by Cook, James A. ,Goldstein, Joshua,Johnson, Matthew D. ,Schmalzer, Sigrid
Bringing It All Back Home: Overseas Chinese and China
Chinese communities abroad initially maintained close cultural ties with their homes via institutions such as the Thian Hock Keng, but by the start of the twentieth century these connections began to undergo important changes. Stung by Western criticism of China’s Confucian culture as being outmoded and feudal, embarrassed by the inability of the Qing dynasty to protect China from Western imperialism, and influenced by their exposure to European nationalism while abroad, overseas Chinese sought to become a more important force for reform and change back home. Since commerce and culture dominated overseas Chinese society abroad, the return of Huaqiao influence naturally flowed along these lines.
While overseas Chinese in North America were limited by exclusion acts and racism in their choice of economic pursuits, some Huaqiao merchants in Southeast Asia had become extremely wealthy supplying European and Japanese demand for raw materials such as tin and rubber over the first two decades of the twentieth century. Remittances of foreign currency now began to flow back to China with regularity. While the majority of these funds were generally used for day-to-day expenses by relatives back in China, capital was also channeled into more productive investment like housing, business, and transportation. One overseas Chinese resident described his desire to invest in his hometown of Xiamen as follows:
As a resident of the Philippine Islands and as a native of southern Fujian province where Xiamen is located, I am deeply interested in the fate of the city . . . . The overseas Chinese, particularly those coming from that part of the country, are closely knit with the fortune of their city and should be given a say in its administration, for they are somehow concerned with its affairs. From both far away and when we return to the city, we have always held Xiamen dear and given our wholehearted cooperation and material support when such was needed.16
By the 1920s, overseas Chinese investment in mainland China, particularly up and down the southeast coast from Guangzhou to Shanghai, had become a critical source of capital. Funds from North America and Southeast Asia sparked new economic opportunities, helped alleviate China’s precarious balance of payments problems, and increased the economic integration of overseas Chinese communities with ancestral villages.
While it is impossible to arrive at a precise figure for total remittances from Chinese abroad back to the mainland, researchers have estimated that during the 1920s approximately CN¥425 million, or over US$210 million, was sent.17 Again, while the majority of these funds were used by mainland relatives for living expenses, investment in housing and industry also flourished. For example, in the province with the largest overseas Chinese population, Fujian, overseas Chinese invested 125 million yuan into public utilities, real estate development, urban infrastructure projects, commerce, and banking in prewar Republican China.18 Additionally, these investments introduced new technologies and forms of business organization from abroad. Railroads, bus companies, and mining operations were all opened in southeast China with overseas Chinese capital.
Huaqiao were also important conduits for cultural and societal change. We have already noted the important role of overseas Chinese in educational philanthropy, particularly in their native provinces of Fujian and Guangdong. Overseas Chinese influence, however, stretched into the curriculum and pedagogy of teaching as well. The competitiveness of the Southeast Asian and North American economies required very different skills than those taught in traditional Chinese schools. English, economics, and mathematics were required subjects, and the high demand for both skilled and unskilled Chinese labor led to the creation of new schools in China that prepared young Chinese for life abroad. Perhaps the most famous example of these new currents of educational reform could be found in Xiamen University, a college completely funded and administered by overseas Chinese but located in China.19 Additionally new tastes in clothing, theater, literature, and other forms of cultural publishing began to move back across the South China Sea.
