The old cathay cinema in downtown Shanghai is in a sorry state. The art deco fa?ade has been tarted up with green neon lighting; the styrofoam is popping out of the grubby seats inside. The sound system crackles, the projector is faulty, the auditorium is dank and all but empty. The films are equally drab: heavy on political and patriotic content, most films still reek of a government propaganda department which treats the cinema as a means of educating the masses, rather than entertaining them. "There are no good movies being made in China," says Zhang Yimou, director of films such as Raise the Red Lantern and To Live, explaining why people are deserting the cinema. On the streets outside, Shanghai is a city blooming with choice, a metropolis striving to be modern. The Communist party is gradually relinquishing control. Opposite the Cathay, one of the many new fashion emporiums is crammed with shoppers browsing the designer labels. Those who do not want to shop can play: a few years ago, karaoke was the thing, then tenpin bowling; lately go-karting tracks have sprung up to compete with the pool halls, health clubs and space invader parlours which serve a generation discovering the meaning of leisure.
In China today, life is more colourful outside the cinema than inside. Skyscrapers are sprouting, shiny car showrooms are opening in place of old state shops. A class of affluent young professionals has arrived, with many of the accessories of metropolitan life, but without a contemporary cinema. It is a conspicuous absence; one which spreads out to most forms of popular expression. A society is being reborn, but one which does not articulate itself in the media of the modern age. It is an incomplete renaissance-a cultureless revolution.
This is not for want of talent or know-how. The popular arts remain actively underdeveloped by the Communist party censors, a restraint felt all the more keenly as other creative minds in China have been unleashed by the country's leaders, to develop companies, products and technologies. The result is a popular culture increasingly out of step with its population, moving on a slower treadmill than the economy at large. Not quite two decades since China launched its transition to the free market, manufacturers are making colour television sets which rival the best brands in the world. Sadly, the home-grown content is not worthy of the picture quality.
Film, television, theatre, journalism and literature are all constrained by the contradiction at the heart of modern China: a liberalising economy operating within a one-party state. As the economy has slipped freer of the government's grip, the party has an ever greater incentive to devote its energies to the ultimate levers of social control: the means of mass communication. In the 1990s, the Chinese leadership has relinquished more and more power over the daily lives of individuals: it has given up price controls, comprehensive responsibility for housing and welfare, effective command of people's movements and total ownership of state industry. But if the party is to retain the loyalty of the people-if it is to survive in one form or another-it cannot afford to relinquish the controls over popular thinking. In the language of the increasing number of management consultants now operating in China, massaging the hearts and minds of the people remains one of the party's "core competences."
There is a hierarchy of cultural impoverishment. High culture-classical Chinese art, Beijing opera and classical western music-have all actually blossomed along with the economy. In Shanghai a new museum opened last year, housing one of the world's finest collections of classical Chinese porcelain, bronze and jade. Next year, an opera house will be completed; there are plans for a concert hall. These may not be venues for modern popular cultural expression, but in a society which endured the Cultural Revolution's assault on classical art and music, the municipal government's rediscovered enthusiasm for high culture is more than welcome.
Pop music and a new generation of pop stars are also emerging from the shadows. You can still see the divas and crooners who dress in People's Liberation Army uniforms and appear in videos which invariably feature them striding along the Great Wall, belting out rousing Chinese anthems. But a few pop singers-sassy, progressive and backed by international record labels-have joined the ranks of Asia's megastars. China's propaganda machine is not too bothered by the fledgling pop scene. Like its counterparts elsewhere in the world, it instinctively steers clear of politics.
On television, you are more likely to see a game-show or China's version of a seaside special variety programme, than challenging social drama. That said, television programmes can sometimes be surprisingly adventurous. One reason is that there is a lot of money sloshing around the television industry. Last year more than $2.1 billion was spent on advertising in China and the total is growing by 30 per cent a year. Most of it goes into television. Television is also freer of government intervention than cinema, simply because there is more of it: "Each year there are only 150 films made, but tens of thousands of hours of television shows, so television is impossible to control in the same way as film," says one official with the Shanghai propaganda department.
