Documentary, World History, and National Power in the PRC

Global Rise in Chinese Eyes

Gotelind Mueller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415811699
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135089122
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Documentaries have recently become a favourite format for Chinese state-directed media to present an officially sanctioned view of history. Indeed, this is not confined to Chinese national history. In stark contrast to the earlier self-centred preoccupation with Chinese history, there has been an upsurge in interest in foreign history, with a view to illuminating China's role not only in world history, but also on the global stage today, and in the future.

This book examines three recent Chinese documentary television series which present the officially sanctioned view of the rise of the modern West, the reasons for the end of the Soviet Union, and the legitimisation of the present-day Chinese government via a specific reading of modern Chinese history to argue for a 'Chinese rise' in the future. With a focus on these documentaries, Gotelind Müller discusses how history is presented on screen, and explores the function of visual history for memory culture and wider society. Further, this book reveals how the presentation of Chinese and foreign history in a global framework impacts on the officially transmitted views on Self and Other, and thus provides a keen insight into how the Chinese themselves regard their 'global rise'.

Documentary, World History, and National Power in the PRC will be welcomed by students and scholars working across a number of fields, including Chinese studies, East Asian studies, media studies, television studies, history and memory studies.

1 Introduction

‘Global rise’ has become a buzzword in the early twenty- first century and many people immediately think of China in this context: both outside China, and also within. In fact, Chinese and foreigners alike assume China is already in the midst of a ‘global rise’ and the only question is how to deal with it. Western attitudes waver between pragmatic approaches of accommodation and at times cautious encouragement at one end of the spectrum, and fears of a ‘China threat’ on the other. Asian neighbours are concerned about the regional implications and hope, above all, that China’s ‘rise’ will be a peaceful one, which will not lead to imbalances and regional instability. But how do the Chinese themselves see their assumed ‘global rise’? Not surprisingly, the topic is central to the political aspirations of the state which tries to define, manage, and push China’s ‘global rise’ in a way that does not antagonise others (and does not endanger party rule, of course), but it is also dear to the public, pleasing national pride but also inviting reflection on how others managed to ‘rise’ historically (and why China did not do so earlier – or why it lost out in historical competition in spite of one- time greatness). The topic therefore comes up in various guises and formats, and one of the formats that provide a window on Chinese visions of ‘global rise’ is the historical documentary.

Documentaries have recently become a favourite format in Chinese media and come with an aura of objectivity and study. By taking up the issue of ‘global rise’ in a historical perspective, they step back from a narrow ‘presentist’ policy focus to provide a larger context and allow for more general discussion of the ‘historical laws’ behind such a ‘rise’, its opportunities and dangers, and therewith can legitimate also present- day political options. From the perspective of the state, TV (television) history is a useful tool for presenting and disseminating officially sanctioned views of history to the public. The media and academia, on their part, reflect the timeliness of the topic by their activities, be they directly connected to the state (as explicitly elicited or financed as ‘academic key projects’, etc.) or not, because they perceive also the public’s growing interest – and the possibility of meeting with market success in generating societal influence.

Even though history was already a favourite topic on Chinese TV, with the ‘global rise’ theme the conventionally self- centred preoccupation with Chinese history in the PRC (People’s Republic of China) has given way to new developments: an unprecedented upsurge of interest in foreign/world history is a notable phenomenon, and even discussion of Chinese history is now carried out with a view to China’s being part of world history. The driving forces behind the design of early twenty- first century historical presentations are cultural, economic and political asymmetries and their workings in the past and prospective future. In its ‘utilitarian’ aspect, the Chinese conception of ‘using the past to serve the present’ is, however, firmly linked to tradition.¹ And it is this ‘application’ vision of ‘historia magistra vitae’ (Koselleck 1967) that underpins and frames this continuing interest in historical topics, including the ‘rise to global power’ of other nations in former times, making for an approach to history that focuses on positive (or negative) examples (‘exemplary history’) to attain the goal of national ‘rise’ or ‘revival’.

Issues and contexts

The notions of national Self and foreign Other in China are in themselves historical and subject to shifts over time. To follow up on these shifts and address the present-day (political) relevance of these notions, this book proposes to look into the genre of historical documentaries by focusing on three very recent documentary series presenting the Chinese officially accepted view of the rise of the modern West (and Japan), of the reasons for the end of the Soviet Union, and of the legitimisation of the present-day Chinese government via a specific reading of modern Chinese history that argues for a Chinese ‘rise’ in the future on the global ‘stage’.

