Zhang Yimou and History

In my last post, I made a fleeting reference to Zhang Yimou being a sellout. This, as many things in China seem to, has to do with history. Most Americans are familiar with Zhang Yimou through Hero, a movie that would not have been released in the US without the help of Quentin Tarantino, an interesting, but less talented director than Zhang (I often wonder how Zhang Yimou feels about that).

After Tian Zhuangzhuang released Blue Kite overseas to critical acclaim, he was blacklisted. The government banned him from directing for nearly a decade. Blue Kite is one of the best movies made about the Cultural Revolution that I've seen (perhaps second only to Zhang Yimou's To Live). When Zhang Yimou's own picture on that subject was subsequently banned, he must have surely feared that what happened to Tian, his film school classmate, would also happen to him. He escaped the directing ban by shying away from politically-sensitive topics, but years later, he would address them head-on, only with a different bent.

Since Hero is the most watched of Zhang Yimou's movies in America, I'll assume you've seen it and I won't care if I spoil the ending (people who took Chinese History knew the ending anyway). The soon-to-be emperor whom Jet Li is planning on assassinating, Qin Shihuang, is credited with uniting China under one dynasty after centuries of petty squabbles between small, weaker kingdoms. (Qin China looked like this.) After conquering all the various local rulers, Qin Shihuang imposed a strict legalist code that overturned the Confucian system and resulted in the draconian suppression of his opponents. The Qin dynasty was so harsh and repressive that it only lasted 14 years. In Hero, Jet Li chooses not to assassinate Qin Shihuang (at this point he was not called Qin Shihuang yet) because he remembers those two characters， 天下 (everything under heaven), that took Tony Leung an absurdly long time to write (I'm pretty sure 天下 was only seven strokes even in 200 BC). Viewing the unification of China as more important than anything else, Jet Li leaves the blood thirsty tyrant alone. It is pointless to speculate about what history would be like if the assassin had succeeded (would the glorious Han have emerged and ushered in a golden age?).

You are probably wondering, so what? How does this make Zhang Yimou a sellout? Before he started considering himself made of the same stuff as Sun Wukong, the fabled Monkey King, a recent Chinese leader liked to imagine that he was the reincarnation of Qin Shihuang. His real name was Mao.

Note: Chen Kaige, another classmate of Zhang's and Tian's, directed a good version of the same assassination attempt starring Zhang's ex-girlfriend Gong Li. It's not a kung fu movie. The Emperor and the Assassin.