Chinese journalism is striking for its homogeneity. Like a giant echo chamber, it reverberates the sounds emitted from Xinhua, the official government news agency. But occasionally, independent sources of revenue enable some newspapers to stretch the boundaries of the government's news values. The Xinmin Evening News, for example, is China's equivalent of a tabloid-it crunches the party's political messages into discreet little boxes on the bottom of the page and devotes space to columns on how to deal with your husband's lover, a campaign against rising bus fares or a sensational series on a fat girl barred from higher education because of her weight. The Xinmin Evening News is now the second most popular paper after the People's Daily-the official mouthpiece of the Communist party. The critical difference is that state enterprises subscribe to the People's Daily but individuals buy the Xinmin Evening News. It is the exception to a generally stodgy diet of patriotic party propaganda.
Then there is China's acutely anaemic film industry. In the early years after the Communist takeover, the cinema was the natural pulpit for Maoist propaganda, arching across the country's regional, cultural and intellectual divides. Film gave the party the power to forge a nation in the spirit of the revolution, using a medium which was emblematic of communist modernity. Today, perhaps for reasons of nostalgia, the cinema still has a special place in the hearts of party propagandists. Since the mid-1990s, the censors have meddled a great deal more.
But just as state intervention has been stepped up, government funds have begun to dry up. While tightening control of film content, the government has opened the film industry to market forces in two ways. First, big film studios have been made responsible for their own fund-raising and budgets. State subsidy has shrunk, but little private finance has taken its place. Films in China are a risky investment as long as government can arbitrarily block content and distribution. Second, several big budget Hollywood blockbusters are now shown in China each year, underlining the inadequacy of locally made rivals.
Pinched between zealous censors and reluctant investors, home-grown films look cheap and atavistic, failing to keep pace with an increasingly sophisticated audience which is coming to grips with the complexities and ambiguities of modern life. The limited number of foreign films approved for screening in China each year offer filmgoers little more to chew on. Mission: Impossible, Dante's Peak and Jumanji ran for much of the last year in Shanghai. With Speed II still to come, it seems that the selectors are bent on keeping Chinese audiences on thin fare.
Chinese film is sometimes derided, but more commonly ignored. Cinemas and theatres in Shanghai, for example, sold nearly 200m film tickets in 1979, the year Deng Xiaoping launched the process of economic liberalisation. By 1996, sales were down to fewer than 40m, having collapsed from 135m in 1991. Put another way, 20 years ago the average Shanghainese went to the cinema more than a dozen times a year-today he or she may perhaps go twice.
What worries people such as film director Zhang Yimou is a generation which takes a second-rate national cinema for granted: "In the 1990s, China has enjoyed great economic growth and a real improvement in living standards. But, inevitably, there have been some side effects. There is a strong trend towards money worship and people have given up spiritual pursuits," he says. Ask someone about a recent film, and too often the most favourable review is "not bad for a Chinese film."
However, Zhang cannot speak out on behalf of all China's filmmakers. He and Chen Kaige, director of films such as Farewell My Concubine, may be China's best known filmmakers internationally, but their reputations at home are tarnished. A common reproach is that films like Raise the Red Lantern offer a stylised version of China's past, riddled with inaccuracies and failing to address the "real conditions" of China. The complaint is unsettling-not because it is right or wrong but because it is so frequently repeated. It is as if there is a standard line on Zhang Yimou-as there is on peaceful reunification with Taiwan, the legacy of Chairman Mao's rule or Sino-American relations. Politically, China is a country which brooks little diversity; there is a disconcerting sense that it is also a society which needs to reach a monochrome view on cinema.
Few controversial films are made in China; but there are some. A handful of them delve into the difficult issues of modern life: the divorce rate is soaring; a utilitarian approach to marriage is being replaced by a Sino-foreign blend of romantic love; sexual mores are changing; families are strained by generations divided by experience. There is much to make films about. Don't Bother Me, I'm Divorced was one such film. It dealt with marriage break-up and the turns it can take in a family cramped into a confined space. More often, even films with potential end up mired in heavy-handed dialogue and propagandist flavour. Consider In the Days after Lei Feng.
Lei Feng was the original model comrade: a cheerful, chubby youth who used to get up in the middle of the night to wash his fellow soldiers' socks and underpants. When he died in a mysterious accident 30 years ago, Chairman Mao personally inscribed a piece of calligraphy urging the Chinese people to "Learn from Comrade Lei Feng"-catapulting Lei into the pantheon of Communist China's revolutionary heroes.