The impact of these new commercial and cultural currents upon the villages and cities with the largest overseas Chinese populations was significant. In cities such as Guangzhou, Shantou, and Xiamen, overseas Chinese capital funded the complete reconstruction of these cities. In Xiamen, for example, local planners, builders, and business leaders decided to rebuild the city so that it catered to overseas Chinese tastes. This meant the recreation of an urban landscape that closely conformed to the colonial milieu of Southeast Asia’s port cities, i.e., an environment dominated by modern transportation facilities, an orderly urban environment where business transactions could be conducted in an efficient and timely manner, and, of course, a certain style of housing (Figure 7.7, see website).20
As they reordered the city’s urban landscape through massive land reclamation projects, urban planners produced a “Xiamen renaissance based not on European architecture, but rather a building that embodied the mercantile success of Xiamen’s transnational business community—the shophouse.”21 Within the city center, in area after area, Xiamen’s older homes were purchased by developers, demolished, and then replaced by rows of shophouses. This, in turn, altered the entire city milieu. No longer was Xiamen characterized by a hodgepodge of different buildings, winding roads, and a vibrant temple culture dedicated to Mazu; in its stead appeared a regularized network of modern boulevards lined with row after row of highly standardized shophouses. Fed by increasing overseas Chinese remittances and a booming real estate market, housing construction in Xiamen moved ahead at an astonishing pace. Between 1928 and 1932, more than 5,300 new homes were built within the city, with over 90% of the units funded either fully or in part by overseas Chinese capital.22
Reimagining Chinese National Identity
The Chinese character Huaqiao (华侨) combines the meanings of Chinese identity (hua, 华) with the ideal of movement abroad (qiao, 侨).23 Yet with a few different strokes of the brush or pen, the word qiao can be rewritten to mean bridge (桥). It is perhaps this rendition of qiao that best describes the role of China’s overseas Chinese. While they were certainly migrants, they were also China’s bridge to the outside world.
Initially, the movement of culture and people was essentially one-sided. Just as the statue of Mazu was transported from Fujian to the Thian Hock Keng temple in 1840, so too did large numbers of Fujianese and Cantonese immigrants make the perilous journey across the sea to Southeast Asia and North America. In these new and often hostile social climates, Chinese immigrants constructed powerful symbols of their home identity in the form of temples, arches, and residences. Throughout the twentieth century, in both the Republican era, and later in the post-Mao reform era as well, overseas Chinese communities worked to bring their powerful and heartfelt influences back to their ancestral hometowns and homeland; the entrepreneurial spirit as well as the characteristic versions of “traditional culture” that they forged overseas came back with them.
Even as Huaqiao strove to reshape their new environments in the image of their homeland, their journeys eventually changed what it meant to be Chinese. On the one hand, many overseas Chinese were deeply committed to traditional Chinese culture. The May Fourth Movement of 1919, led by radicals such as Chen Duxiu, exposed Confucian culture to withering criticism and played a critical role in the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party. Abroad, however, May Fourth intellectuals were never very popular or very powerful. To many Huaqiao their ideas smacked of defeatism and played into the hands of notions of Western cultural superiority. On the other hand, having spent time abroad within the modernizing confines of North America and Southeast Asia, many overseas Chinese felt that they truly understood the process of modernization and how to create a modern Chinese identity. Their vision of a modern nation was radically different from that found in the United States or Europe, in the national capital of China, or among Chinese Communist revolutionaries. Wedding the commercial wealth of overseas Chinese merchant life with a revamped Confucianism and a deeply rooted cosmopolitanism, Chi
na’s overseas residents hoped to create a new vision of China that reflected these values.
Returning to the example that opened this chapter, the experiences of Lin Zhuguang help us further rethink our assumptions about the stability of national borders. The Chinese diaspora was fundamentally transnational in character; through the movement of goods, people, and ideas, it continuously linked Chinese communities on both sides of the Pacific. In other words, what do we consider to be “local” when we live in a place whose residents are constantly moving back and forth across national boundaries? Diasporic communities, like the Huaqiao communities we have been discussing, undermine our traditional conceptions of national identity by their very fluidity. Figure 7.1 reminds us that this process is not new. Indeed, it has been developing for several hundred years. Yet today, amid constant reminders of the patriotic obligation to defend national borders, the experience of China’s Huaqiao reminds us that there are many ways to define a nation. The way overseas Chinese communities in the 1920s and 1930s defined what it meant to be Chinese cautions us to rethink our assumptions of the sanctity of geographic borders in history.
notes
1. Xiamen huaqiao zhi bianzuan weiyuan hui, Xiamen huaqiao zhi (Xiamen: Lujiang chuban she, 1991), 354.
2. Zhonghua shanghui chuban weiyuanhui, Feilubin Minlila Zhonghua shanghui sanshi zhou nian jinian li, 1904–1933 (Manila: Chinese Chamber of Commerce, 1936), ji yi.
