chin-length hair pulled behind their ears, and they occupy the screen in a medium

shot with several other cadres. The first actual close-up in the film is a shot lasting nearly 10

seconds on the face of Na Wa, the female Lahu protagonist. Even in a softly lit close-up on her

face, her status as a minority is clear in her earrings and headscarf. In the shot, she looks up

directly at the camera, responding to the gaze of Za Tuo, slowly smiling, then giggling, the

turning her head bashfully towards her shoulder. Medium close-up and close-up shots of

womens faces that underscore their feminine features was an uncommon cinematic practice in

29

the Seventeen Years Period.77 This type of introductory close-up on the female ethnic minority

character in response to an off-screen male onlooker is therefore an even more notable part of the

female ethnic minoritys alluring onscreen image, a depiction which was a manifestation of the

internal orientalism strategy of the new nation.

FIGURE4CLOSEUPOFZATUO,LUSHENGLOVESONG(1957)

Before going into this argument, one must to delineate the visual politics involved in such

a discussion. Ever since the publication of Laura Mulveys Visual Pleasure and Narrative

Cinema, films which feature a female figure have been re-watched with an awareness of the

patriarchal power hierarchy embedded in the visual pleasure offered by such films. In that

milestone article, Mulvey argues that there are two types of pleasures that the classic Hollywood

cinema offers: scopophilia and narcissism. The former refers to the pleasure of looking at erotic

objects, and the latter refers to the pleasure that the audience obtains from identifying with an

image on the screen, a process similar to the creation of ego ideal in Lacans mirror stage.

Offering a male spectator as representative of the patriarchal society, Mulvey argues that both of

these pleasures contribute to the phallocentric psychological foundation of the mass success of

the traditional cinema. The spectators scopophilic pleasure comes from the voyeuristic gaze at

the female forms on the screen, facilitated by the dark and private atmosphere that the theater

provides. This enjoyment is uniquely amplified in the process of recognition and identification

77Theofficialculturalpolicyinthe17yearperiodvirtuallyremovedalleroticdepictionofwomenfromthesilverscreen.SeeJieChen,79.

30

with the onscreen male protagonist, which provides the spectator with the fantasy of gazing at

the woman from inside the narrative as well.78

Mulveys psychoanalytic approach to classic Hollywood cinema, though since debated

on many levels, made a major contribution to the examination of the political and psychological

roots of visual pleasure in traditional cinema.79 Dai Jinhua argues that in the classical

revolutionary cinematic mode, perfected in the Seventeen Years Period, images of women were

no longer objectified by this male desiring gaze. A revision of powerful patriarchal discourse,

she argues, the gender opposition and distinction between men and women in these films

disappeared and were replaced by class and political difference. This suspension of desire, then,

was directed onto Mao and the socialist system.80 Ban Wang cites exemplary films of this period,

noting that female beauty in them becomes an embodiment of the party, and that this, too, was

mixed with nature imagery linked with maternal figures of the nation and state.81 Chen Xiaomei

even notes that in Revolutionary Model Opera posters, the physique of female dancers served as

an exploitation of the erotic to arouse patriotism.82

Although the portrayal of Han female bodies throughout a range of media formats in this

period is complex and multi-faceted, in minority films they nonetheless serve as a model of the

masculinized traits of the modern Han woman, in juxtaposition with the feminine qualities of the

ethnic minority female, feminine qualities which work in coordination with other assigned ethnic

minority characteristics. Therefore, though different in its major themes and narrative pattern

78LauraMulvey,"VisualPleasureandNarrativeCinema,"Visualandotherpleasures(London:PalgraveMacmillan,2009)618.79GaylynStudlar,forexample,pointsoutthatMulveyreadsscopophiliafromapurelymaleperspective,failingtotakeintoaccounttheescapistviewingpositionoflesbianviewers.Inthisposition,sheargues,sadismisreplacedwithmasochisminordertoaccessapresymbolicorantisymbolicexperiencewhichescapestheimaginationsofthepatriarchalsymbolicorder.SeeGaylynStudlar,"MasochismandthePerversePleasuresoftheCinema,"QuarterlyReviewofFilmStudies9(1984)26782.80DaiJinhua,263.81BanWang,153.82ChenXiaomei,37.

31

from a classic Hollywood movie, Lusheng Love Song nonetheless satisfies the audiences visual

desire with its lush natural scenery, costuming, and beautiful leading actress.

