Chineseness and the Cold War

Contested Cultures and Diaspora in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong

Jeremy E. Taylor, Lanjun Xu, Jeremy E. Taylor, Lanjun Xu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032078892
• eBook ISBN: 9781000450194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores contested notions of "Chineseness" in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong during the Cold War, showing how competing ideas about "Chineseness" were an important ideological factor at play in the region. After providing an overview of the scholarship on "Chineseness" and "diaspora", the book sheds light on specific case studies, through the lens of the "Chinese cultural Cold War", from Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. It provides detailed examples of competition for control of definitions of "Chineseness" by political or politically oriented forces of diverse kinds, and shows how such competition was played out in bookstores, cinemas, music halls, classrooms, and even sports clubs and places of worship across the region in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The book also demonstrates how the legacies of these Cold War contestations continue to influence debates about Chinese influence – and "Chineseness" – in Southeast Asia and the wider region today.

Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I
Chineseness and “new China” in Cold War Southeast Asia

1 The Southern Film Corporation, opera films and the PRC’s cultural diplomacy in Cold War Asia, 1950s–1960s¹

Lanjun Xu

DOI: 10.4324/9781003211976-3

Introduction

In the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) adapted numerous local operas (xiqu) into films, which it then exported throughout Asia and into Western countries in the hope of promoting friendship among neighbouring nations as well as blurring the boundaries of the “Bamboo Curtain”.² These opera films played a particularly significant role in Hong Kong and overseas Chinese communities, especially in Southeast Asia. Quite a few scholars have undertaken studies of regional operas and folk culture in the PRC, especially the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) use of culture for political ends and folk art as the basis for party-reformed cultural genres.³ Some new scholarship has also emerged on opera films in the Mao period.⁴ However, these studies mainly focus on aesthetic aspects of the relevant works, in particular their cross-media borrowings and mutual enrichment between stage performance and the film medium. Few have paid substantial attention to the role that opera films played in the PRC’s diasporic propaganda and in the globalization of Maoist ideology. Using recently declassified archival materials, oral histories, film studio records, press coverage and government documents, I attempt to shed light on the complex interaction between communist propaganda, cultural diplomacy and the popularity of Chinese opera films in Cold War Asia. This chapter demonstrates that, by investigating the production and circulation of opera films, we can map out cultural interactions between mainland China, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Such an approach takes account of the recent scholarly emphasis on the Cold War as more than the transformation of geopolitical boundaries between the United States and the Soviet Union, and acknowledges that Asia, and especially China, played a significant role in this conflict.⁵

This chapter stresses the need to consider the crucial role of geographical points of contact, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, while trying to work out “a circulatory, interactive and transformative history”⁶ of what we call in this volume the Chinese cultural Cold War. My discussion emphasizes the role of the Southern Film Corporation (Nanfang yingye youxian gongsi) (SFC), which was one of the most important distributors of Chinese films to Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, and explores the strategies that this corporation used to introduce PRC opera films to the region. After the crisis of the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s, the CCP treated the export of films as an important way to transcend and transgress the boundaries of First World capitalism, Second World socialism and Third World development. As a result, one essential element of the monumental project to “export the Chinese revolution to the world” was to transmit to a global audience a wide range of cultural products, including literature, film and also Mao’s works. The target audience of this effort consisted mainly of people who were politically positioned between radical leftists and rightists, and who were geographically located in the “in-between” regions that included capitalist countries and imperialist countries as well as developing countries – mainly in Asia, Africa and Latin America – that were fighting for independence from imperialism. More importantly, the struggle to attract the “hearts and minds” of overseas Chinese became a focus for both the PRC and the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s, to the point that one could argue there was a Cold War among overseas Chinese audiences. Jeremy E. Taylor, in his study of the Amoy-dialect film industry, analyzes how the Nationalist state on Taiwan used Amoy-dialect films for its political agenda both in Taiwan and throughout Asia, especially among overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.⁷ Comparatively less attention has been paid to the role of PRC films in the region, probably because after 1957, a number of countries such as Malaya and Thailand tightened their control over, or banned, communist publications and cultural products. In this chapter, I focus specifically on the genre of opera films (xiqu dianying), examining their role in the evolution of the PRC’s political strategies to manage international relations.

The Southern Film Corporation and the PRC’s cultural diplomacy

After the conclusion of the Korean War in July 1953, the Chinese communists changed their foreign policy approach by turning to “five principles of peaceful coexistence” with the West in order to split the “Free World”.⁸ The Geneva Conference of 1954 could be seen as a turning point in the PRC’s support for cultural diplomacy. This conference mainly dealt with the question of how to peacefully resolve issues between South and North Korea and to revive the peace process in Indochina; it was also the first time that the new communist government in China had sent a delegation to such a large international conference. In other words, it was a prime occasion for the newly formed PRC to establish its international image. At a reception before China’s delegation left for Geneva, Zhou Enlai told the delegation: “China is a big country and we will go to Geneva to attend our first international meeting. This is our first real show in the international arena, so we should perform civil plays (wenxi) rather than military plays (wuxi)”.⁹

The years 1954 and 1955 were a key period for promoting a peaceful China on the world stage. The Bandung Conference in 1955 was another turning point. At Bandung, Zhou Enlai outlined the five principles of “peaceful coexistence” that informed China’s foreign policy and placed China in a leadership position within the Third World. As Chen Jian explains:

After five years of sharp confrontation with the United States and the West, many leaders in Beijing perceived that for the purpose of promoting the socialist transformation and reconstruction at home, China needed a more stable outside environment. The Chinese leaders thus saw the Geneva and Bandung Conferences as opportunities to improve China’s international image. They obviously believed that a reconciliatory and positive Chinese approach would help strengthen Beijing’s new claim to peaceful coexistence as the foundation of the Chinese foreign policy. At this moment, Mao Zedong also endorsed this relatively moderate approach in the PRC’s international strategies and policies.¹⁰

This change in foreign policy also influenced the export of cultural products from the PRC, as Tina Mai Chen observes:

Nineteen fifty-four thus marked a turning point in what we can consider the geopolitical nexus of the exchange agreements. Prior to 1954 China was the recipient of Soviet film and film technology, and exchange agreements reinforced the relative strength of the Soviet Union and its film industry over China. The year 1954 can be seen as a moment of equalization and in the subsequent years China asserted itself as the center of socialist film exchanges.¹¹

It may not be accidental that the opera film Liang Shanbo Zhu Yingtai (Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai; hereafter Liang-Zhu) was also made in 1954, commencing a series of opera films produced under the new government.

The agreement signed at Bandung, the “Resolution to Strengthen the Cultural Cooperation and Enhance Cultural Exchanges among Asian Countries” (Guanyu jiaqiang Yazhou guojia wenhua hezuo he cujin Yazhou geguo wenhua jiaoliu de jueyi), greatly increased cultural exchanges between the PRC and other countries. During the period between the Bandung Conference and 1959, the number of countries that established cultural relationships with China increased from ten to forty. In October 1955, Zhou Enlai pointed out that cultural workers were the vanguard of international activity. In particular, for those countries that had not established diplomatic relations with China, Zhou stated the principle of “culture first, diplomacy after”.¹² More clearly, in 1956 he proclaimed at the Third Session of the First National People’s Congress that just as with economic cooperation, cultural exchanges were important to improving peace, friendship and cooperation among different countries. In 1956, Liao Chengzhi – the Director of the Foreign Affairs Office of the State Council, who in 1952 coined the Cold War strategy of “relying on the motherland while facing overseas” (Beikao zuguo, mianxiang haiwai) – emphasized to Zhou Enlai that the contributions of overseas Chinese to the development of the PRC should be recognized, and proposed that the PRC should “strengthen the propaganda work for the overseas Chinese”.¹³ Liao pointed out that films should have some attractive content, not just emphasize political correctness. He stated in particular that the popularity of these films should not be neglected. In his view, only when overseas Chinese welcomed them would films become effective tools of political propaganda.

In 1959, the PRC’s Ministry of Culture sent out a new document to all national film institutions proposing new policies for developing Chinese films, in which it stated that it was g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Archival abbreviations
• Introduction: putting “Chineseness” back into Cold War cultures
• Part I Chineseness and “new China” in Cold War Southeast Asia
• Part II Anti-communist Chineseness in Cold War Asia
• Part III Border-crossing “Chineseness” in Asia
• Abridged bibliography
• Index