The aim in discussing these documentaries is to analyse the framing of visions of (selected) foreign and Chinese history – understood from the viewpoint of nation states precisely because they are designed to serve the national interest – which are embraced or at least acknowledged by the Chinese state.² In each case the discussion will clarify how far the historical presentation is a direct or indirect political endeavour by looking into the production processes and actors involved; the ends attached to this enterprise; and its impact on shifting popular views of national Self and foreign Other in a medially transmitted global context, though paying attention also to reception processes and cues that might go astray of the roads that the state or the producers envisaged. In other words, it looks into filmic methods of historical representation and their reflections of contemporary society, culture and politics on the basis of an analysis of production, content and reception.³ This is done in a way that also pays heed to current memory studies’ calls for taking into consideration mediation and dynamic processes of interaction, rather than the ‘produced’ static ‘views’ as the results (i.e. process, not finished product) (cf. Erll and Rigney 2012). Beyond ‘classical’ reception studies, there is a pluri-medial network in which these history productions are embedded horizontally, and they are to be seen as part of signifying processes that include the ‘before’ and the ‘besides’, not only the ‘after’ vertically (cf. Erll and Wodianka 2008). Therefore we will look also into ‘prefigured’ (Ricoeur) historical views, as well as into side productions to integrate the ‘before’ and the ‘besides’ in the discussion of the documentaries chosen.

As for history on screen in general, some research has been done predominantly on Western countries,⁴ thus providing this study with comparative aspects in terms of methodology, specific problems with production contexts, receptions with various audiences, and implications of the workings of this particular medium. Hopefully, this study will be able to broaden the presently Euro-centred discussion on history in film and television, which automatically presupposes a ‘Western’ television production environment, by presenting the Chinese case within a very different political setting, discussing how far, nevertheless, the public is involved in it as well via its reaction to the whole process, in order to prevent a simplistic ‘liberal’ vs. ‘authoritarian’ dichotomy (cf. Müller 2011a).

The Chinese media in general are a very vibrant field of research (see below) and also draw a lot of attention from Western journalists, but most discussions focus on the structural systemic side, on censorship for example (cf., e.g. Brady 2008). Here, very often the focus is on print media or – more recently – the Internet. With visual media, Chinese film has been the format that received most scholarly attention, due to several internationally successful productions, and more recently also with a view to ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ film culture (cf. Pickowicz and Zhang (eds) 2006; Berry et al. 2010). Less work, however, and only starting relatively recently, has been done on television, and the work that has been done tends to discuss soap operas and the like rather than historical series (see below). The specific role of documentaries as a format in China has barely started yet to be considered in any depth (see Chu, Yingchi 2007).⁵ Notably, presentations of foreign history in the media, being a fairly new development,⁶ have not yet received much attention in this context, in spite of the fact that people admit they mostly take their ‘knowledge’ on other countries from TV.⁷ This book tries to fill that gap, connecting the specific framing of foreign and Chinese history to investigations into the shifting perceptions of national Self and foreign Other as a reaction to globally shifting asymmetries on the economic, political, and cultural level, centring around the key question of global rise and its conditions. This also enlarges the scholarship in this regard, which up to now has mainly addressed the question of China’s ‘rise’ in terms of policy and security concerns.⁸

My personal starting point for this endeavour is the issue of the formation of historical consciousness, which is guided first of all by history education in school (cf. Müller 2008 and Müller (ed.) 2011c).⁹ On the other hand, historical consciousness is clearly also framed today by popular media, including television, film and Internet (see Müller 2006–, 2007a and 2007b). The Chinese government, the publishing and the media industry (and in part the academic world) all realise the potential of various media, and thus construct a net of interdependent interests, actors and so on, which criss-cross a simple dividing line between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the realm of the media, presenting a layered web of socio-political complexities as the basis on which different historical visions are negotiated (cf. Müller 2011a). The Chinese state with its power of defining the boundaries of action evidently sets up the limits, but also actively takes up the potential of the new media to promote its own desired reading of history (which is not necessarily taken up by the audience as originally intended, however).¹⁰

More concretely, the book’s focus on the three chosen recent documentary series serves to analyse the ways in which the Chinese officially favoured view of history is transmitted via the media so as to guide perceptions of foreign and Chinese history towards legitimisation of PRC policies. Besides the aspects of governance involved via the media system itself and the use of documentaries also in the formation of cadres (the top-down intention), cultural flows are marked in introducing Chinese spectators to foreign history with a hitherto unknown intensity as well as in the subsequent reframing of China’s own history, putting her consciously in a global context (top-down by the producers; bottom-up in terms of the use Chinese spectators make of it; Lull 1991: 211–12). And the relations between different media outlets and consumer groups add the ‘horizontal’ dimension.

The sources to be used are mainly the three chosen recent documentary series of influence in a political – and partly in a market – sense:

1. Daguo jueqi (The Rise of the Great Powers), i.e. Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, the UK (United Kingd...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Foreign models for the public: the TV documentary Daguo jueqi (The Rise of the Great Powers)
• 3 China's potential on display: the sequel documentary Fuxing zhi lu (The Road to Revival)
• 4 Soviet failure lessons for insiders: the party-educational documentary Ju an si wei (Alert to Danger while Dwelling in Safety)
• 5 Framing visions of China and the world: the state, documentary, and history in comparative perspective
• Bibliography
• Index