Los Angeles Times May 7, 1999
After the Chinese government twice prohibited films of his from competing in the Cannes
Film Festival, he thought he had a sure bet this year. His latest picture, "Not One Less," is a realistic, charming story of children in the countryside struggling to stay in school, a movie that finally won authorities' consent for entry at Cannes. But during the selection process, Zhang heard, a Cannes screening committee member called the film
"propaganda." Stung, the director yanked it out of competition. He also pulled another film, "The Road Home," that he had planned to screen during the festival, which begins
Wednesday. "It seems that in the West, there are always two 'political criteria' when interpreting Chinese films, either 'anti-government' or 'propaganda,' " he wrote in an open letter to Cannes festival director Gilles Jacob. "This is unacceptable." At home, local newspapers lionized Zhang for standing up for China's honor. "First Chinese director to say no to Cannes!" said the headline in Shanghai's Youth Daily. "Zhang
Yimou's withdrawal is of great importance." But who canned whom?
In France, Zhang's withdrawal is being interpreted as "a face-saving move" after his film was rejected as a prize-contender and offered a place in the festival's noncompetitive showcase, "Un Certain Regard." Jacob told reporters last week that it is
"interesting that when the festival selected in the past one of Zhang's movies, he did not come to Cannes," adding that he was puzzled by Zhang's "tendentious and political argument." "The de facto opinion of festivals is that if a film is banned or made underground in China, then it is automatically a good film," said William Brent, executive director in Shanghai of China Entertainment News, a newsletter that monitors the nation's TV and film industries. Now that he has made a film the government likes, he is suspected of kowtowing to the government," Brent said. "He has to serve the interests of the domestic film bureau but somehow also romance the festivals into thinking he's subverting the system."
Respected President,
I have decided to withdraw my films Not One Less and The Road Home from you and will not be taking part in this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The reason is I feel you have seriously misunderstood these two films and it is a misunderstanding I cannot

accept.
My two films both concern beloved themes. Not One Less expresses our deep love for children and this whole national cultural situation for us today and our concerns for the future. The Road Home sings the praises of the truth and purity of love between a man and a woman. These are feeling common to all mankind. Therefore it is surprising that you critique my films on “political” grounds. This is nothing but political or cultural prejudice.
For many years, I have been an enthusiastic and active participant of the Cannes
Film Festival. Cannes has an important place in my heart, just as it does for every other director around the world. To be selected to take part in Cannes is a great honor for us. But today, I have decided to withdraw because my faith in the cherished artistic motives of the festival has been shaken. I am very sorry that this has happened.
Whether a film is good or bad, each person can have his or her own way of looking at it, this is only natural. But I cannot accept that when it comes to Chinese films, the
West seems for a long time to have had just the one “political” reading: if it’s not “against the government” then it’s “for the government.” The naiveté and lack of perspective (lit.
“one-sidedness”) of using so simple a concept to judge a film is obvious. With respect to the works of directors from America, France and Italy for example, I doubt you have the same point of view.
I hope this discrimination against Chinese films can be overcome in time.
Otherwise, it will not only be an injustice to me, but also to other Chinese directors, including the next generation of young directors and their works.
Yours sincerely,
Zhang Yimou
Zhang Xiaoling, ‘The Death of Heroes in China,’ China Information , Vol. 22: 1, March
2008,pp.119-137
The Anti-Rightist Movement
The AntiRightist Movement in the People’s Republic of China, which lasted from roughly 1957 to 1959, consiste d of a series of campaigns to purge alleged “rightists” within the Communist Party of China (CPC) and abroad. The definition of “rightists”

was not always consistent, sometimes including critics to the left of the government, but officially referred to those intellectuals who appeared to favour capitalism and were against collectivization. The campaigns were instigated by Chairman Mao Zedong and saw the political persecution of an estimated 550,000.
The Anti-Rightist Movement was a reaction against the Hundred Flowers Campaign which had promoted pluralism of expression and criticism of the government, even though initiation of both campaigns were controlled by Chairman Mao and they were integrally connected. Going perhaps as far back as the Long March there had been resentment against “rightists” inside the CPC, for example Zhang Bojun.
The first wave of attacks began immediately following the end of the Hundred
Flowers movement in July 1957. By the end of the year, 300,000 people had been labeled as rightists, including the writer Ding Ling. Future premier Zhu Rongji, then working in the State Planning Commission was purged in 1958. Most of the accused were intellectuals. The penalties included informal criticism, “re-education through labour” and in some cases death.
One main target was the independent legal system. Legal professionals were transferred to other jobs; judicial power was exercised instead by political cadres and the police.
The second part of the campaign followed the Lushan Conference of July 2, 1059.
The meeting condemned General Peng dehuai, who had criticized the Great Leap
Forward.
From Encyclopedia Britannica
“Throughout China’s long history, the intellectuals considered themselves the preservers and transmitters of the precious culture of their country. Their road to success was not always smooth, but the intellectuals were strengthened by the belief that once they won recognition as first-rank scholars they would be rewarded with position, honour, and lasting fame.
The attitude of the Chinese communists toward intellectuals is, in large measure, influenced by their ideology. While workers and peasants were raised to the top position, the intellectuals were downgraded because they were considered products of bourgeois and feudal education and perpetuators of bourgeois ideology. The

