After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History

Abstract

For whom is the future of Chinese history an issue? The easy answer is that the control of China’s narrative, about its past and possible future, belongs squarely to the Chinese people. Yet through her penetrating analysis of Chinese cinema and society, Dai Jinhua shows how this battle for control cuts across global class lines. China’s future is not merely of quaint concern to its citizens in accounting for its own civilizational import and goals; rather, as Dai ominously puts it in her introduction, the imaginative burden on China is of world-historical urgency “because China must be a China of the future, or there will be no future” (22). How can this be? This volume of seven remarkable essays, organized thematically in three parts, constitutes a solid and durable intellectual primer on the thinking of Dai Jinhua. Her work is noteworthy not simply to those working in some specialized niche of film study (say, “Asian” or “world” cinemas) but to anyone interested in the expressive possibilities of the medium and what directors on the receiving end of Hollywood influence are up against. After going through Dai’s work, one begins to reorient one’s bearings; it is not global or Chinese cinema doing something at the margins of mainstream cinematic thoroughfare; rather, the only hope for renewing mainstream filmic possibilities comes from such “global” cinemas. Hollywood and even European art-house films have become conventional hence marginal. Yet, the renewal of such possibility is hardly guaranteed. Any such promise is likely to be subsumed under a certain class decimation. What Chinese cinema must contest is not the demands for blockbuster entertainment created at the behest of its rich entrepreneurial class on the one hand nor the cheap and easy mass consumption by its proletarian working class on the other. Rather, the newly minted Chinese middle class is the greatest threat to the expressive possibility of cinema. The success of Chinese war films in the early twenty-first century (Lu Chuan’s 2009 blockbuster, City of Life and Death specifically, which details the twentieth century Nanking massacre/holocaust perpetrated against China by the Japanese), for example, are not indicative to Dai of cheap nationalist jingoism suited to the masses but of a middle class desire for a type of cosmopolitan global recognition: