Is “Full River Red” Propaganda, or Secretly Subversive?
The titular question of this piece is ostensibly a very easy one: Yimou Zhang’s recent Chinese blockbuster Full River Red is indisputably Chinese Communist Party propaganda; one need not probe too deeply into the film’s cultural context to see that. The wuxia (swordplay) thriller takes its name from a poem supposedly authored by Chinese folk hero and 12th-century imperial general Fei Yue. Here is that poem translated into English:
My wrath bristles through my helmet, the rain stops as I stand by the rail;
I look up towards the sky and let loose a passionate roar.
At the age of thirty, my deeds are nothing but dust, my journey has taken me over eight thousand li [unit of distance]
So do not sit by idly, for young men will grow old in regret.
The Humiliation of Jingkang still lingers,
When will the pain of the Emperor's subjects ever end?
Let us ride our chariots through the Helan Pass,
There we shall feast on barbarian flesh and drink the blood of the Xiongnu.
Let us begin anew to recover our old empire, before paying tribute to the Emperor.
Like any text that’s a millennium old, its import in regards to modern day events is up for grabs, but I understand (from the closing titles of the film) that the poem has been handed down through generations as a song of patriotism and a rallying cry for the Chinese people. The film, after two-plus hours of palace intrigue and dark comedy, ends with a dramatic recitation of this poem that is obviously meant to bring tears to the eyes of any Chinese partisan. For non-partisans, the poem’s exhortation for listeners to “drink the blood” of their “Barbarian” enemies and “recover [your] old empire” might come off a bit ominous, politically speaking, especially delivered within a film that could only exist with the full approval of Chinese Communist Party censors. Regardless if Full River Red was birthed of an artist’s inspiration or from the CCP’s desire to juice up its base, I think “propaganda” is an appropriate word for any work of art that intentionally flatters the totalitarian government under which it is produced.
So, is that all there is to it? Well, the complicating factor here is that Full River Red is both directed and co-written by Yimou Zhang. Zhang, probably the most internationally famous director from mainland China, is mostly known in the West for directing wuxia epics Hero and House of Flying Daggers, and for directing the opening ceremonies of the 2008 and 2022 Beijing Olympics. He is certainly not a dissident artist; his long-standing success within the Chinese film industry precludes him of that designation. Yet, over the course of his thirty-six-year career, Zhang has never stopped making films that quietly challenge or condemn authority, and often the authorities behind the Chinese Communist and Cultural Revolutions. Until Hero, Zhang was most famous for his collaborations with actress Li Gong, movies like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern which questioned China’s history of institutional patriarchy and sexism. After 1994, Zhang was banned from filmmaking for directing To Live, a film that portrayed many of the ills which the Cultural Revolution perpetrated on Chinese citizens. The ban was temporary, and unsuccessful in dissuading Zhang from the subject that got him in trouble. In 1999, Zhang’s The Road Home depicted a romance stalled and nearly ended by the arbitrary whims of the Revolution’s bureaucracy. Since the 2000s, when Zhang achieved unprecedented international success with his wuxia films, his output has become more varied, but he returned to the injustices of the Cultural Revolution with his films Coming Home (2014) and One Second (2020).
Western audiences might imagine Chinese filmmakers are disappeared for making movies like To Live, but the censorship situation doesn’t seem quite as bad as that, or at least not as simple. Before the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, there was an entire genre of Chinese film devoted to unearthing the crimes of the Cultural Revolution (called “Scar Movies,” movies about the scars left by that period). After Tiananmen Square, there was a crackdown on such movies, but even the director Ye Lou has been permitted to make many films since his controversial 2006 film Summer Palace touched directly on Tiananmen Square. The official position of the CCP is to condemn the Cultural Revolution, although public discussion of this topic is severely managed and limited by censorship. While Zhang’s criticism of the Cultural Revolution is in keeping with the party line, there is evidence of some resistance on the part of authorities to his political films. Both Coming Home and One Second are adapted from the novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi by Chinese-American writer Geling Yan; Yan has fallen out of favour with Chinese censors and she was denied a credit on One Second. Some believe One Second was pulled by censors from competing at the 69th Berlin Film Festival; thus far, it hasn’t had much of a release in the West (I managed to watch it as an in-flight movie flying Air Canada, and on my next flight it was unavailable). The Golden Rooster Awards – the mainland Chinese Oscars, which I’d bet are not indifferent to the preferences of the CCP – tend to award the hell out of Zhang’s films, but One Second only picked up a few nominations in 2021 and was snubbed for Best Picture and Screenplay. The movies that won those categories instead were Island Keeper and 1921, respectively, two films made to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party – some evidence, perhaps, of a lack of appetite on the part of the cultural gatekeepers for politically introspective works. In 2018, the CCP made sweeping institutional changes to give itself even greater control over pop culture than it already had. One Second would have been in pre-production before that law was passed, but since then Zhang has exclusively directed propagandistic action movies like Cliff Walkers, Snipers and now Full River Red.
It is not an inaccurate statement that these days Zhang is an artist who generates propaganda for a totalitarian government. To the extent that this is true it is fairly depressing, given Zhang’s history of artistic courage. And yet, if it’s an obvious fact that Full River Red is propaganda, it’s also true that films, like people, can speak from both sides of their mouths. Full River Red, like many of its heroes, could have ambitions too dangerous to admit in a voice louder than a whisper. Of course, it’s more than possible that I’m seeing what I want to see because of my idealistic view of Zhang; I welcome readers with greater insight into Chinese history and politics to leave their thoughts in the comments.
Full River Red is set entirely within a labyrinthine palace ruled by Hui Qin, a 12th-century Song Dynasty politician. Qin’s palace borders territory belonging to the Jins, traditional enemies of the Songs with whom Qin has recently made uneasy peace. Fei Yue (author of the titular poem) rejected the peace, preferring to conquer the Jins instead, and as a result Qin had Yue executed. The popular historical viewpoint, which the film shares, is that Qin was a traitorous villain beholden to the Jins whose execution of nationalist hero Yue was a betrayal of the Songs – in other words, according to the film’s metaphorical schematic, a betrayal of the Chinese. This is all merely the setup for the film, which takes place after Yue has already been executed. The story kicks off when a Jin ambassador to Qin’s palace is murdered; most of the film is about the attempt by various underlings in the palace hierarchy to solve that murder under threat of death by Qin. The major players are the clownish Zhang (Shen Teng), deadly soldier Sun (Jackson Yee), slippery politician Wu (Yungpeng Yue) and prostitute Yao (Jia Yi Wang). Each character is motivated primarily by their own survival; Qin rules the palace with a brutal severity, his subjects are all one wrong step away from a quick death.
The characters’ gloomy prospects are underlined by the film’s murky aesthetic. Scenes take place in one of two location types, either shadowy interiors or twilit exteriors. The predominant colour is a dull, pale blue. Aesthetically and tonally, Zhang’s wuxia films have trended darker and darker since Hero, and Full River Red is the extreme endpoint of that trend. Though Hero tells a story of warriors who ultimately put a king’s ambitions above their own, the authorities in Zhang’s later epics are seen increasingly as figures of malevolence and injustice. Curse of the Golden Flower is about a cruel Emperor who crushes a revolution by his own wife and son. Shadow follows the struggle for power between a variety of irredeemable royals. While Flower has all the saturated colours for which Zhang is often celebrated, Zhang changed course drastically for Shadow, in which every prop, costume and setting are either black, white or grey and bright red blood provides the only pop of colour. If Shadow was an example of Zhang using his chosen visual limitation as a source of dazzling inspiration, with Full River Red, Zhang seems intent on emphasizing a lack of visual possibilities. Full River Red is, possibly, the most ascetic and least visually dynamic of all Zhang’s films. Given the film’s large budget, this should not be mistaken for an accident of expedience; clearly, Zhang has chosen a visual style to suit the dreary, hopeless world in which the characters exist.
