Newsweek: Chinese Artists Explore the Nanjing Massacre

[ellisonz]

A generation of Chinese Artists are Grappling with one of the nation’s greatest tragedies.
Jan 2, 2012 12:00 AM EST
By Isaac Stone Fish

In the winter of 1937, the Japanese army stormed Nanjing, then China’s capital, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people in what is now known as the Nanjing Massacre. The incident remains the most emotionally wrenching chapter in the history of Sino-Japanese relations. But unlike the Holocaust and other acts of mass violence during World War II, creative attempts to represent the massacre have been few and far between.

Over the past few years, however, there has been an outpouring of dramatizations of Nanjing in literature and film, as a new generation of Chinese auteurs attempt to grapple with the tragedy, and juggle the demands of their audience, their censors, and their own artistic conscience. Last fall, for instance, National Book Award–winning author Ha Jin published the English-language novel, Nanjing Requiem, which explores the role foreigners played in trying to save the Chinese. And last month brought Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War, the most expensive film ever made in China, which tells the story of a priest, played by Christian Bale, who tries to shelter schoolchildren and prostitutes from the Japanese.

Such reflection on tragedy wasn’t always common. For years, after the Communists came to power, the state wanted to bury the massacre entirely and maintain good relations with the new Japanese government, which could help support China’s struggling economy. Nanjing was the capital of the hated nationalist regime, and the Communists played no role in defending the Chinese from brutality. The massacre did not fit into the Communist Party’s history, and since the state did not tolerate dissenting views, very little was published about it.
The Flowers of War

Starting in the 1980s, however, the political environment changed. As liberalization ensued after the death of Chairman Mao, and relations with the Japanese worsened—in part due to a Japanese textbook that claimed the Imperial Army “advanced into” rather than “invaded” China—the pendulum started to swing the other way. “Anti-Japanese sentiment became a useful tool for the party, and so the Nanjing Massacre came into our mind’s eye,” says Teng Jimeng, a film critic.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/01/chinese-artists-explore-the-nanjing-massacre.html

[RZM]

1. Very interesting about the Communist government's lack of interest in commemorating it

There are a lot of parallels there with the quasi-denial of the Holocaust that took place in the USSR after WWII. The Holocaust was not a good fit in the Soviet government's framing and commemoration of the war. Given their emphasis on class identity and the immense suffering that the Soviet people at large endured, they did not appreciate the idea of Jews being singled out as a special victim class. They preferred that the Holocaust be subsumed into a larger narrative of Soviet victimhood, thus the slogan 'Don't Divide the Dead.' There were very few honest treatments of the Holocaust during the war in the Soviet press, with the notable exception of the Yiddish language press, where most references to the Holocaust as a specifically anti-Jewish crime were segregated.

Part of it was probably old-fashioned anti-Semitism as well. During the war a common rumor held that Soviet Jews were not doing their part to contribute to the war effort and instead served on the 'Tashkent Front' (Tashkent is in Uzbekistan - a lot of Soviets fled there to escape the oncoming Germans during the war). It's not for nothing that Stalin's later years witnessed the 'Doctor's Plot' and the campaign against 'rootless cosmopolitans,' the latter a code-word for Jews.

[ellisonz]

2. Very interesting.

Thank you...