communist policy was tp “absorb and reform” the intellectuals.
The intellectuals were made to undergo thorough remodeling to be “cleansed” of bourgeois ideas and attitudes. The remodeling began with relatively mild measures, such as “political study” and “reeducation.” The policy became increasingly oppressive in the 1950s when intellectuals were pressured to take part in the class struggle of the land reform and in orchestrated attacks on university professors, writers, artists, and intellectuals in different walks of life. The intellectuals – especially those who had studied in Western schools or had been employed by Western firms – were forced to write autobiographies giving details of their reactionary family and educational background, pinpointing their ideological shortcomings, and confessing their failings.
Following Khurshchev’s 1956 speech criticizing Stalin, violence broke out in Poland and Hungary. This wor ried Mao, who agreed to try Premier Zhou Enlai’ proposal to relax the Communist Party’s pressure on intellectuals. This resulted in the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.” Mao indicated that intellectuals would be allowed to speak freely. The result, however, was unexpected and shocking. Once they began to speak freely, the intellectuals unleashed a torrent of angry words, fierce criticisms, and open attacks against the repressive measures under which they had suffered. Some recanted the confessions they had made under duress; other went so far as to denounce the Communist Party and its government. To avoid a more serious outburst of explosive ideas and emotions, the government decided to put a stop to the “blooming-contending.” Outspoken critics were labeled rights and an anti-rightist campaign not only silenced the intellectuals but also placed them under more restrictive controls than before. The “flowers” wilted and the
“schools” were muffled.
Gary G. Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema
In Zhang Yimou’s films, the lure of history is manifested in the visual depiction of the contrast between men’s revolution and the earth’s unassuming antiquity, as shown in one film for which he was the cinematographer ( Yellow Earth [1984]). That same lure is evident in the criticism of patriarchal repression during the early Republican period
( Raise the Red Lantern [1991]), the patricidal urge intertwined with sexual transgressions ( Ju Dou [1990]), and concern with modernization and rural education in

the reform era ( Not One Less [1999]) . All these films are related to Zhang’s conflict between the need to legitimize his own traumatic experiences by representing history and the unwillingness to follow the communist linear narrative of modern Chinese history.
One way to solve his dilemma, which Zhang experimented in The Road Home
[1999] and Happy Times [2000], is to deliberately efface the temporal setting of historical moments. Instead of drowning personal lives in the grand narrative of history by linking them explicitly to historical events, Zhang embeds the historical moments in personal lives. This strategy gives the audience an impression: historical moments do not necessarily dominate personal lives; there are unforgettable moments in even the most mundane life that transcend specific historical events. One can only infer the temporal setting from close examinations of personal tragedies in these films. In The
Road Home , for instance, Father is suddenly summoned back to the city without being given any explanation. Father’s departure devastates Mother and triggers the most emotional moment – Mother’s falling ill – in the film. A figure loosely based on Zhang’s own father, Father has been labeled a rightist and stripped of his teaching post, an ordeal that is only hinted at in the film. The historical trauma of the Anti-Rightist
Movement in 1957 is nowhere to be seen in the film, which drowns all heavy feelings in its timelessness , its beautiful and dreamy colors, its coming-of-age motif, and its overt sentimentality.
Figure 1.2 Titanic Poster , The Road Home
The timelessness in The Road Home is temporarily disrupted when the camera gives prominence to the Titanic movie poster (fig. 1.2) on the wal l of Mother’s home.
The temporal frame is clearly indicated as the contemporary and post-Father era, which in contrast to the “timeless” past in vibrant colors, is shot in black and white. The poster represents a reality check, a signal of the intrusion of Hollywood and global capital into the reclusive village of China. It is also an ironic gesture pointing to the film’s own melodramatic sentimentality; the film’s score is suspiciously similar to