The film opens on a sepia day in the early 1960s; Lei Feng is under a truck fixing a mechanical problem. As he works, he gives a lecture to the truck driver on the health risks of smoking-the first lesson for today's nicotine-dependent audience: smoking kills. In fact, it is the truck which kills Lei Feng. According to the mythology surrounding Lei-some even think that the man himself is an entirely fabricated myth-the truck driver reverses into a telegraph pole which falls on Lei's head, killing him instantly. From then on, the film tells the story of the truck driver, haunted by the guilt of killing a man who embodied all that was good and hopeful in the communist revolution. As time goes on, sorrow is compounded by the sight of China in headstrong pursuit of economic advancement, abandoning its nobler instincts along the way. To give the film its due, it offers a bleak and sometimes bold series of vignettes of China's recent history, from the early days of revolutionary innocence to the present. A Forrest Gump for China (minus the mockery of political leaders).
If China's Communist party gave Oscars, In the Days after Lei Feng would no doubt win the award for "Best Political Content"-the film echoes President Jiang Zemin's recent rallying cry for China to build a "spiritual civilisation" to accompany economic development. But this has had little lasting impact on Chinese audiences, who presumably have seen enough Lei Feng films already. They may also be fed up with films which so consistently underestimate them-In the Days after Lei Feng is a didactic film, part of a popular culture which is not worthy of modern Chinese people.
chinese cinema has not always lectured its audience. The first film screenings in China were part of a tea house show in Shanghai in August 1896; in the early 1920s and 1930s, as cinemas spread across Shanghai and other cities, films tended to offer foreign escapism and commercial plugs for fashionable new products. But from the early days, a leftish group of intellectual filmmakers saw the cinema as a means of communicating a political message. In the heady years after the Communist victory in 1949, many of the filmmakers who stayed in China willingly devoted their energies to films which would deliver the lessons of the revolution direct to the people. Over the following decades, the propagandist approach was institutionalised.
In the 1980s there was a change. Deng Xiaoping had set China on the road to economic liberalisation and "emancipating the mind." The following years were known as the "Beijing Spring," a brief period of flourishing free expression and experimentation. For filmmakers it started with the making of Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth in 1984. Zhang Yimou, who worked on the film as a cameraman, remembers a time when "China was anxious for culture and knowledge. A single novel could become a talking point across the country. People flooded into exhibitions of photos and paintings. Even as a young guy, you had to talk about Freud or Sartre if you wanted to go out and meet girls."
Yellow Earth enjoyed critical acclaim at home and abroad and launched the careers of Chen and Zhang-standard-bearers of the "fifth generation" of Chinese filmmakers. After the brutality of the Cultural Revolution, filmmakers set out to explore a scarred national conscience, sometimes harrowingly-Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite begins with the jolly wedding of a pair of trusting young innocents and remorselessly charts their slow demise and the destruction of those they love.
Huang Shuqin, a Shanghai-based director who graduated at the height of the Cultural Revolution and waited 15 years before making her first film in 1981, recalls the Beijing Spring: "The 1980s were a high point for Chinese film. There was a sense of liberation, but the market economy was not yet in place and so there was no real commercial pressure on filmmakers. Directors were really able to express their thoughts in their films."
The massacre of pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989 jolted the budding self-confidence among China's filmmakers. But-surprisingly perhaps-it did not derail it. The early 1990s witnessed a series of stunning successes-Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993. Ge You won a best actor award at Cannes the following year for his part in To Live, directed by Zhang Yimou, who by then already had two Oscar nominations under his belt.
The malaise in the Chinese film industry is much more recent. It dates back to early 1996, when the government parked its tanks, figuratively speaking, on the filmmakers' lawns. Ding Guangen, director of the CCP central committee's propaganda department, told a conference of filmmakers that films "must present to the audience... the lofty ideals and beliefs and excellent working style of the Communist party... and nationalism. We must cultivate the people's high morals." Five new films were banned the following month.
Chinese filmmakers are generally talkative people, but they clam up on the subject of Ding Guangen. There is speculation that his star is on the wane in Beijing, which may herald a thaw for the film industry. But for the time being, China's propaganda officials are implementing Ding's instruction that Chinese films adhere to the party's principles on literature and art: films must, among other things, "serve the people and socialism," "plunge into the thick of life and reality, maintaining close ties with the masses" and "uphold Deng Xiaoping's theory of building socialism with Chinese characteristics."
An official at the propaganda department in Shanghai says: "We have started paying more attention to the film industry than we did a few years ago. This is something coming right from the top in Beijing." It is a distasteful business which does not sit well with the young official spruced up in a Ralph Lauren shirt and drinking black coffee-displaying a certain cosmopolitanism in a traditional tea culture. "Television is much better than film. There are not so many restrictions on television and the government does not interfere so much," he adds.
This year, the propaganda people have thrown their weight behind Red River Valley, a film shot against the breath-taking backdrop of the Tibetan Himalayas. It tells the story of the Tibetan and Han ethnic groups living together in harmony, joining in battle to fight off British invaders. "It shows the Tibetans and the Hans united... This is in accordance with the national interest," the official says. Actually, it is in accordance with the national anxiety-China's grip on Tibet, which it "liberated" in 1959, remains fiercely tight, but a bomb attack in Lhasa in 1996 prompted fears of potential unrest.
The price of promotion is censorship. Even Xie Jin, the spritely 70-something director of The Opium War, the propaganda epic of 1997, says: "The government sometimes cares too much and their instructions are too detailed, which creates obstacles for the film industry." This is something of an admission from the man whose film about China's noble but ultimately ignominious attempt to repulse British opium traders had its first screening at a gala in the Great Hall of the People-the constitutional seat of CCP power-attended by the leading lights of China's politburo.
Directors who seek to avoid hassle with the censors inevitably run into the problem of self-censorship. Zhang Yimou suggests that filmmakers have little choice but to resign themselves to self-censorship: "This is the country we live in. We are used to it. What we try to do is to make a good film within the existing conditions. That is all that we can do."
Xie Jin says the reason he made The Opium War was because the Hong Kong handover was "a chance for me to sell my movie. It was a good selling point. If Hong Kong had not been returning to the motherland, I would not have made this film." Making The Opium War cost about $15m, the most expensive film ever made in China. Other filmmakers work with only a fraction of that budget.
Distribution in China is also chaotic-another symptom, filmmakers say, of the halfway house of China's economic transition. "If we really lived in a market economy," says Huang Shuqin, "there would be some co-ordination between distributors and producers. But as it is, there is no connection between how much you spend making a film and how much is spent on distribution." Not only is the relationship between suppliers and buyers fractured, but the market itself is balkanised. Distribution is handled on a province by province basis and, in some cases, cinema by cinema. To promote Keep Cool, Zhang Yimou's latest film, director and cast trooped from one provincial city to another in a marketing and distribution drive.
Foreign films have much less difficulty with marketing and promotion. Hollywood is filling the vacuum. It weighs into a market, albeit heavily restrictive and regulated, already besieged by foreign cultural brands and icons. More and more people with satellite dishes turn to CNN rather than CCTV (China Central Television) for news. With the Nike swoosh emblazoned across much of urban China, more kids want to grow up to be Michael Jordan than Lei Feng. More Beijing University students are reading Bill Gates's The Road Ahead than Mao's Red Book. Government regulation offers a meagre defence against Hollywood.
Nevertheless, audiences in China (like audiences elsewhere in the world) prefer homemade films to imports-Keep Cool, for example, broke all box office records this year. So it is tempting to shrug off the film industry's difficulties, to treat them as what the Chinese call "problems left over from history." The obstacles to a thriving film industry-an overdeveloped propaganda department and an underdeveloped market-will, one hopes, be remedied in time. It is hard to conceive that a country like China could simply give up on cinema permanently and amuse itself with other things.
In the meantime, what impact does a cinema (and television) without bite have on society? At the very least, it endorses a culture cowed by a generation of violent authoritarian rule, where public discourse has parted company with truths that are only spoken in private. There must surely be a price paid in the intellectual and artistic development of China's young people. In a world where creativity and imagination are recognised as the human qualities which increase productivity and, in turn, the wealth of a country, the arrested development of its cinema may yet exact an economic price from China in the future.
There are ranks of aspiring officials. There is a grasping generation of young entrepreneurs. Universities, too, boast growing numbers of challenging thinkers. China is caught up in a frenzy of anticipation. It is in a hurry to get to its promising future; and for many people the recent past looks drab by comparison with the neon colours of the 1990s. For filmmakers today it is the other way round. They remember nostalgically the era that began with Yellow Earth, but they are left with a feeling of uncertainty when asked to look at the prospects for the industry without a "sixth generation" of directors.
As Zhang Yimou recalls it, Chen, the director, was a young man when they made Yellow Earth: "That first film was full of vigour. He put something into that which came from deep within him. He knew nothing about film festivals or foreign things. He did not know his way to the foreign embassies. He had a strong feeling about the land and the people who lived on it. I haven't seen similar films made by the sixth generation. Why? I don't know."