As it happens, the characters are not very happy about living in that world, and it’s gradually unveiled that most of them are involved in a multifaceted plot to oust Qin. Since Qin’s rule can only be described as totalitarian, the conspirators cannot breathe a word of their true goals, even to their own comrades, and at many points the dissidents are required to perform acts of inhuman brutality just to protect the guise of their allegiance to Qin. Qin dominates through violence but also, significantly, through the control of information and speech. Comprising his inner circle are a duo of deadly maids whose primary value to Qin is that they are mutes. An important plot point concerns the interception of a letter between the Jin rulers and Qin; the information in the letter is so forbidden that simply reading it means certain death at the hands of Qin. Possession of the forbidden information means both great leverage and great danger for the knower, and exactly who has read the letter and when provides some of the film’s thickest tension. Finally, it is not a battle that undoes Qin, but speech. After most of the conspirators sacrifice their lives and humanity to create an opportunity to corner Qin, the sole surviving dissident, Sun, forces Qin to recite the poem “Full River Red” for all his army to hear. Yue’s words are so powerful, it’s implied that simply speaking them out loud is enough to foment revolution against Qin. Even the speaker himself – who, it turns out, is actually a decoy acting as Qin’s double – is inspired by the words. Once he’s been defeated, the real Qin cannot help but marvel at how “well written” the poem is. In a world of many dangers, human expression is the most powerful weapon.
Perhaps a subversive subtext is starting to emerge. With its greyish setting and its mood of paranoia, the Zhang film which Full River Red resembles the most is not a swordplay epic but rather Coming Home, a film about miserable characters selling out their own family members for thought crimes in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. Zhang co-wrote Full River Red, and his personal touch is easy to detect, both from the film’s dark, strange humour (reminiscent of his Coen Brothers remake A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop) and, perhaps, from the skepticism of authority from which Zhang has rarely deviated.
Western critics have thus far seen the movie as an uneasy mixture of dark humour, violent intrigue and rousing nationalism, and when viewed strictly as CCP propaganda the movie does seem off-kilter. Considered in a very broad, simplistic sense, the propagandistic metaphor is clear enough: Qin is known for betraying the Chinese, Yue is known as a Chinese nationalist, therefore the denigration of Qin and celebration of Yue can be seen as a gesture of current-day Chinese nationalism. But in the context of the story, the precise ideal that Yue represents is the least salient element. It’s clear Yue was against the Jins, but the Jins are never really seen in Full River Red, they function more as a plot device than as meaningful antagonists. The only antagonist present is Qin, a Chinese who rules other Chinese, and in the world of the story Yue is meaningful strictly insofar as he opposes Qin. What Qin stands for is very clear: the total, violent and intellectual control of his subjects. That control is portrayed as fundamentally unjust; the impression is not given that the characters would be happy to be dominated as long as their dominator was more of a nationalist like Yue. When viewed with a more-than-superficial examination of the film’s subtext, the propagandistic metaphor starts to fall apart – after all, the only people dominating the Chinese public right now are the CCP.
It’s obvious how the CCP would want the average Chinese citizen to read the metaphor of Full River Red: as a battle cry for Chinese domination and resistance to foreign interference. But practically speaking, the movie is about Chinese subjects crushed and conquered by their own leader. I would think any dissident-minded Chinese viewer of Full River Red would have the imagination to notice something familiar about a world where characters are punished for knowing or saying too much, where characters must hide their true beliefs and live double lives. At the very least, one can imagine Zhang, a once-courageous filmmaker whose freedom of expression is more limited now than it’s ever been, would not fail to notice possible interpretations of the script he wrote. Even the poem “Full River Red,” when viewed without the CCP’s preferred slant, could have current-day implications that are at least ambiguous:
My wrath bristles through my helmet, the rain stops as I stand by the rail;
I look up towards the sky and let loose a passionate roar.
At the age of thirty, my deeds are nothing but dust, my journey has taken me over eight thousand li
So do not sit by idly, for young men will grow old in regret.
The Humiliation of Jingkang still lingers,
When will the pain of the Emperor's subjects ever end?
Let us ride our chariots through the Helan Pass,
There we shall feast on barbarian flesh and drink the blood of the Xiongnu.
Let us begin anew to recover our old empire, before paying tribute to the Emperor.
For today’s Chinese citizens, what does it mean to “sit idly by” and what could young men grow to regret? What is the source of the ongoing “humiliation” and “pain” suffered by the Emperor’s subjects? Who are the “barbarians”? What does it mean to “begin anew” and “recover our old empire”? Even if Full River Red only raises these questions indirectly and by accident, it is an important film for doing so.
