Lesbian wedding in China (Photo from crtv.nl)

by Isabella Tianzi Cai

In a “Letter from China” column for the New York Times on September 1, 2010, Howard W. French elaborates on China’s changing attitude towards queer culture based on his personal observations in Shanghai. Having worked and lived in Shanghai for just under a decade, French is well aware of Chinese people’s increasing psychological tolerance towards homosexuals in their midst.

French says that it is most evident in “public intimacy between women,” which he supports in the letter by recounting a few of his personal experiences, most memorably, witnessing two teenage girls kissing passionately in a Shanghai subway car, without regard for the older passengers watching them with consternation. It should be noted that this incident is without precedent; a similar event in 2008 was captured on video and created a stir when posted on the internet.

French offers his understanding of this social phenomenon:

As this society rapidly grows richer, its social fabric and mores have been changing in ways far more dramatic than even the physical landscape, and sexual choice and expression are arguably in the leading edge of this upheaval.

Although this trend, as articulated by French, is more or less inevitable, the transition from a conservative society to a liberal one is neither as easy or as fast as he makes it out to be.

In this vast country boasting the world’s largest population, French’s observations are but a drop in the ocean. While his experiences are valuable primary sources, this topic on homosexuality is more thoroughly and systematically explored in Cui Zi’en’s documentary Queer China, Comrade China.

Queer China has plenty of scholarly research and news footage to both clarify, correct or enhance conceptions about homosexuality in China. Its scope is wide and its understanding is deep, with rich historical and cultural references. Moreover, its organization of ideas provokes its audience to ask further questions.

Cui Zi’en’s long-established body of work, as a scholar, writer and filmmaker, is enough to prove that the expression and exploration of queer identities in China is nothing new. His groundbreaking debut feature Enter the Clowns caused an international sensation. In the film, Xiao Bo (Yu Bo) lives in a world where the lines defining men from women are constantly dissolving. He kneels at the deathbed of his father (played by Cui) who has become a woman, and whose dying wish is to have oral sex with his/her son. His boyfriend “Nana” has also undergone a sex change, but Xiao Bo no longer finds her attractive as a woman. A sexual chain reaction ensues that wreaks havoc on traditional Chinese roles that govern male and female, parent and child.

French also mentions the “Super, Girls!” singing competition as another example for the “sudden media exposure of lesbian and gay people” “the rapid decline of [restrictive] ideology in most every aspect of Chinese life.” For those who don’t know, this singing competition is a Chinese equivalent of “American Idol.” French interviews Feng Hui, an 18 year old lesbian, who cites “Super, Girls!” champion Li Yuchun for making a “critical breakthrough” for sexual identity and behavior among girls:

Ms. Li, who has sidestepped questions about her sexuality, wore her hair short and dressed in boyish fashions. Moreover, she won singing love songs written for men about women.

“Li Yuchun is the mother of unisex in China, and her comfort with herself inspired a whole generation of women like me,” said Ms. Feng.

But how do the young in China approach these issues of personal freedom, in their identities, their behaviors, and their pursuit of “alternative” lifestyles? The answers to these questions can be found in Jian Yi’s documentary Super, Girls! Jian allows his subjects sufficient space and freedom to explore these topics and express themselves, not within the context of the “adult” world, but on their own terms. The resulting film is a powerful exploration of the youth culture of contemporary China.

Relevant Classroom Use

San Yuan Li (dir. Ou Ning, 2003)

What is a Chinese film?  Ever since I’ve started living and working in Beijing over six years ago, most serious discussions about Chinese cinema ultimately come down to this elemental question, either in its descriptive mode (what defines a Chinese film?) or in its more urgently prescriptive version (what should a Chinese film be?).  Often, it’s filmmakers themselves who seem most anxious about the issue.  Behind it lie several subsidiary anxieties: “What do Westerners want from Chinese films?”, “What’s my role in Chinese society?”, “Are films art, or commerce, or politics?”

In English, we don’t distinguish between zhongguo dianying (movies made in China) and huayu pian (Chinese language films).  Chinese film in the first instance can simply mean the national cinema of China, from its early years in Beijing and Shanghai to the present day, both within and outside the state run system of production, distribution, and exhibition.  A broader geographical definition adds to this films from “greater China”, encompassing Taiwan and Hong Kong.  A still broader meaning includes any films in the various Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, etc.).  A still wider circle would embrace filmmakers of Chinese ethnicity like Ang Lee and John Woo, whose work can be in English or in Chinese.

So much for the first term in “Chinese film.”  The second word, “film”, is equally ambiguous.  Look at any catalogue of the state-run Shanghai International Film Festival, and you’ll find the official narrow interpretation of Chinese film, encompassing state-owned film studios’ mainstream propaganda films (zhuxuanlu pian) and independently financed commercial movies authorized by the Film Bureau, both on film and DV.  Small-scale independent “image exhibitions” in China (see my previous article for an overview) will show films made outside of the system, these days almost exclusively on digital video.

With foreign film festivals, the picture becomes even more complex.  There are still international film festivals that largely follow the creaky old Shanghai IFF model, filtering out non-sanctioned cinema (several of the old-style “Category A” film festivals fit this bill).  On the other hand, there are festivals such as Rotterdam’s International Film Festival that exist to “discover” (for western viewers), support (though financing and programming) and promote independent, alternative, non-commercial cinema.  Most festivals lie somewhere in between.

Foreign festivals of either bent attempt to satisfy certain ideas about what constitutes “China” and what constitutes “film.”  No choices are completely objective, and none escape the confines of pre-existing notions of cultural and national difference.  Even the most independent, enterprising festivals can have a stake in constructing a vision of a product, the “independent Chinese cinema” brand.  This is a brand that can satisfy certain prejudices and requirements of an alternative art film distribution network.  We have to change the question, then.  Instead of asking “what is a Chinese film?”, let’s ask instead “what kind of cultural work can Chinese cinema do?”

