Please, before you begin, if you have not yet, at least skim this entry:
Pioneers 创业 (1974)
Jiang Qing loved movies.
She had been an actress in Shanghai. She loved Garbo. She raged that the actress had not been given an Oscar for Camille (1936). When Roxane Witke came to visit her in the summer of 1972, they settled in to watch Queen Christina (1933) in her private theater. She cared deeply about film esthetics, acting, screenwriting, and music.
Unlike Kim Jong-il, who funneled his love of cinema into revitalizing the film industry, she shut it down it. No feature films were made between the start of 1967 and the end of 1972. Films made before 1949 were forbidden; films made in the 1950s and 1960s occasionally had permission for public screening revoked.
This sounds more dramatic than it should. With any discussion of the Cultural Revolution, though, the question has to be asked: Where did these rules apply? And when did they apply? Jiang Qing was not alone in keeping a stash of private reels. And, anyways, even if no feature films were being made, there were documentaries being shot and films of lavish productions of revolutionary plays and opera. And there were even occasional foreign films screened.
This story starts with an Albanian picture: Oshëtimë në bregdet. Shot in 1966, it appeared in China as Thunder on the Coast 海岸风雷 in sometime around 1968.1
In the 1960s, the leaderships of China and Albania were united by their hatred of Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Soviet revisionism. Apart from that, they didn't share much more than small arms and movies.2
Xue Tao of the local Culture Bureau saw Oshëtimë në bregdet in Daqing in 1970.3 It got him thinking that the Culture Bureau should make a movie about Wang Jinxi, who had just passed away from cancer.4 He started writing a treatment.
The “Iron Man” of Daqing, Wang Jinxi was the first propaganda hero launched by the campaign in the 1960s. He learned his trade in the oilfields at Yumen and rushed to Daqing in 1960 with some of his best men. Legend has it that Wang and his men drilled more footage than any other team. After Song Zhenming chose him to head up the publicity campaign, images of the “Iron Man” dragging equipment through the mud were splashed across every newspaper.
More than a propaganda hero, he became a representative of Daqing and the Oil Gang,5 often touring with Kang Shi'en and Song Zhenming, and joining Yu Qiuli for events in Beijing.6 In the 1960s, as the Oil Gang rose, he rose, too. He left the oilfields to work in an office. When oil production dropped at Daqing in 1970, it was Wang Jinxi that was sent to give an in-person report to Zhou Enlai.
Since the Daqing model had come under attack earlier in the Cultural Revolution and given the situation in the film industry, getting a movie made about the “Iron Man” was difficult. Xue Tao’s treatment went to the Changchun Film Studio, but they were unable to make a picture.
The Oil Gang personally intervened. Things were shifting in their direction by 1973. Yu Qiuli went to Zhou Enlai, who pushed the studio to complete the picture.7
Directed by Yu Yanfu, from a script by Zhang Tianming, and starring Zhang Lianwen, Li Rentang, Chen Yin, Zhu Decheng, Gong Xibing, and Zhang Jie, Pioneers was rushed into production in early 1974.
It was not exactly what Xue Tao had envisioned. Rather than the story of Daqing, it narrates the story of Chinese petroleum exploration as a showdown between two political lines—one consumed with Western theory and the other seeking truth through practice—with the correct line prevailing.
Opening in 1949, it shows the slow growth of the Chinese petroleum industry, carried along by the commitment of men like Zhou Tianshan (Zhang Lianwen), who are fighting the very Earth itself, while also dealing with revisionism.
In the end, oil gushes from the ground. The working class is celebrated; the counter-revolutionaries and revisionists are punished.
I wonder if it seemed leaden to moviegoers raised on the superior films of the 1950s and 1960s. I wonder if it seemed drab compared to the flamboyant revolutionary operas.8
The film premiered for delegates to the Fourth National People's Congress in January of 1975 and was publicly screened that February.9
Jiang Qing shut it down. The Ministry of Culture, firmly in control of the Gang of Four,10 ordered all screenings of the film cancelled. It was slammed for inaccuracies, the appearance doing public relations for a line supported by Liu Shaoqi and Bo Yibo, as well as political esthetic failures, such as not making Zhou Tingshan sufficiently typical, and giving too much screen time to middle characters.11
In hindsight, the politics of the movie seem sound, and it seems to reflect an orthodox Cultural Revolution line, and supports the Gang of Four stance against the importation of foreign technology and expertise. I don’t think that mattered as much as the fact that an unapproved script was filmed. And the fact that it seemed to praise the Oil Gang would not have sat well with Jiang Qing.