3. Zhu Ming, “Fujian shi women de jiaxiang,” Fujian yu huaqiao1.1 (April 1938), 17.
4. Lynn Pan (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 261.
5. Ibid., 235.
6. Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Southeast Asia (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 3.
7. Ibid.
8. Geoff Wade, “Ming China and Southeast Asia in the 15th Century: A Reappraisal,” Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series, No.28 (Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, July 2004), http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/docs/wps/wps04_028.pdf (accessed December 17, 2013).
9. Robert E. Elson, “International Commerce, the State and Society: Economic and Social Change,” in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Volume 2: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Nicholas Tarling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 142.
10. Fujian sheng dangan guan, Fujian zhi: huaqiao zhi (Beijing: Dangan chuban she, 1990), 17–18.
11. Ibid, 37.
12. Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore (Singapore: University of Malaysia Press, 1957), 50–51.
13. Ellen C. Cangi, “Civilizing the people of Southeast Asia: Sir Stamford Raffles’ Town Plan for Singapore, 1819–1823,” Planning Perspectives 8 (1993), 167.
14. Ibid., 178.
15. I have made this argument referring to the nature of shophouse architecture before in James Cook, “Re-Imagining China: Xiamen, Overseas Chinese, and a Transnational Modernity,” in Materializing Modernity: Changes in Everyday Life in Twentieth Century China, eds. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein, 156–194. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006.
16. Ralph C.D. Ko, “The First Mayor of Amoy, an Overseas,” The China Critic, VI (April 6, 1933), 358.
17. C.F. Remer, Foreign Investments in China (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968), 187.
18. Lin Jinzhi, “Jindai huaqiao zai Xiamen de touzi ji qi zuoyong,” Zhongguo jingjishi yanjiu, 1987.4, 111.
19. James Cook, “Currents of Education and Identity: Overseas Chinese and Minnan Schools, 1912–1937,” Twentieth Century China 25.2 (April 2000), 1–31.
20. Virgil Ho has argued that perhaps I overstate the sociocultural importance of the shophouse in Xiamen. In his own work, Ho focuses primarily on the city of Canton and notes that, while the shophouse was an important new architectural feature of twentieth-century construction, it was not the dominant defining element. I would agree that this might be the case in Canton, but in Xiamen and Singapore the shophouse was certainly a dominant architectural feature in their commercial centers and I would argue took on a much greater degree of primacy in the cities. For more, see Virgil Ho, “Images of Houses, Houses of Images: Some Preliminary Thoughts on the Socio-Cultural History of Urban Dwellings in Pre-1940s Canton,” in Visualizing China, 1845–1965: Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives, eds. Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 208.
21. Nanyang shangbao, October 30, 1929.
22. Xiamen shi fangdi chan zhi bianzuan weiyuan hui, Xiamen shi fangdi chan zhi (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chuban she, 1988), 16–17.
23. The character qiao first arose during the early fourth century to refer to those individuals who had moved south to escape the violence of the Eastern Jin dynasty. See Ciyuan, 0140.4.
Chapter 8
The Myth about Chinese Leftist Cinema
Zhiwei Xiao
A film’s meaning is often defined less by its supposed “intrinsic” qualities than by the circumstance under which it is viewed. To take an example from American film: from the 1910s through the 1960s many Asian characters were played by white actors in “yellow face.” While certainly viewed as offensive by most Asians and minority audiences at the time, the majority of white film viewers were generally unperturbed by these highly stereotypical and degrading portrayals of Asians; today we are immediately struck by the obvious racial prejudice of such images (Figure 8.1 below and 8.2 website). The issues in Chinese film history are, as we will see in this essay, quite different; but the central point, that the context in which a film is viewed is often even more important than its intrinsic content—that audience reception is often as important as image production—lies at the crux of this chapter.A distinction must be made between what films meant to their audiences at the time of initial release and what their future viewers read into them in later years, for these interpretations are often divorced from the experience of the moviegoers of the past.