The film draws often draws attention to natural scenery and actress beauty with longer

takes, creating a slower pace. This slow pace often corresponds with scenes that develop the

romantic plot, which, as I mentioned, plays an important role in nearly all of the minority films

of this period. In a musical sequence establishing her and Za Tuos romance, Na Wa stands in

front of a waterfall with Za Tuo, playing a flute then singing. Later, upon leaving him, she gives

him her ornamented head wrap as a gift. The repeated emphasis through close-ups on her

costume and alluring physical features and the inclusion of nature within the mise-en-scene not

only provides visual pleasure, it underscores minority sensuality and primitivity. In addition to

womens more ornate, form-fitting, or revealing costume, the practice of ethnic minority

traditions such as making embroidered items for a loved one created a stark contrast with the

forward-thinking uniformed Han PLA soldiers, reinforcing their civility and modernity and

serving as a function of the nations internal Orientalization.

Thanks to the influence of womens liberation and connected socialist ideological

movements, however, female characters like Na Wa do not readily fit into the stereotype of

vulnerable women awaiting protection and salvation by male figures in classic Hollywood

cinema. Rather, they are active participants in material production, social development, and even

physical combat.

Na Wa, for example, displays many of the characteristics typical of revolutionary model

woman like Li Shuangshuang or Wu Qunhua; her cunning, loyalties, and physical prowess create

the masculine warrior idealized by the womens liberation movement. In the scene when she

returns to find Za Tuo, for example, she demonstrates her physical agility and strength: first, she

climbs across a bridge that hangs from only a single rope. A long shot lasting several seconds

32

demonstrates the danger of this stunt, illustrating how high above the raging river the bridge

precariously swings. Later, after she is captured by the KMT leader, she leans over near the edge

of a cliff as if to show him a flower she is admiring, then forcefully pushes him into the water

below. She then pulls off her head scarf and fashions it into a rope, using it to swiftly climb

down the cliff. The danger of this stunt is again highlighted in a long shot taken from the side of

the cliff. Aside from an encounter with a tiger that Za Tuo experiences early in the film, this is

the only sequence that focuses predominantly on physical prowess. The attention to her physical

capabilities demonstrates that filmmakers in this sequence sought to emphasize Na Was body,

not for its traditional Lahu dress and jewelry, but for its ability to equal or exceed the abilities of

her male counterpart.

Perhaps her most important model revolutionary characteristic, however, is Na Was

embrace of CCP socialist ideology. In contrast to the male protagonist Za Tuo, Na Wa is

ideologically in line with the PLA soldiers from the start. At the end of the film, she convinces

Za Tuo that the PLA soldiers are their friends by playing for him a flute used in the earlier Lahu

dance and romantic scenes. In a low-angle close-up, the camera frames her face against the sky

in tense concentration. In this scene, as she slowly approaches him, a chorus of singers joins the

soundtrack, and the music bridges a cut to a giant festival, in which the Lahu villagers are

dancing, singing, and drinking liquor, happily surrounding Za Tuo and Na Wa and toasting with

PLA soldiers. Much as the film shifts between these two story-lines, that of the KMT resistance

and that of the couples love story, Na Wa shifts between two roles: ideological, physical

conformity to the idealized Han and the visually alluring otherness of the ethnic minority.

The film Skirmishes on the Border (bianzhai fenghuo, 1957) features a similar

ideological contrast between ethnic minority men and women; the male protagonist Duo Long, a

member of the Jingpo village, grows skeptical of visiting PLA soldiers and doctors and briefly

33

crosses the river to join the KMT oppositional forces. It is his wife who shows unfaltering trust

in the PLA and its doctors ability to cure her sick son. Both she and Na Wa have a strong

ideological alignment which, when combined with the scopophilic pleasure provided by their

feminine and ethnic visual characteristics, demonstrates how their characters are able to meld the

surface features of minority cultures with various socialist agendas.

People of the Grasslands (caoyuan shang de renmen, 1953)

The next film I will discuss is People of the Grasslands. Directed by Xu Tao with a

screenplay by Hai Mo, Mala Qinfu, and Da Mulin, this film takes place after the Communist

liberation in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Sister Sarenge and her father, both Mongolian,

raise sheep and live in a village where the CCP has already established cadres and an office.