The immediate aftermath of the ban is hard to figure out. Nothing seems to happen until the summer. There’s no record of intervention from Yu Qiuli or Zhou Enlai.12 Credit is given to the members of the Office of Political Research, the Deng Xiaoping think tank, whether or not that’s what really happened.13
Yu Guangyuan’s memoirs tell the story better than I could:
Hu Qiaomu investigated the situation and decided that an opinion should be sought from Mao Zedong. … In the end, we got contacted Zhang Tianmin at Changchun Film Studio, who had written the screenplay for Pioneers. [Before the screenings were cancelled] he was very dissatisfied with the the Gang of Four controlling the Ministry of Culture. He was happy for the opportunity we offered [to attack the Gang of Four]. He wrote two letters: one was addressed to Mao Zedong, and the other was addressed to Deng Xiaoping. Hu Qiaomu brought both letters to Deng Xiaoping, who passed one to Mao Zedong. On July 25th, Mao Zedong, according to what he had read in the letter, made this proclamation: "This film has no major errors. It should be screened. We should not be striving for perfection [in the arts]. The list of ten charges against the film is excessive and does not reflect a correct approach to regulating the arts." ... Deng Xiaoping conveyed the message to us the next day and ordered a copy of Zhang Tianmin's letter sent to the Ministery of Culture and to his work unit. The Party General Office issued the letter [from Zhang Tianmin] and Mao Zedong's memo as Document Number 181 of 1975. ... The news was spread with great jubliation, since everyone knew that it represented a heavy blow against the Gang of Four.14
Whether or not Mao Zedong watched the movie, I can’t be sure. Some accounts have him not bothering to actually watch it, and taking Deng Xiaoping’s word for it, and others have him breaking down in tears during a screening.15
But Yu Guangyuan is correct; the Gang of Four’s control over the arts and the cultural industry was not something they could afford to have compromised. The Chairman’s intervention in favor of Pioneers was a signal. The Gang of Four would throw out a few more campaigns, but this was a key defeat.
Red and White 红与白 (1987)
In 1987, nobody cared about movies.
There was no Jiang Qing. There was no audience. There was no money.
After the anti-Gang of Four movies passed, there was no longer any need to exert strong ideological control over cinema.
And, if you want to control movies, you need to make movies. That means putting up money. But the Party and the state wanted to get out of the business. After 1984, state funding for production, distribution, and staff salaries was cut. This was the beginning of the marketization.
Only thirty-four of the one hundred forty-two movies made in 1987 broke even or turned a profit.16 Let's say most of that twenty-three percent was just breaking even, so maybe ten, probably five percent of movies made any money.
The reforms were uneven and irrational. The China Film Corporation was no longer the sole distributor, but they still decided how many prints of a film would be distributed and what price they could be sold at. State funding dried up but tight restrictions on financing were not lifted.17
If you wanted to make money in the business, you went to television, where the were fewer regulations about how a studio could operate, and no production quotas to deal with or local distributors to battle. If you were an actor or director, you went to television, too. And the audience followed them.
The uneven marketization of the film industry pushed cinema toward exploitation and violence. Even if television was more prestigious, there were more things you could get away with in the movies. I mean gratuitous violence and sex, but also ideological failures.
Movies pushed boundaries. Even if you only look at 1987 and 1988… A good example is The Silver Snake Murders 银蛇谋杀案(1988), starring Jia Hongsheng—incredibly violent, packed with gory murders, dream sequence massacres, nudity, and a graphic suicide conclusion. Or, Crying Laughing 笑出来的眼泪 (1988), a comedy about the Cultural Revolution, featuring an oversexed Red Guard trying to seduce a detainee. Or, AIDS Patient 爱滋病患者 (1988), which has a main character self-immolate after sleeping with an HIV-infected foreigner. There’s Guang Chunlan’s Crazy Dancer 西部舞狂 (1988), a Bollywood-inspired Xinjiang riff on Breakin’ (1984). There’s my favorite movie: Obsession 疯狂的代价 (1988), an ultra-violent rape-revenge fantasy by Zhou Xiaowen.18 Great movies, but trashy. Even the classics that come out of this period, like Red Sorghum 红高粱 and The Troubleshooters 顽主 (1988), have more than a hint of exploitation.