Titanic ’s themes song. Whatever the implication, the Titanic poster breaks the film’s selfcontainment and dreamy aura; it poignantly points to Zhang’s dilemma between personal trauma and historical experience.
The ubiquitous father figure in Zhang’s films is also indicative of Zhang’s historical predicament. When growing up, Zhang and his peers rebelled against traditional
Chinese culture and cut off ties with previous generations. In post-Cultural Revolution retrospections, they actively sought to heal the traditional culture, hence giving rise to the “roots-seeking movement,” and to denunciations of their spiritual father, Mao
Zedong. The desublimation of Mao nevertheless left a major void in the collective psyche of Zhang’s generation. Zhang constantly seeks replacement of Mao the Father in such figures as the communist soldier in Yellow Earth , “My grandpa” in Red Sorghum
[1987], Fugui in To Live [1994], Zhao Benshan in Happy Times , or Father in The Road
Home . These fathers are not ordinary despite their ordinary appearance and everyday struggles. For they all exist for a sublime moment in their lives, be it the moment of revolutionary success, fermentation of the best wine, or posthumous respect from former students. Patriarchal greatness reaches its peak in Zhang’s representation of
Qin Shihuang, who, after all, was the “first” patriarch to dream of the infinite continuation of his imperial lineage. These fathers’ greatness puts them squarely in the grand narrative of Chinese history and thus qualifies them as legitimate replacements of Mao
Zedong.
The obsession with greatness is not unique to Fifth Generation directors; it is a transnational phenomenon shared by former socialist countries and capitalist nations alike. Russia, for example, spent $1.5 billion on renovating St. Petersburg under the premise of rejuvenating the cultural brilliance of Russia. The real motive, as Russian
President Vladimir Putin disclosed in his speech on the 300th anniversary of St.
Petersburg in June 2003, was to restore the glory and power that Russia possessed un der Peter the Great. Russia’s cold war rival, the United States, is no less obsessed with greatness. As Marjorie Garber’s reading of American popular culture shows, greatness has become a master trope in contemporary American society, which lauds on a da ily basis things from “great American presidents,” “great American heroes,”
“great American values,” “great American dreams,” and “great books of Western civilization.” One of the key symptoms of culture, the obsession with greatness is an
“ideological category, a redundancy effect,” which builds into people’s minds a fantasy

of control, of relying on an ultimate savior who makes all problems disappear or easier to face. Interestingly, Russia’s and America’ obsessions with the greatness share the same vision in constructing a mass utopia of modernity, which, as Susan Buck-Moss points out, oscillates between pictures of a dream world and of catastrophe.
It is no coincidence that Garber uses the Great Wall of China as the starting point for her discussion. She cites a recent study by Arthur Waldron, who, after close examination of historical and archeological records, finds no physical evidence of the
Qin Great Wall’s existence and questions the alleged defensive value of the Great Wall.
According to Waldron, the current Great Wall dates back to the fifteenth century, and it apparently was not built on any sites of a previous wall. Moreover, the Great Wall, greatness is but a cultural and symbolic construct . The biggest irony in Zhang Yimou’s representation of the Great Wall, of course, is his repeated emphasis that it was built by
Qin Shihunag, while its origin was very much questionable. The uselessness of the
Great Wall as defensive tool and the fabrication of the Great Wall as a long-standing symbol of China’s unity are thus indicative of Zhang’s entrapment by history.
The obsession with greatness is a sign of great anxieties in the age of uncertainty.
In psychological terms, the fantasy of control by someone else inherent in the obsession with g reatness signals the ego’s subordination to the superego. The power of the superego, Freud tells us, lies behind “all the influences of the past and of tradition,” while it remains “one of the most strongly felt manifestation of reality.” Freud adds: “In virtue of this concurrence, the super-ego, the substitute for the Oedipus complex, becomes a representative of the real external world as well and thus also becomes a model for the endeavors of the ego. In this way the Oedipus complex proves to be – as has already been conjectured in a historical sense – the source of our individual ethical sense, our morality.” This mechanism of the ego’s succumbing to the superego is behind Zhang Yimou’s attempt to replace the personal experience of shock with the
“past and tradition,” with historical experience, and with Qin Shihuang the patriarchal figure. Pp. 33-6
H. Wang and M. –Y. T. Rawnsley, ‘ Hero: rewriting the Chinese martial arts film genre’
Global Chinese Cinema: The Culture and Politics of ‘Hero’
There is little doubt that Zhang Yimou has made a significant contribution to