Foreign film festivals, especially, play critical and controversial roles in presenting, labeling, constraining, defining, and shaping foreign cultural production for domestic (i.e. Western) consumption.  Since the era of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, “Chinese film” has often meant something gently or violently exotic: old models of Orientalism carried over quite easily into our so-called “postmodern”, “post-colonial era.”  Sex and violence, preferably vibrantly coloured and richly costumed, sell, because they offer western viewers a comfortingly familiar vision of a China that they think they already know.  It’s hard to account for films like Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower (Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia, 2006) any other way.

For many in the West, China is currently being re-defined as an increasingly powerful and ominous nation.  This fear of a new economic and cultural adversary colours how Western media outlets choose to depict China.  Films that in some way underline social problems, films that are bleakly depressing, films that adopt some sort of adversarial stance in relation to power, all constitute an approved set of images which flow towards Western audiences.  Examples abound.  To pick three, almost at random: Zhang Lu’s Grain in Ear (Mang zhong, 2005), Han Jie’s Walking On The Wild Side (Lai xiaozi, 2006), Li Yang’s Blind Mountain (Mang shan, 2007).  Again, the point for festivals and distributors is to supply audiences with comforting images of what they think they already understand: China as a place essentially different from their own home.  China is a place whose internal problems and contradictions need to be exposed, defined, and consumed.  This essentially is just a way of confirming one’s own “normality” in the face of a menacing “other.”  The role of critical, independent Chinese directors in making these films is therefore sometimes all too painfully ambivalent.

Enter the Clowns (dir. Cui Zi'en, 2001)

Within the Chinese filmmaking community, there are other fault lines.  Particularly visible is an implied polemic between film art and film politics.  For many independent filmmakers enmeshed in China’s particular political situation, film offers an imperative duty of opposing power.  Facing a Party whose old style hegemonic control of political discourse is no longer matched by its control over China’s social and economic space, cinematic discourse has an unavoidable responsibility to engage.  Alternatively, the Party’s now only sporadic surveillance of visual culture provides filmmakers with a new freedom to explore questions of form, to create or challenge film aesthetics.  Exemplary figures  include young filmmakers like Liu Jiayin (Oxhide [Niu pi, 2005]), queer experimentalist Cui Zi’en (Enter the Clowns [Chou jue deng chang, 2001]) and avant garde artists Ou Ning (San Yuan Li [2003] and Meishi Street [Meishi jie, 2006]) and Yang Fudong (An Estranged Paradise [Mosheng tiantang, 2002] and Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest [Zhu lin qi xian, 2003]).

Another tendency newly visible in mainland Chinese independent cinema is the urge to record and catalogue.  This is the work that these new Chinese films do.  There has been a virtual explosion, mainly on the documentary side, but also in new narrative fiction, to use cinema as a kind of archive, capturing communities and disappearing or threatened ways of life.  This movement, if it’s not premature to call it that, results in long (sometimes very long) films that function as exhaustive catalogues of data, seemingly assembled more than structured, presenting in some sense a “complete” view of a certain slice of Chinese reality, presented raw and un-altered, for a viewer to digest and analyze on his or her own.  I’m thinking of recent films like Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town (Feicheng, 2008), Cong Feng’s Doctor Ma’s Country Clinic (Ma Daifu de zhensuo, 2008), and Lin Xin’s Classmates (Tongxue, 2009).  Derived from the ethnographic documentary tradition, but injected into mainstream independent film discourse (if that term makes any sense), these catalogue films respond to what can be seen as a political imperative to show the truth: real, unmanipulated reality, untainted by the ideological manipulations of previous Chinese cinema.  Watching this movement is fascinating: the resulting works can be exhilarating, or pretty mind-numbing, or a provocative mixture of the two.

So what can be done to avoid the traps of cramming “Chinese cinema” into restrictive definitions?  What should Chinese film be and do?  It’s not easy: people largely see what they want to see.  Mass media is about giving comfort, reinforcing patterns of thought, policing the boundaries of what we call knowledge.  If I had to give the Chinese filmmakers an answer, I’d say: Make and exhibit films that show audiences what they don’t already know.  Find images that are fresh, provocative, that destabilize the complex of pre-established, pre-thought concepts that a film audience totes like baggage.  Don’t show what’s already been seen; don’t depict what’s already been imagined.  Unsettle, surprise and disturb, and you’ve started to point in the right direction.

This article, revised in June 2009, is based on a shorter article that originally appeared in the Festival Daily, published by the Toronto International Film Festival, September 2007.

Relevant Classroom Use

In film, censors in China are still quick to restrict gay cinema and homosexuality as a theme. But independent film makers have developed ongoing interest in this theme and have delved into the topic with great insights.  We at dGenerate will be adding some of these pioneering titles of queer Chinese cinema to our catalog soon.

One of our most respected directors, Cui Zi’en, the first Chinese gay to openly come out publicly on TV, documented the changes and development in LGBT issues in China over the last 80 years in his new documentary Queer China. As the opening film of ShanghaiPRIDE festival, this is the most comprehensive cinematic overview of LGBT history and culture in China.  It includes interviews with gay club organizers, doctors, laws, NGO workers, as well as famous scholars, such as Li Yinhe and Lisa Rofel.  From the repeal of sodomy law to the submission of a same-sex marriage bill to the National People’s Congress, Cui Zi’en uses his camera to record China’s changing attitudes towards homosexuality.  We at dGenerate Films are proud to announce that we’ll be distributing Queer China as well as Cui Zi’en’s film Enter the Clowns soon!

Thanks to Yuqian Yan for compiling links and info for this post.

Relevant Classroom Use