I argue in this chapter that the labeling of a large number of 1930s Chinese films as “leftist” in current Chinese film historiography distorts historical reality. By projecting an unambiguous political reading onto these films, the label ignores the complexity of the relationship between the Chinese film industry and the Nationalist (GMD) government, disregards the political context in which these films were made, and excludes other interpretative possibilities. As I will show: 1) the so-called leftist films were often consistent with the Nationalist government’s policies; 2) indeed, if there was an oppositional thrust in these films, that thrust had more to do with shifting political circumstances than with any conscious “leftist” positioning of the filmmakers and 3) the myth about leftist cinema was manufactured in post-1949 China by a group of people to serve their own political agenda rather than for historical accuracy. All three of these points highlight that the changing context of reception, not the intrinsic content of the celluloid images themselves, has played a primary role in shaping how many Republican-era Chinese films have been understood.
Figure 8.1 Still from the 1932 film the Mask of Fu Manchu, with Boris Karloff as the evil Dr. Fu Manchu and Myrna Loy as his beautiful daughter. Both actors performed in “yellow face” which was common in most Hollywood films at the time that included Asian roles. The offensive stereotyped images were well-suited to the equally racist “yellow peril” plot—Fu Manchu seeks to unearth the sword and mask of Ghengis Khan in an attempt to rally Asia to wipe out the “white race.”
Indeed, the Nanjing decade (1928–1937), while a relatively stable period in comparison to the preceding all-out civil war or the warlord era (1916–1928) and the impending Japanese invasion (1937–1945), was a decade of uncertainty and change. Though the Nationalist government consolidated its rule over much of China from 1928–1937, its control over the country was still very weak. The GMD military was apparently incapable either of destroying the Communist insurgency (first in Jiangxi and later in Shaanxi Province) or of resisting the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1
931. Even within the GMD government there was much factional wrestling, both over personal power networks and policy issues. And in Shanghai and Nanjing, modernizing cities in the heart of GMD-controlled China, there was a lively leftist cultural movement that sought to use the new mass media of popular publications and film to reach sympathetic audiences. Where did the new and extremely influential medium of film fit in the volatile world of GMD-ruled China in the 1930s? How did the GMD government attempt to turn film to its own purposes, or at least contain its potential for disruption? We will begin with these questions, and then try to understand how and why the complex answers to them have been distorted to create the overly simplistic myth of Chinese leftist cinema heroically resisting the GMD’s merciless repression. Finally, we will consider what this tells us as about the power of historical context in shaping how visual images are understood.
The Yihua Incident: A Reinterpretation
Early in the morning of November 12, 1933, Yihua Film Studio was vandalized by a group of young men who identified themselves as members of an anticommunist league in Shanghai. Armed with sticks and bricks and wearing masks, they broke glass, knocked over furniture, and smashed any expensive film equipment in sight. Before the studio employees had recovered from shock, the thugs had boarded a truck and sped off. As the studio staff began to assess the damage, they noticed scattered flyers that stated “Eradicate Communists” and “Down with the Treacherous Communists.” The vandals also left a letter posted on the wall accusing the studio of making leftist films. The letter identified several films by their titles, including some produced by other film studios, and denounced them as propaganda for the Communist Party. The letter was signed by “The Anti-Communist Squad of the Film Industry in Shanghai” and threatened further actions if Yihua did not change its ways. The next day, other film studios in Shanghai received identical letters warning against the menace of communism and demanding that filmmakers stop making films depicting class struggle or advocating aggressive nationalism.1