Another herder, Sangbu, also lives in the village, and he and Sarenge fall in love and make plans

to eventually marry. A Mongolian in the village, Bao Lu, is hired by the corrupt landlord Lu

Shou Qing to sabotage the efforts of the villagers and the CCP officers; he secretly lets out

livestock during a snowstorm, then poisons the well so many of the villagers sheep die. Sister

Sarenge feels extremely sad about the animals death and doesnt want to continue her work in

the Communist Youth League, but the League director convinces her to carry on. During a

village festival, Sister Sarenge discovers that Bao Lu is a spy. She chases him down on

horseback and apprehends him, then brings him to the village elders and CCP cadres, where

Sangbu comforts her. The festival continues, ending with a speech by Sarenge about the

importance of the CCP and Chairman Mao in the villagers lives.

Again this film, like Lusheng Love Song, opens with a credit sequence set over scenes of

landscape and wildlife specific to this particular ethnic group, in this case a simple backdrop of a

yurt with several horse carts lined up in front of it characteristic of the traditional Mongolian

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way of life. Its similarity with the opening credits sequence in Victories in Inner Mongolia,

which also features Mongolians, serves as a reminder that the settings, props, and costuming

became a visual tool with which to instantly signify an ethnic minority and place the film in an

already familiar socio-historical context. Because scenes such as this type of credits sequence

was used as a reoccurring motif, it became shorthand for visually conveying to an audience what

minority the film was going to focus on, simultaneously promoting key elements of the new

national style.

FIGURE5OPENINGCREDITSSEQUENCES,VICTORIESININNERMONGOLIA(1951)ANDPEOPLEOFTHEGRASSLANDS(1953)

People of the Grasslands features song and dance sequences corresponding with scenes

involving romance, nature, the ethnic surface features that create national style. Further, nature

is linked with not just the ethnic minority, but with the ethnic minority female: in this case,

Sarenge. The opening credits of the film are followed with an image of Sarenge posed in the

Soviet-Realist style: a low-angle, medium shot shows Sarenge sitting on her horse, smiling,

framed against the open sky and accompanied by upbeat orchestral music. This is followed by a

Close-up of sheep, then long, panning shots of the herds grazing in the surrounding grasslands.

Sarenge then gets off her horse and lovingly pets the sheep (fig. 6). This opening sequence serves

as an integral establishing link between Sarenge, nature, and wildlife. The films narrative further

reinforces this link: the death of many sheep in the herd later serves as the major psychological

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blow and obstacle that Sarenge must overcome. She is therefore visually and psychologically

connected to her ethnicized setting.

FIGURE6SARENGEPETTINGASHEEP,PEOPLEOFTHEGRASSLANDS(1953)

The narrative, however, not only connects her to her Mongolian setting, it also connects

her to the Communist Party. In order to help her overcome her sadness over the loss of the sheep,

Sarenge visits the Communist Youth League district chief. He suggests that she, in her work on

agricultural advancement projects such as the use of hay cultivation machinery introduced by the

CCP, should emulate the strength of the PLA soldiers who fought in the Korean War. The

narrative thus seamlessly integrates the promotion of CCP political campaigns and the success of

the CCP in regions such as Inner Mongolia and Korea with the individual narrative of Sarenge.

Her speech in the second to last sequence of the film visualizes the connection between her and

the CCP: after being introduced and congratulated for her noble work, she make a speech in

which she notes that, as part of Maos generation, she and her fellow villagers should work

for [the good of] everyone, ending with the words, Communist party and Chairman Mao.

She makes the speech standing on a grand podium, again shot from a low-angle lending an air of

power and grandiosity to her figure, and she is framed in front of the CCP flag and a large

painting of Chairman Mao.

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FIGURE7SARENGEADDRESSINGTHEVILLAGERS,PEOPLEOFTHEGRASSLANDS(1953)

In this way, Sarenges character is similar to Qunhua in The Red Detachment of Women:

her personal story is, in Yaos words, appropriated and rewritten within the dominant

historiographical project, supporting the CCPs authority and its leadership in pursuit of social

transformation in a climate of social stability.

Sarenge also serves a one of the best examples of the Chinese female warrior. Like

many of the Mongolian heroines in the post-1949 period, Sarenge is equal to or even surpasses

men in her working abilities, sporting abilities, and fighting abilities.83 She herds sheep with

Sangbu, and she wins an archery competition, beating several competing Mongolian men. In the

climactic action sequence, Sarenge first chases Bao Lu on horseback, then jumps off of her horse

onto his, pulling him down off of the horse with her. This physical stunt work is typical of that

seen in the Seventeen Years Period films celebrating the Han model Revolutionary woman, but

unlike her Han counterparts, Sarenge still enjoys certain overtly feminine aesthetics and

activities.

