‘No one knows how this history will be written,” a soldier muses portentously in the new Chinese blockbuster The Eight Hundred. If he could see 80 years into the future, he would have the answer: as an epic, effects-enhanced patriotic action movie. While the rest of the world’s cinemas are still in coronavirus recovery mode, most of China’s 70,000 screens have been open since early August, and The Eight Hundred is a sign it no longer needs Hollywood content to fill them.
It has been compared to western war movies such as Dunkirk (although there is more than a touch of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor in there), and so far it has taken more than $400m (£308m) at the box office, making it the second-highest-grossing movie of the year worldwide. The Eight Hundred draws attention to the meteoric progress of China’s increasingly blockbuster-oriented film industry, but also to the Chinese government’s determination to stamp its authority on it. The two might be on a collision course.
The Eight Hundred depicts the legendary defence of the Sihang warehouse in Shanghai, where, in 1937, an isolated battalion of Chinese soldiers held out against the invading Japanese for four days and, as the film would have it, “restored the pride of a nation”. China’s film industry might also take some pride in The Eight Hundred. Shot entirely on the giant-screen Imax format (a first for a Chinese movie), it took 10 years to make, with a reported budget of $80m.
You can see where the money went. There are huge, often violent action set-pieces. The Shanghai set – a huge project that took 18 months to build – is detailed and convincing, especially the foreign concession area, populated by Europeans and Americans as well as Chinese civilians. The Japanese avoided striking this British-governed area, which was just across the creek from the Sihang warehouse, giving western observers a ringside seat. At this point, China was seeking western support in the Sino-Japanese war, so the Sihang warehouse incident was already, in part, a theatrical exercise.
The Eight Hundred’s success is not quite as straightforward, though. The movie was scheduled to open the Shanghai film festival in June 2019, but its release was suddenly cancelled just days before, owing to “technical difficulties”. One of the problems with the Sihang warehouse story is that the resisting Chinese forces were from the nationalist side, the Kuomintang, who were later defeated by Mao’s communists and retreated to Taiwan in 1949. At one point, the soldiers rally round the flag, Iwo Jima-style, as the Japanese try to shoot it down – except the flag is that of the Republic of China (red, with a white sun on a blue square in the corner). It is now the national flag of Taiwan. Last year was the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, so for the ruling Communist party to be glorifying the future founders of Taiwan was not a good look.
In a revealing comment, the secretary general of the China Red Culture Research Association, a government-affiliated group, reportedly said of the film: “It is a reversal of history and misleads the audience. If left unchecked, it will certainly deprive the entire Communist party of its historical basis. Once the party’s leadership is lost, the Chinese nation is bound to fall into the deep, miserable abyss of colonised and semi-colonised countries.”
The Eight Hundred’s history had to be rewritten. It is impossible to know what was changed, but in the finished movie much is made of the support of the Chinese civilians across the river, who catapult over supplies and lift spirits. As for the troublesome flag, it is usually seen from a distance, and is conspicuously missing its white sun symbol.
The appetite for Chinese blockbusters seems to be coming from both directions. “Because Hollywood films like The Avengers still play such a huge role in the Chinese box office, there’s a desire to displace that, or at least to have domestic films which are seen to be of as high a quality, both for the global market in terms of soft power, but also for the domestic market,” says James Mudge, director of the UK’s Chinese visual festival, which has been bringing Chinese cinema to the UK since 2011.
Last year, four of the top 20 highest-grossing movies worldwide were Chinese. Leading the pack were Ne Zha, a family animation, and The Wandering Earth, an effects-heavy space sci-fi later picked up by Netflix. Last month, Chinese authorities released a document calling for more homegrown sci-fi, and suggesting such movies should “highlight Chinese values, inherit Chinese culture and aesthetics, cultivate contemporary Chinese innovation”, as well as implementing “Xi Jinping thought”. The document also called for the industry to support research and development in key areas such as visual effects (both The Eight Hundred and The Wandering Earth rely on western expertise for their effects).
