by Cook, James A. ,Goldstein, Joshua,Johnson, Matthew D. ,Schmalzer, Sigrid
Propaganda, the Communist Party, and State-Led Development
Xuanchuan, a Chinese term many translate as “propaganda,” has the broader meaning of “disseminating” or “announcing” messages endorsed by the dominant political regime. Some scholars of Maoist politics believe that such messages were intended to transform members of society by making them take on the Communist Party’s goals “as their own values.”2 The party’s reasons for pursuing such a transformation are suggested by Julian Chang, who writes that in 1950s China, “a high level of mass political consciousness was [interpreted as] an explicit prerequisite for national development and propaganda was seen as a crucial tool for increasing those levels of political knowledge.”3 Taken together, these two observations indicate that xuanchuan was seen as a means of creating social consensus based on party norms and as an indispensable tool for the promotion of national development. In both cases, xuanchuan implies a hierarchical relationship between political elites on the one hand and audiences—the “masses”—on the other. In the context of the PRC, xuanchuan (“propaganda” hereafter) can thus be generally understood as indicating a media-based program intended to “encourage and guide the masses toward the party-state’s policy goals.”4
One of the most important means of communicating Communist Party-approved values was cinema. Although mainly confined to China’s coastal cities throughout much of the pre-1949 period, motion pictures spread rapidly throughout China after the founding of the PRC, most notably during the Leap period, when the party, led by Mao Zedong, called for a dramatic modernization of rural society and an end to gradualist developmental policies. The Great Leap Forward put “politics in command,” and film was no exception. Indeed, film technology itself was seen as an important improvement over existing forms of cultural production and consumption, one whose technology manifested the modernizing agenda of the PRC state (see Figure 12.1, website). As the “exhibition network” (fangying wang) extended into villages, slogans and images supporting the Leap saturated China’s public space via movie screens. One of the main arguments of this chapter is that films produced during the Leap often tended to blur the line between past, present, and future in a way specifically intended to mobilize audiences by instilling in them the belief that “the future was now,” and that conditions of material want and poverty were soon to be consigned to the dustbin of history. From the perspective of Communist Party leaders, visions of imminent prosperity were meant to motivate citizens to unleash their mental and physical energies in the pursuit of improved well-being and international prestige. While in hindsight these methods may appear deeply manipulative and misguided, they nonetheless represented these leaders’ attempt to place the PRC among the ranks of developed nations, or even at the top of the hierarchy. As the philosopher Ci Jiwei argued:
Material superabundance was the goal; on this were superimposed. . . the soaring spirit of altruism and the ethos of complete communal sharing to give that materialist goal the semblance of an idealistic totality called communism. For a utopian project like this one, where material abundance outweighed all other considerations, poverty was naturally the principal psychological lever . . . From this enlightened poverty, it was believed, there would burst forth the utopian energy that would “change heaven and earth” (gaitian huandi).5
Film was a form of visual propaganda that reinforced this goal of “superabundance” by hinting at what a changed heaven and earth might look like, and by providing a map of how to get there.
A Genre is Born: Song of the Reservoir and the “Documentary-Style Feature Film”
The international context of the Great Leap Forward was the Cold War. In simplest terms, the Cold War was a contest beginning in the 1940s between two systems of power, one capitalist and one socialist. One of this war’s defining features was that the principal powers involved—the United States, the Soviet Union and, increasingly, the PRC—did not often engage direct in military conflict. Rather, technological and economic development played a vital role in proving to rivals and potential allies alike that each country’s system was a success. Propaganda was thus pivotal to Cold War geopolitics, convincing citizens to take part in supporting their nation while demonstrating to other nations that evidence existed to back up claims for supremacy in such areas as nuclear capability, agricultural production, per capita wealth, and the space race.
When the Leap was announced in January 1958, Communist Party leaders were in essence claiming that their own nation was poised on the brink of an unprecedented stage of rapid economic growth and material prosperity rather than simply championing the model of socialist development promoted by the Soviet Union, Party ideologues and planners pointed to signs of rapid collectivization in the cities and countryside to show that communism might be achieved with previously unimaginable rapidity. Indeed, many high-ranking members of the Communist Party, including Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi, believed that the nation’s transition from capitalism to socialism was virtually complete.
Propaganda, including the motion picture, was used widely to support this accelerated transition into socialism, and a whole new film genre emerged to capture and manifest the Leap’s breakthrough. Known as “new features” (xin yishupian), “feature-style documentaries” (yishu xing jilupian), “documentary-style features” (jilu xing yishupian), or “Leap Forward films” (yuejin pian), what distinguished this genre was its attempt to combine two very different cinematic modes—the documentary and the fictional-feature film—in order to meld reality with utopia. From a psychological perspective, the key was to convince people that the Leap was in essence already happening in select parts of China, and that by joining in, ordinary citizens would be hastening and spreading a new post-Leap reality of national wealth, prosperity, and power.