contemporary Chinese cinema. His accomplishment was realized when China opened to the West in the 1980s. When his directorial debut, Red Sorghum [1988], won the
Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, Zhang became the first filmmaker from the Chinese-speaking world to receive the highest recognition at a major international film festival in the West. This has marked the beginning of a trend where contemporary Chinese cinema constantly makes a noticeable impact at important film festivals. In the meantime, Zhang’s success in subsequent film festivals granted him increasing resources, as well as domestic and international reputation. He gained tremendous confidence in his own artistic judgment and for a relatively long period since
1988, Zhang Yimou was seen at overseas film festivals as a Chinese director who specialized in producing award-winning masterpieces. As his achievement has raised the artistic perception of Chinese cinema in the West, Zhang has been perceived by a considerable number of Chinese critics as a legendary figure that is widely accepted by the West, but at the same time is moulded and even marred by Western values.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that Zhang Yimou has always insisted on making movies about China, in China, through legal channels. He once admitted that
When I receive a film script, the firs thing I think about is not whether there will be an
investor for the film, but how I can make the kind of film that I want with the approval
of the authorities.
(Zeng, 17 December, 1999:6)
He did not change his ways of filmmaking when the Chinese ‘underground cinema’ captured Western imagination and became fashionable in the West in the 1990s.
Even when To Live [1994] was banned from being screened in China, Zhang did not move abroad but remained on the mainland to make films in a similar manner to his previous productions.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, Zhang Yimou completed Not One Less
[1999], a film about school children in a poor northern Chinese village, which received huge acclaim in China. It was initially predicted by Zhang himself that Not One Less would win major film awards in Europe although he was unsure if the American market would welcome it because he felt less attuned to the US taste. However, the director of the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, Gilles Jacob, accused Not One Less of government

propaganda perhaps because the film portrayed a “strong residual moral seriousness in the Chinese popular consciousness.” Which is opposite to the Chinese mentality thought to be prevalent in the 1990s, i.e. “commercialization, consumerism, money-worship, utilitarianism, and pseudomodernization.” Jacob’d comment angered
Zhang and prompted him to withdraw from the festival (Zhang originally planned to submit both Not One Less and The Road Home [2000] to Cannes. As Sheldon Lu has recorded:
In his letter to Jacob, Zhang criticized what he regarded as a naïve and lopsided understanding of Chinese films among many Western viewers. For them, Chinese films must fall under two categories: they are either government propaganda or antigovernment. By this logic, whatever films the Chinese government approves must be bad, and whatever films are banned in China must be good and worth seeing.
We can hypothesize from such evidence that although Zhang Yimou does not necessarily change his directions imply because certain ways of filmmaking are popular in china and/or Western tastes through his constant negotiation between the two cultures in the past two decades.
Zhang Yimou worked at a cotton factory in rural Shaanxi Province in the 1970s. His hobby was photography and his portfolio of photographs helped him win recommendation by the Cultural Ministry to attend the Beijing Film Academy. When
Zhang registered as a cinematography student in 1978 he was already 27 years old, several years above the age limit specified by the academy’s admission policies.
When One and Eight [1983] and Yellow Earth [1984] caught the attention of international festivals, Zhang Yimou was the cinematographer for both films. Zhang then acted in Old Well [1986], which won him the Best Actor at the 1987 Tokyo
International Film Festival. When he received the Golden Bear Award with Red
Sorghum, his reputation as a movie director finally surpassed his achievement as a photographer and an actor. Nevertheless, the ways Zhang approached his earlier works were similar; he tried to capture and represent the grassroots China that he knows by heart with passion and aesthetic energy. As Jinhua Dai has observed:
Although Zhang Yimou’s films only occupied a small corner of Chinese cinema in the

1990s in terms of both quantity and quality, his films have been quickly identified as a symbol representing ‘Chinese cinema’ as a whole in the Western cultural realm.
The West has become used to recognized the particular China, Chinese culture,
Chinese history and reality, as well as Chinese cinema, through Zhang Yimou and
his films.
This may explain why although Zhang was highly regarded at overseas festivals, his films did not enter mainstream markets in the West. They were seen exclusively
‘foreign’ by Western standards. In addition, Zhang’s films did not usually command large audiences in China because of their very strong art-house tendency.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Zhang Yimou has recognized that market value is the most important element for the movie industry. It is as true in the capitalist West as in communist China since the Chinese government has declared
‘market is politics’ as one of the policies guiding cultural industries. Hence, Zhang
Yimou has decided to reinvent himself in the new millennium in order to continue being the leading director pushing modern Chinese cinema into the international arena – not only artistic values, but also in commercial terms. Hero became the most influential turning point for Zhang’s career. It revealed his ambition as the most successful director in the People’s Republic of China, as well as his acute understanding of how to operate in a globalized movie world. Despite the varied views on its artistic merit,
Hero’ s success in the global market has guaranteed its historical status in Chinese cinema as the first movie from the mainland to become a global sensation. pp. 90-92