The bigger China’s movie industry becomes, though, the greater the urge to control the message. In 2018, the Communist party’s propaganda department took direct control of the entertainment industry. That year, the government also carried out a huge clampdown on tax evasion in the film industry, making an example of the actor Fan Bingbing, who mysteriously “disappeared” for three months. She reemerged after making a grovelling public apology and paying a fine of nearly $130m.
The Eight Hundred is by no means the first film to find its release suddenly cancelled. Last February, two Chinese movies were pulled from the Berlin film festival: Better Days, a high-school bullying drama, and One Second, set during the Cultural Revolution and made by the renowned director Zhang Yimou. Zhang is an illustration of how fickle the relationship between censor and film-maker can be. In the 1990s, the arthouse darling’s films (such as Raise The Red Lantern and The Story of Qiu Ju) regularly won awards at foreign festivals, even if they were often banned in China. Zhang was gradually brought back into the fold, directing the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Then, in 2013, he was fined more than US$1m for violating China’s one-child policy. One Second seems to have disappeared completely (such disputes can take years to resolve), but Zhang’s career is by no means over. He has other films in the pipeline.
“The biggest thing is not the censorship itself; it’s the unpredictability of it,” says Mudge. “The things to avoid are pretty much the same” – chiefly politically sensitive issues such as Mao, Tibet, the Tiananmen Square massacre and Hong Kong democracy – “but if you’re a film-maker or an investor or a producer, and you know that your film could get yanked the day before it’s supposed to be released, even after you’ve spent all your marketing money, it’s a problem.”
It is also a problem for Hollywood film-makers, who are effectively playing by the same rules in order to get their product on to China’s screens. In a report last month, PEN America condemned Hollywood’s pro-China self-censorship. “As US film studios compete for the opportunity to access Chinese audiences, many are making difficult and troubling compromises on free expression,” it said.
The cravenness could have backfired. The recent controversy over Disney’s Mulan filming in Xinjiang province, where major human rights abuses have taken place against Muslim minorities, led to a media blackout of the film in China, where it was released last weekend. Mulan only just beat The Eight Hundred to the No 1 spot, but its takings are expected to be small. It is dangerous to annoy China’s censors, but it is dangerous to appease them, too.
Movie stars find themselves in a similar bind. Mulan star Liu Yifei’s support for Hong Kong police suppressing pro-democracy protests prompted boycotts of Mulan in Hong Kong and Taiwan. But to criticise the Chinese authorities would be career suicide. “It is a hornet’s nest. So why go near it?,” says Yau Yee-ning, a culture reporter based in Beijing. Most stars studiously avoid commenting on anything political, she says, and interviews are carefully controlled. “They have to see the interview questions first, and any they don’t like you have to take out. Any mention of the government or anything a little bit sensitive, they won’t answer it.”
Hong Kong’s film industry once dwarfed mainland China’s, but as the balance has shifted, its own stars have been forced to pick sides. Those who have supported Hong Kong democracy have been effectively blacklisted by the Chinese industry, including Chow Yun-fat, Anthony Wong Chau-sang and Chapman To Man-chak. Others, such as Jackie Chan – for decades the global face of Chinese cinema – have sided with the mainland, and against pro-democracy protesters. In 2009, Chan, who has now lived in China for more than a decade, said: “We Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.” As a result, Chan is now deeply unpopular in Hong Kong, says Yau. “He’s getting more patriotic as the years pass, so Hong Kong people just totally rule him out now, but he’s become an international star so he doesn’t really care.”
While the movies are getting bigger and better, China seems to have little interest in exporting its culture. With a home audience of 1.4 billion, the focus is still inward. The Eight Hundred is being released in 33 UK cities and 60 countries worldwide, but none of China’s recent blockbusters has made even 1% of their revenues from foreign sales. For now, it seems, China is happy to be in the position of the soldiers in The Eight Hundred: barricaded in its stronghold, fending off incursions from without, but earning the admiration of the foreigners all the same. Then again, the movie ends with the Chinese soldiers abandoning the Sihang warehouse and the ruins of Shanghai, and crossing the bridge into the bustling, multicultural foreign zone. The symbolism might not be on-message, but this history is still being written.