The acknowledged harbinger of this new filmmaking trend, Song on the Reservoir (Shuiku shang de gesheng, Changchun Film Studio, 1958) tells the story of a young female commune member, Gao Lanxiang, whose selfless attitude nearly becomes an obstacle to her marriage plans. Gao’s fiancé, Gu Zhiqiang, works on the Ming Tombs reservoir construction project near Beijing (see Figure 12.2, website). Gao also wants to participate in the effort to modernize China’s infrastructure, and joins up with a well digging crew in her home village, which is far from Beijing. The couple, now physically separated, must put off their wedding. Yet Gao is then miraculously transferred to Beijing for a new work assignment, and ultimately to the very same reservoir construction site where Gu is working. The two are reunited, and married (see Figure 12.3, website). Their commitment to the reservoir project, however, leads Gao to rhapsodize that, of all things, labor is “the most beautiful (mei) and meaningful (you yiyi de).”
The movie, released in July 1958, was fictional, but the Ming Tombs reservoir construction project was quite real. Begun at the launching of the Great Leap Forward in January 1958, the reservoir was one of the highest-profile development projects of the 1950s.6 Intended to promote rapid economic growth by bringing irrigation to the countryside, the site was visited by national leaders, foreign diplomats, and thousands of PRC citizens who, like the fictional Gao and Gu, volunteered their labor to help complete this monumental task. Mao Zedong and state premier Zhou Enlai were depicted in carefully posed photographs lifting shovels in support of the project. Song on the Reservoir contained numerous scenes capturing this ongoing labor, presenting it not as fiction, but as contemporary fact accompanied by a fictionalized love story and lively music (see Figure 12.4, website). For far-flung viewers throughout China, such documentary scenes served as evidence that public works projects like that at the Ming Tombs site—enormous projects mobilizing thousands of volunteer laborers working night and day with tremendous enthusiasm and speed—were indeed very real, and that rapid transformation of China’s countryside was truly possible and already underway. The fictional aspects of the film, detailing not only Gao and Gu’s love story but also their commitment to work, implied that anyone could take part in these endeav
ors; both characters were rural people, with little to distinguish them from others in the film apart from their enthusiasm and youth. In short Song on the Reservoir suggested that a new period of national transformation was dawning, and that Chinese citizens throughout the country could—and should—take part with the same self-sacrificing spirit exemplified by Gao and Gu (see Figure 12.5).
The film was instantly labeled a new cinematic genre. “[Song on the Reservoir] reflects new things and new people,” trumpeted the People’s Daily, referring to the film’s positive depiction of selflessness in support of national development, “while it might lack a preponderance of artistry, regardless, it shows exactly the inherent nature (bense) of our socialist era and is a concrete manifestation of the upsurge in Communist consciousness.”7 The reviewer was right—Song on the Reservoir had been completed hastily, and the composition of its mise-en-scène made little use of varied backdrops, costumes, and special effects typically associated with feature film during the late 1950s. However, the review was quick to draw readers’ attention to the film’s numerous virtues: its characters’ personalities were easy to understand; they put national goals, like water conservancy, before personal goals; working people and authority figures (the solution to Gao’s problem is suggested by her commune chairperson) were prominently and positively depicted; romantic love coexisted with personal sacrifice and restraint; the filmmakers were attuned to the “pulse” (maibo), or “spirit” (jingshen), of the era; the scenery was composed of existing state projects, incorporated real events, and incurred little or no significant expense. In short, both directors and actors had, according to the official press, entered the “torrent” (hongliu) of contemporary social transformation. In other words, the film modeled and endorsed Great Leap Forward goals of mass mobilization, while at the same time referring to real events—in this case, China’s ongoing material and ideological transformation as promised by Communist Party leaders.
Figure 12.5 Human and mechanical labor achieve the incredible in Song of the Reservoir. The signs read, “Study the Enthusiasm of the Ming Tombs Reservoir.” From: Shuiku shang de gesheng [Song of the Reservoir]. Changchun Film Studio, 1958.
“Our Nation is Like an Atom”: The Great Leap Forward as Developmental Ideology
What made Song on the Reservoir and the dozens of documentary-style features that followed in its wake so distinctive was not just that these films contained images of model individuals, but that they made the extraordinary seem both possible and real. This latter effect, conveyed by the “documentary style,” was achieved by employing visual evidence which referred to real places—the actual Ming Tombs reservoir, for example—and real outcomes, such as the reservoir’s completion. The message was that ordinary people, working together, could achieve immense results in building a newer, better, and more prosperous society for all. While Song on the Reservoir did depict mechanized equipment, its overwhelming visual focus was on human labor such as digging, carrying heavy loads of dirt on shoulder poles, and other, more “traditional” construction methods.
