IN 2002, the movie Hero became an instant hit in China, where it was made by Zhang Yimou, perhaps the best-known Chinese director. When it opened in America last year--complete with an above-the-title imprimatur by haute auteur Quentin Tarantino--it was billed as an action-romance of the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon variety, complete with wire-guided swordfights and a melodramatic ménage-a-trois love angle. Yet, in addition to being a piece of post-modern eye candy, the film had a distinctly pre-modern theme: the glories of Chinese nationalism. The movie's central plot swirls around martial arts master Jet Li's decision to abandon his mission to kill the Qin emperor, who is marching his army to conquer Jet Li's homeland of Zhao. The hero recognizes that the establishment of "our land"--greater, imperial China--is a cause far greater than the enslavement of his native people. As New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis (a student of the Maureen Dowd school) summed up Hero's message: "Roll over, Chairman Mao, and tell the comrades the news: the history of the empire now comes wrapped in kaleidoscopic kung fu cool."
Unquestionably, nationalism is intended to be cool in China these days. Indeed it has become the replacement for communist ideology as the Chinese Communist party seeks to maintain its hold on power while embracing capitalist economics. The government is ritualistic in its fanning of the flames of this nationalism--the "spontaneous" anti-Japanese protests in Chinese cities on the first three weekends of April bore the unmistakable marks of Beijing's stage management. As
student protestor Sun Wei told Joseph Kahn of the New York Times, "I felt like a puppet." The rally in Beijing ended when police told the crowds they had "vented their anger" long enough, shuffled them on to busses back to their campus. "It was partly a real protest and partly a political show," Sun declared.
The protests began in the city of Chengdu, in southwest China, April 2, but when they hit Beijing a week later they grew in size and seriousness; they were the biggest to take place in China since 1999, when huge crowds expressed their anger over the inadvertent bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade during the war in Kosovo. That the demonstrations continued into a third weekend is a measure both of the depth of Chinese anti-Japan sentiment and the level of official tolerance of such feelings. In Beijing, units of police and interior ministry troops were mobilized as protection for the Japanese embassy and the Japanese ambassador's residence, but they didn't prevent the crowds from throwing stones and bottles, or from looting Japanese businesses.
The roots of China's anti-Japanese anger are deep, based not just on the events of the World War II era but also the earlier flowering of Japanese power at the turn of the 20th century. Their devastating defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 is widely regarded in China as a watershed event marking China's weakness before imperial powers, leading even intellectuals to fear national extinction. As J.A.G. Roberts writes:
The disastrous defeat in the Sino-Japanese War destroyed the credit of the self-strengtheners [in China] and raised acute fears for the nation's survival. In the aftermath, in response to the scramble for China, a determination to preserve all practical means to preserve China may be observed. . . . From these incidents and from the social changes which occurred in the late nineteenth century, there developed the sentiment which may properly be called Chinese nationalism.
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