This is what you need to keep in mind with Red and White.19
Director Lu Xiaoya might have preferred to make a more stiff and didactic film, but she knew it had to be cut quick and leavened with enough violence and eroticism to keep people interested.20
This is the story of Pan Yiding (Xu Huanshan), who is retiring from his teaching position at a medical school to write a book on diagnosis errors. But this is complicated by the fact that Pan Dacheng (Xu Zhan), his son, has caused the death of a young dancer (Geng Zhong21). The girl was perfectly healthy, but had been complaining of abdominal pain. There was nothing to suggest a cause of her sudden death. So, it seems to be a case of malpractice, implicating Pan Yiding’s son. The parents, however, won't agree to an autopsy. The hospital administration wants to sweep it under the rug.
After the dancer's mother attempts suicide, Pan Yiding talks the family into an autopsy, which determines that Pan Dacheng failed to correctly diagnose a burst spleen.
The film climaxes with Pan Dacheng falling on his sword and Pan Yiding in a lecture hall, telling his audience of medical students why he cares so much about errors: He is forever haunted by an error that resulted in the death of the husband of a close friend and colleague.
Pan Yiding burns the scroll given to him at his retirement ceremony, along with its poetic inscription about the divine wisdom and talent of physicians.
Admiring expertise is fine, he warns us, but it can't become worship. We can’t listen to someone just because they have a title or a uniform. A doctor is only human; their errors must be recognized to avoid the same mistake happening twice.
Red and White works on its own as a drama about doing the right thing, and sacrificing family for righteousness, but there are political resonances that few would now appreciate. Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but I have always connected it to the criticism of bureaucracy that spread in the wake of the incident in the Bohai.
An oil rig capsized. Deng Xiaoping chose that moment to smash the Oil Gang. The leadership of the petroleum industry was blamed for fostering a culture of secrecy and a persistent disregard for the rules. Kang Shi’en, Song Zhenming, and Yu Qiuli were censured or demoted.
The movie came out in 1987, but it is based on a novella written a few years earlier, during the attack on bureaucratic secrecy after 1980. Rooting out problems in the bureaucracy was an ongoing concern.
Here, the hospital administration stands in for the Oil Gang, and Pan Dacheng for the workers on the bay.
That is how I read it, at least.
The copyright screen for the Chinese dub says that the Shanghai Worker-Peasant-Soldier Film Studio completed their work in October of 1967. Date of first screening is usually given as 1969, but it’s sometimes 1968.
An essay by Tian Wanting on Albanian films in China has a saying from the time: “Vietnamese movies have planes and bombs, Korean films are romantic and emotional, Romanian films are touchy-feely, Albanian films are baffling.” But none of the movies was revisionist, at least. The Sino-Soviet split cut the Chinese audience off from the golden age of Soviet cinema.
I am still unclear on which movie Xue Tao saw. It was Albanian. The name is usually given as Thunder on the Coast, or Hǎi'an Fēngléi. That translation matches Oshëtimë në bregdet, which means something like “echo on the coast.” And there are sometimes descriptions of the plot of this Thunder on the Coast that match with Oshëtimë në bregdet. But confusingly, Thunder on the Coast is sometimes said to be the Chinese translation of Gjurma (1970). Cho-kiu Li in his entry for “The Cultural Side-Effects of the Sino-Soviet Split: The Influence of Albanian Movies in China in the 1960s” has this: “《 海岸風雷 》 (Echoes on the Shore) Gjurma (translated in 1967).” I think that’s a mistake. But, still, it’s confusing to me that a film about partisans in Albania would inspire him to think about Daqing…
But, here, as I will do several more times, I will suggest we don’t really know what happened, now that the legend has become ossified. There is another version of events that has Jiang Qing reading a story about the “Iron Man” in Chinese Literature in October. That’s possible. The English edition has the story running in its July of 1972 issue (PDF). It’s uncredited, but I believe it’s by Wang Yiping. It was her that gave the push to make the movie, at least in this version. The story is accompanied by some very cinematic woodcuts, as well, which could be scenes from the eventual “Iron Man” picture.
Now you can see why I decided to give a few thousand words to the Oil Gang! Like Wang Huning, I would rather spend my time writing about movies.
I intentionally wrote Wang Jinxi out of my introduction to the Oil Gang. But he was there for many of the events I describe. He was sitting at the table with Chairman Mao and Yu Qiulu when Yu was called up to the State Planning Commission in 1964, for example.