The key to this line of reasoning was Mao Zedong’s belief that the PRC had already completed the transition to socialism by January 1958, thus implying that communism and material prosperity—“each according to their wants”—beckoned. What made Mao’s views unlike those of more orthodox Marxist–Leninists was that he apparently did not believe that urbanization and industrialization were necessary prerequisites of communism. The main premise of the Great Leap Forward, as described to China’s people, was that China could “leap” over this developed-world stage of social development ahead of schedule and transition directly to communism, just so long as the state owned the means of production and people were willing to throw themselves into the task. China’s “poor and blank” condition, in which 90 percent of the population consisted of peasant farmers, whose literacy rates were low, was not an obstacle to material growth because, as Mao explained to members of the Supreme State Conference:
Our enthusiasm has been aroused. Ours is an ardent nation, now swept by a burning tide. There is a good metaphor for this: our nation is like an atom . . . When this atom’s nucleus is smashed the thermal energy released will have really tremendous power. We will be able to do things which we could not do before. When our nation has this great energy we will catch up with Britain in fifteen years.8
According to Mao, what people believed they could do was more important than the restrictions placed on their behavior by environmental, technological, or other factors.
This “voluntarist” strain in Mao’s understanding of social change has received considerable attention from his interpreters. For the intellectual historian Maurice Meisner, one of Maoism’s chief characteristics was that it functioned as “an ideology of development. . . as well as one promising a future Communist utopia.”9 Maoism was thus partly a theory of economic modernization, which emphasized hard work, self-denial and sacrifice, and unwavering commitment to collective or national goals as the prerequisites of Communist utopia (see Figure 12.6, website). For that utopia to arrive, each member of society was required to throw themselves into the process of making China richer and stronger. In a political system based on these norms, propaganda represented one of the chief means through which people were taught Mao’s vision and how, accordingly, they should behave. At the time of the Great Leap Forward, the release of collective energies depicted in films like Song on the Reservoir were thus meant to reinforce Mao’s assertion that anything was possible with the right spirit by providing visual evidence that what Mao said was true (see Figure 12.7, website).
Celluloid Sputniks: From Reservoirs to Communes in Film and Propaganda
Mao’s voluntarist vision was by necessity also supported by the many propagandists within the Communist Party, who in turn employed a variety of media to support Mao’s claims that a new Communist society was not only possible, but actually being created. Mao particularly favored rural people’s communes—enormous, mega-farms the size of entire counties formed at his tacit urging during the run-up to the Leap—as the symbols of this ongoing transformation. Commune leaders and propagandists then worked together to create visual evidence that the communes did indeed represent communism in practice. Collective meals at which people ate everything they wanted (see Figure 12.8, website), and smiling, well-fed children (see Figure 12.9, website), were depicted as signs that a more abundant society was possible, desirable, and actually being created in the year of 1958. In the context of a country where food shortages, rationing, and inadequate nutrition were still realities in some places, this message was powerful.
Following films like Song on the Reservoir, which depicted a project that had already become a national icon by mid-1958, subsequent Leap-era features and shorter films became even more exuberant in their claims for present-day material superabundance. This trend reflected the fact that political leaders at all levels were themselves were being heavily pressured by Mao and his closest supporters to launch “sputniks” (a reference to the new Soviet satellite, whose successful orbit of the Earth had shocked the world) in production, pressure which led to fabrications and wild experiments, ultimately resulting in widespread starvation and death.
Peasants were, in theory, the most essential targets of pro-Leap propaganda, because food production was essential to keeping a national labor force fed. Film industry planners addressed this issue directly by coming up with a list of themes they believed would motivate peasants to work harder and grow more. These included: celebration of the past year’s agricultural harvest; victories in production that could be attributed to the party’s general line of socialist construction; summaries of “experience” (jingyan) gained during the past year of large-scale collectivization; “leaps forward” in the cultural and educational realms; and plans to guarantee plentiful food and clothing to every citizen, along with other evidence of the “promising and blissful” prospects offered by socialism and communism.10 By viewing “countless exampl
es of increased production” and extolling the “advantages of the socialist system,” peasants would become resolute and faithful (xinxin) in following the socialist road toward collectivized agriculture.11
In practice, however, one of the most common characteristics of later Great Leap Forward films was that they depicted amazing—and, it was later discovered, almost completely fabricated—accounts of stupendous crop yields and mechanical achievements in far-away places. “Feature-style documentaries” joined documentary-style features (indeed the two terms were sometimes used interchangeably) as films which further blurred the distinction between what was real, and what was futuristic or simply faked. Industrial and urban workers were also featured in Leap-era filmmaking. For example, A Factory Grows and Thrives (Bai shou qijia, Changchun Film Studio, 1958) recreated the story of a Liaoning industrial unit which, primarily through its workers’ own efforts, became a national leader in production of nonferrous alloys. Rural images of the Leap further extolled the virtues of agricultural communization (renmin gongshehua) by depicting vast, productive fields, enormous crop and yields and, above all, healthy and smiling peasants.