Reconfiguring China

Films, especially adaptations of award-winning literature, have frequently been employed by the Party-state to reconfigure a positive image of China; this chapter showcases the difficulties that come with this practice through consideration of Zhang Yimou’s adaptive works. It first traces why and how film adaptation of literature was traditionally employed by the Communist cultural leaders as propaganda tools to educate the mass audiences in the domestic sphere and also consolidate with its socialist allies. Secondly, this chapter lays bare Beijing’s initial attempts to employ the Fifth-Generation film adaptations to project the country’s soft power and the futility of these endeavors. It argues that the medium shift in adaptation and the unsuccessful conferral of cultural prestige across media, national, and ideological borders partly account for this futile effort. The failed conferral of prestige largely derived from the fact that literary adaptation, an artistic practice that generally took advantage of the prestige of adapted texts for art’s sake, was infiltrated with the awards culture and therefore incubated deliberate misrepresentation of China to please the West. The chapter concludes with a brief reflection on the dilemmas that Chinese filmmakers are facing when caught between state policy, artistic ambition, and Hollywood.