This detail and some others are taken from an essay by Zhang Wei: 张连文:一位老演员的“创业”故事. I believe that word was sent by Zhou Enlai in 1973, not 1974, though, given the political situation of the time and the fact that the movie was done by the winter of 1974. Another version of events has Jiang Qing herself approving filming.
Zhang Wei gives the detail of the January screening. In Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State Hou Li starts his narrative at the public screenings in February. Other writers give a February date, too, and none mention a screening in January. I went to Mao Huahe’s The Ebb and Flow of Chinese Petroleum: A Story Told by a Witness to check, since he’s usually the best source on these things, but he doesn’t mentioned the film.
It was Yu Huiyong that gave the decision to screen the movie, it seems. He saw it before the public screening in February and before the possible January screening, too, when it went to the department of the State Council monitoring culture. He commented: "Pioneers is a good film.” It was termed “another great achievement of our Cultural Revolution.” He noted that it was “ideologically sound” and artistically brilliant. Despite “minor shortcomings,” he gave his enthusiastic approval to screen the movie. Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan all approved his notes. This description is from an essay by Lei Li: 余秋里与《创业》风波.
I can’t find the original editorial, but these notes appear repeated in coverage of the Jiang Qing strike, like here: 1975年毛泽东为什么批准放映电影《创业》?
I don’t have access to Kang Shi’en’s autobiography, but it supposedly claims that Yu Qiuli was generally uninterested in the film project. This is suggested by Lei Li’s essay, as well. Even though his name came up in the criticism of the film, he was not directly implicated in its revisionist message, so perhaps he thought it better to steer clear.
The first thing to note is that there was already a push underway to take cultural affairs out of the hands of the Gang of Four. There was another film controversy around that time, involving Haixia 海霞, in which Deng Xiaoping had called on the Chairman to intervene. Even before Zhang Tianmin’s letter, the Chairman made a note on artistic control. Some of this is covered here: 邓小平把整顿推向了“四人帮”长期控制的教育文化领域. And it is possible that Zhang Tianmin wrote the letters without prompting by the Office of Political Research. This is what Han Shaogong suggests in "Why Did the Cultural Revolution End?" (translated by Gao Jin): it was Zhang bringing an accusation before the emperor (the term he uses is gào yùzhuàng). It makes sense. Deng Xiaoping could have simply gone to Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai, just like he did for Haixia. So, maybe the Office of Political Research received the letter for Deng Xiaoping and then made the call... I have no idea.
This is my translation, taken from Yu Guangyuan’s My Recollections of Deng Xiaoping 我忆邓小平.
I remember recounting this situation before and adding in a detail that the Chairman had watched it propped up in bed with a bandage over one eye. He was a sick man, by this time. But I don’t remember where I heard that… Lei Li says that the Chairman watched the film twice: "A comrade who was present said that Mao Zedong's eyes had filled with tears during some of the scenes."
This claim in The Cinema of Feng Xiaogang: Commercialization and Censorship in Chinese Cinema after 1989 by Rui Zhang comes from: "1988中国电影市场备忘录," 王永午, 翁立.
For more on this: Chinese Cinema During the Era of Reform: The Ingenuity of the System, Ying Zhu.
This is the best example of loose censorship. If it could be approved by any film censorship boards anywhere now, it would probably receive an NC-17 rating after many cuts. Even the version marketed on DVD from Taiwan and Hong Kong is more tame than the original theatrical version.
Again, as long as the link holds, you can watch it here. It seems to disappear regularly from Youtube and contains too much blood and nudity to be uploaded to Chinese streaming sites. Online censorship in 2022 is more effective and strict than Chinese film censorship in 1987.
Lu Xiaoya was one of many directors that should have made a first film long before their debuts in the in the late 1970s and early 1980s (I think Lu Xiaoya actually worked as an actress, though, so she did make movies in some form, but she spent the 1960s and 1970s in a factory). But no movies were being made. She made her first picture in 1979 and scored a hit in 1985 with Girl in Red 红衣少女 (1985), a story of a teenage rebellion. She only made one more movie after Red and White.
The young actress is quite good in this. I looked up other roles and saw that she left for Japan shortly after this was made. She had a brief acting career, and now she runs film festivals: 映画と“結婚”した中国の元新体操の妖精=NPO法人日中映画祭実行委員会理事長・耿忠さん.