The “Resist the U.S., Assist Korea” campaign also revitalized the “literary reportage” genre (baogao wenxue) in Chinese literature.  Arguably born in the early 1930s when many Chinese writers swung to the left, “literary reportage” combines journalism-like “truthful” account with fiction-like typicality and characterization.  Xia Yan’s 1936 reportage “The Indentured Labor” (Baoshengong), for example, is a journalistic account of the inhuman treatment of a group of young girls who were bought by the Japanese cotton mill owners in Shanghai and forced to work like slaves.  In addition to this “truthful” observation, however, the reportage also adds fictional elements to the portrayal of several characters.  As the chance to quickly end China’s involvement in the Korean War became dim, China started to send the so-called “Homeland Consolation Group” to the battlefront in Korea to convey greetings and appreciation to the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteers.  Many writers joined the activity.  Among them was Wei Wei (1920-), a Yan’an educated young writer who traveled to the battlefront three times and, based on his observations and interviews with a number of Chinese soldiers, wrote the reportage “Who Are the Most Lovable People” (Shuishi zui keai de ren).  Published in 1951, two years before the Korean War officially ended, the reportage had a wide circulation at the time and was later selected as one of the “model essays” for the nationally standardized high school Chinese text.  The reportage’s impact was so tremendous that the phrase “The Most Lovable People” became the synonym of the “Chinese Peoples’ Volunteers.” 

 

China’s Cinematic Response to the Korean War: An Overview

Compared to literature, the graphic arts, and other forms of mass media, Chinese cinema was remarkably slow in responding to the outbreak of the Korean War.  With the exception of a few documentaries released in 1951 and 1952, not a single feature film about the war was made during the three-year military conflict.  It was not until 1956 that the first feature film about the Korean War, The Shang Gan Mountain (Shang Gan Ling), was released.  This unusual slowness can be explained from several angles.  First of all, as an art form that requires both teamwork and technological support, film by nature does not possess the similar immediacy as that of literary reportage and the graphic arts.  While this reason seems to be universal, other factors that contributed to this slowness, however, are more historically and politically determined.  The success of the Chinese communist revolution in 1949 was followed by a series of political and social reforms that swept over the Chinese society, and the Chinese film industry was certainly no exception.  The most visible change of the Chinese film industry was institutional.  Prior to 1949, Shanghai was indisputably China’s center of film production, distribution, and exhibition.  Even in the early years of the People’s Republic, there were still more than 10 film studios in Shanghai, among them Kunlun and Wenhua the most prominent.  But Shanghai’s predominant role in filmmaking was gradually weakened as more state-owned studios were set up in Beijing and Northeast China.  Among these newly founded studios, the August First Studio, established on 1 August 1952 and headquartered in Beijing, and the Chang Chun Film Studio, formerly the Northeast Film Studio and renamed in February 1955, produced almost all Korean War films.  Furthermore, while studios in other parts of China boomed, the film industry in Shanghai, on the other hand, underwent a major restructuring that resulted in the formation of a single state-owned studio in 1953: the Shanghai Film Studio.  This restructuring process significantly reduced the capacity of film production in Shanghai.  As a result, the Shanghai Film Studio seemed to be content with giving up all Korean War-related projects to the August First and Chang Chun studios.

 

Another important factor that slowed the Chinese film industry’s response to the Korean War was Mao’s devastating attack on The Biography of Wuxun (Wuxun zhuan) in 1951.  Directed by the veteran filmmaker Sun Yu and produced by the Kunlun Studio in late 1950, The Biography of Wuxun tells the story of a real historical figure during the Qing Dynasty who was determined to raise money, even through begging, to build schools for peasant children.  In the early months of the film’s exhibition, critics and audiences were generally enthusiastic about the film’s realistic portrayal of Wuxun.  They were especially overwhelmed by Zhao Dan’s extraordinary performance.  But this initial acclaim was soon silenced after Mao’s essay “We Should Take Seriously Discussion of The Biography of Wuxun” was published in May 1951 as an editorial of the People’s Daily.  Mao argues in the editorial that the film “fail[s] to touch the economic roots of feudalism” and “fanatically propagate[s] a servile, feudal culture.”   Mao’s harsh criticism of the film led to a nationwide political campaign that went far beyond the film arena.  Within a short span of time, more than 100 articles were published in major Chinese newspapers, attacking the film as a “serious distortion of the Chinese people’s revolutionary history.”  The immediate result of this political campaign, unprecedented in both scope and magnitude, was the significant decrease of film productions.  The attack on The Biography of Wuxun taught many filmmakers a hard lesson that sometimes doing nothing was safer than doing something.  As a result, the whole Chinese film industry only produced one feature film in 1951 and four in 1952.