83UradynBulagwritesextensivelyonthehistoryofMongolianChineserelations,inadditiontotheuseofthearchetypalheroicMongolianfemalecharacterintheChineseliteraryandcinematiccannons,suchastheyoungprotagonistsinthefamousrevolutionarystoryHeroicSistersoftheGrassland(caoyuanyingxiongxiaojiemei).SeeUradynErdenBulag,TheMongolsatChina'sedge:Historyandthepoliticsofnationalunity(Lanham:Rowman&Littlefield,2002).

37

In addition to her form-fitting Mongolian dress with beaded collar and linings, her head

scarf, and the use of several close-ups on her face, Sarenge also participates in a romantic affair

characterized by pre-1949 conventions such as sung duets, gift exchange, and scenic natural

backgrounds. All of these feminine qualities both satisfy the audiences visual desire and work in

coordination with assigned ethnic minority characteristics. The first shot of Sarenge and Sangbu,

for example, is a medium shot showing them riding horses next to one another and singing while

surveying the grazing herds. Later, she takes out a decorated cloth bag and shows it to one of

the sheep for inspection; we discover soon after that this is a bag she has embroidered to give to

Sangbu. The specificity of the landscape, the embroidered bag, and even the practice of singing

in film are by this time firmly linked to the backwards yet quintessentially Chinese

characteristics of ethnic minorities.

Interestingly, however, the final scene in People of the Grasslands is not that of Sarenge

framed in front of the giant portrait of Chairman Mao; rather, it is again an image of her and

Sangbu riding in the fields. In this final scene, he lovingly (and skillfully, considering they are

sitting on horses) wraps his arms around her as she gently and lovingly rests her head on his

shoulder. The camera then pans out for one final view of the herds in the expansive grasslands

before fading out (fig. 8). In fact, the convention of ending with a concluding romantic scene,

instead of a PLA military victory or picture of CCP comrades or Chairman Mao, is extremely

common in the minority films of the Seventeen Years Period; both Lusheng Love Song and The

Dai Doctor follow a similar pattern. It is because of these films clearly demarcated ethnic

minority characteristic that ethnic minority women are allowed these certain archetypically

feminine characteristics, including alluring garments and ornamentation, close-ups, and the

romantic endings, conventions all normally associated with Classical Hollywood Cinema.

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FIGURE8FINALSCENESFROMPEOPLEOFTHEGRASSLANDS(1953),LUSHENGLOVESONG(1957),ANDTHEDAIDOCTOR(1960)

The Dai Doctor (moyadai, 1960)

The Dai Doctor, directed by Xu Tao with a screenplay by Ji Kang and Gong Pu, takes

place in post-liberation Xishuangbanna, a village in Yunnan Province populated by people of the

Dai ethnic group. A Dai woman accused of being a Pipa ghost and causing the death of babies

is burned at the stake. 18 years later, her daughter, Yi Lai Han, lives in the village with her

widowed father who runs a small store. CCP cadres have recently established an office in the

village, but Zao Ba, a wealthy feudal lord (fengjianzhu), tries to sabotage them by spreading

rumors about the CCP in the village. Ai Wen, a young Dai man who helps the CCP cadres in the

village, becomes interested in Yi Lai Han and begins to court her. A baby in the town becomes

sick, however, and Lao Ba blames Yi Lai Han, inciting the villagers to burn down her fathers

house and chase them out of the village, whereupon Yi Lai Hans father dies. Yi Lai Han is then

found by some PLA soldiers and taken to an ethnic minority womens school run by the CCP,

where she studies medicine. After she becomes a doctor, she travels to small villages in Yunnan

to work, finally arriving back at Xishuangbanna. She and Ai Wan are reunited, and Lao Ba is

apprehended and publicly denounced. The film ends with Yi Lai Han and Ai Wans marriage

celebration.

As previously mentioned, The Dai Doctor contains scenes and subject matter more serious

than that of the previous two films in this study. In addition to reinforcing official ideology such

as class struggle, the film also tackles the CCPs more difficult and minority-specific political

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campaigns such as the banishing of backwards native customs (fengsu xiguan). Much of the

cinematography matches the tone of this subject matter; the first 12 minutes of the film, for

example, are shot with heavy shadows and dark tones, even during daytime scenes. The presence

of this darker tone and more serious subject matter in a film featuring the Dai, a soft

southwestern minority, again challenges Berrys categorization of soft and hard minority

films.

In addition, the issue of native customs highlights some of the difficulties the CCPs

ethnic minority policy was beginning to face by the latter half of the Seventeen Years Period. To

the casual viewer, the distinction between ethnic minorities harmful native customs and

celebrated national characteristics may seem blurry. In this film, the designating of Pipa

ghosts and the discarding of a second child when a woman has twins are both native customs

that the film identifies as evil and in need of reform. In a scene in which Yi Lai Han goes to a

small Yunnan village to deliver twins for a local minority woman, a village aristocrat dressed in

fine robes comes to take the second baby away. When Yi Lai Han refuses to give him the baby,

he tells her she is breaking their native customs. Yi Lai Han, now a modern CCP doctor,

responds, Your native customs need changing! Dai customs such as fishing, yarn spinning, and

playing musical instruments, however, receive several minutes of screen time and are

accompanied by upbeat music and smiling faces. Ethnic minority films therefore designate

backward customs by linking them to class enemies such as wealthy aristocrats and landowners,

differentiating them from the correct signifiers of national identity, ones that are often easily

conveyed in film through bright, colorful images, links to romantic narratives, and fast-paced

music.

Another difficulty the CCPs ethnic minority policy faced was religion. As in other

minority films addressing this issue, Buddhism seems to occupy an unclear role in The Dai

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Doctor. Lao Ba, for example, helps run the local Buddhist temple, and he along with a village

elder take all of the local Dai villagers offerings. The film later reveals that Lao Ba improperly

uses much of this money for himself, and the local CCP cadres along with Ai Wen and other

villagers publicly denounce him. In Nongnu a Buddhist temple is similarly taken advantage of by

local villains, who hide guns and ammunition inside sacred statues. Although one could say these

films posit the church as simply another aspect of ethnic primitivity, championed but not

practiced by the Han, The Dai Doctors lack of scenes featuring protagonists praying (leaving

most of these scenes to supporting characters), and the churchs absence from happy, narrative-

resolving sequences near the end of the film reveal that the relationship between the CCP and

religion is still a somewhat uneasy one, one that is notably absent from the depictions of

national style in media and print that reinforce the nations new identity.

Aside from traditional activities such as yarn spinning with large, traditional looms, a task

in which Yi Lai Han participates (fig. 9), The Dai Doctor makes consistent use of the

conventions established by previous films in the genre, such as the use of natural settings. The

film is set in a lush, heavily forested area of Yunnan, and trees and rolling mountains serve as

regular backdrops. The surface features that normally facilitate national identity and ethnic

minority status also include gendered costume and head wraps, singing scenes performed by Yi

Lai Han and other ethnic minority women in the village, and the appearance of monks.

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FIGURE9YILAIHANSPINNINGYARNWITHADAILOOM

The romance scenes between Ai Wen and Yi Lai Han are similarly ethnicized. Courtship

activities include Ai Wen playing a flute outside of Yi Lai Hans home, Ai Wen putting flowers

in Yi Lai Hans hair, and Yi Lai Hans gift to her lover of a bracelet. Further, the flute tune,

exchange of gifts, and flower in hair all function as reoccurring motifs in the film, the last two

appearing again in the final marriage scene (fig. 8). The seamless integration of a romantic

subplot with designated ethnic minority characteristics again demonstrates the dependence of the

former on the latter.

Although Yi Lai Han and the other Dai women in the film serve as objects of visual

pleasure, wearing sleeveless, brightly colored dresses, and head wraps or jeweled ornaments

highlighted by medium and close-up shots, they are not the only ones with marked clothing. As

in other minority films, the mens dress and customs similarly serve as minority classifiers. Her

love interest, Ai Wan, for example, wears bright colors and head wraps, and he and other Dai

men are usually shown revealing much more skin than CCP cadres with whom they are

ideologically aligned. In one scene, he stands next to Comrad Cao, the village CCP cadre,

joining the Han officer to denounce the wealthy villager Lao Bas treatment towards a local debt

holder (fig. 10). Dressed in a long-sleeve shirt, Mao suit-style jacket, and PLA hat, all in shades

of grays and browns, Comrad Cao creates a stark visual contrast with Ai Wan. Both in his bright

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colors and revealing shirt, Ai Wan demonstrates that, while ideologically aligned, the two men