Han Sanping

Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.1134: Contemporary Korean Cinema
Professor Jung-Bong Choi
December 18, 2010
High-Grossing Chinese and Korean Blockbusters and Their Role in the “Renaissance of National Cinema”
Blockbusters mobilize expansive social resources, assemble a great variety of talents, attract a wide range of audience, and make enormous profit returns. They cultivate a movie-going culture, help industrialize and streamline a country’s film industry, and put national cinema on a par with the best of Hollywood. This paper uses specific examples to discuss and compare how Chinese and Korean blockbusters help build their respective film industry, and the subsequent contributions that they make to their respective national cinema.
In my best judgment, the Chinese film industry has many things to learn from the South Korean film industry. During the course of this semester, the films that we have watched and discussed and the texts that we have studied give many pointers as to how to understand the renaissance of Korean national cinema. While the renaissance of Korean cinema is a good term to describe the rise of Korean cinema, I would like to pick this idea of renaissance apart because like the more popular notion, “hallyu” (sometimes “hallyuwood”), it indicates something temporary, and like a wave, it will soon fade away. Yes, all cultural phenomena have life cycles; they are all subject to “death.” However, isn’t it too early to issue the death certificate to Korean cinema? Can’t we think of it as still being in the process of making? I believe that much work still remains to be done to have Korean cinema realize its full potential, and for that to happen, the Korean cinema must not dwell on its past achievements. As for Chinese cinema, the same humility applies. Chinese films must understand that at the present, they are just beginning to make a splash. Major hits exist, but the overall quality is low. Although the numbers associated with its rate of growth are staggering, the industry is at large immature. At the managerial level, different authorial voices representing different authorial forces are still vigorously competing against each other. With no prior experiences, China’s first film industry legislation has yet been set in place to help sort out various kinds of legal matters. On top of these, the industry also perches precariously on China’s economy, whose future as we know has generated widely contrasting views. It shocked the world that China overtook Japan as the second largest economy in the world in the second quarter of 2010 in August 2010. Predictions also say that at the current rate, its economy will overtake the U.S. in the year 2035. But in reality this is just press. China’s problems far outnumber its achievements. There are so many potential pitfalls that the vista ahead really looks no more promising than a huge landmine.
The South Korean film industry is ahead of the Chinese film industry by at least ten years. This is also roughly I think how much South Korea’s economy is ahead of China’s economy structurally. Ten years may seem short, but (increasingly) they can be a long time in creating a big gap in the development of a film industry. As we know, new technologies replace old ones rapidly nowadays; the media and cultural landscape is also constantly being reshaped. In the last century, after the end of the Korean War (1950-3), South Korea’s film industry underwent a boom. The late 1950s and 1960s are widely known to be the Golden Age of Korean cinema, boasting many well-made domestic films. For China, this period was also a productive time. Movie-going was part of the popular culture, and a steady supply of films were made for the general public who could watch them at extremely low prices. However, while the Korean film industry continued to mature under the pressure of a series of nationwide democratic movements, China’s film culture was completely halted in 1966 because of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), during which no films were made. Although the industry was resuscitated after the political tumult, from the end of the 1970s to roughly the mid-1990s, it was doing notoriously badly in terms of box office. The lackluster performance was due to the industry’s haphazard transition from being centrally planned to being market-driven. The transition was partial and passive in practice because resistance to the reform was strong at every level. For one thing, the film culture was still largely conservative. It was structured on the Soviet-style command economy from the early 1950s. Everything from production quotas, to film licensing, to film distribution, and to film exhibition went according to the central government’s directives, giving no heed to the market. Neither Hollywood nor Western European imports were allowed into the country. The China Film Corporation (CFC) also adopted the so-called flat-rate film purchasing system whereby it contracted a studio’s entire production output regardless of quality. While it benefited the Fifth-Generation directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, who thrived in this space without having to face the consumers, the number of tickets sold kept dropping from 1980 to 1985, and the industry lost more and more money each year. Finally in 1986, studios were allowed to have a share in the box office revenue generated. It was this direct interest in the market along with various distributors’ and exhibitors’ growing autonomy from the CFC’s monopoly that finally enabled a new round of reforms in the industry, including horizontal integration with other businesses and the downsizing of the various overemployed distributors.[1]
In 1985, South Korea made an important trade agreement with the United States to drop its screen quota for domestic films from the previous number of one third of a year in 1976 to 146 days or 2/5 of a year. This resulted in an influx of Hollywood films in the domestic market, which was later thought to be the key external factor that helped spur the Korean film industry to make high-quality films. Internally, the financial support from well-endowed conglomerates or chaebol like Samsung and Hyundai enabled secure funding for big-budgeted films. In many cases, the corporates’ ways of conducting businesses helped streamline the industry. For instances, market research suddenly became an integral part of the pre-production process, and test screenings were added before the actual premieres. Overall, the industrialization of the film industry allowed it to establish a greater industrial chain, mobilize greater social resources, and in turn generate greater profits. Marriage Story (1992) was one of the first films produced in this manner; its success was later modeled and improved upon by other productions. It is thought that before the 1997 financial crisis hit the Asian market and resulting in the withdrawal of chaebol, the Korean film industry had actually already had a more-than-basic business infrastructure in place, which would account for the subsequent successes of a steady stream of commercial films since the 1999 hit Shiri (1999). On the Chinese side, China approved the importation of ten international blockbusters annually as late as 1994. Over the next fifteen years, the number slowly climbed to twenty. In 1995, just a year after the relaxation of importation policy, foreign films generated 70-80 percent of the total box office. As a counter measure to encourage domestic film production by generating profit for investment, the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television allowed Chinese studios to distribute imports on CFC’s approval list in 1996; the condition given was that one quality domestic film must be made in exchange for one imported film.[2] These measures and others slowly recovered the movie-going culture in China. As the statistics show, China’s box office revenue increased from $219.6 million in 2004 to $909 million in 2009, which equaled to an average 30% increase per year. In 2010, the revenue is expected to exceed $1.4 billion, keeping up with the previous growth rate. As for the number of films made domestically, it increased from 145 in 1995 to 456 in 2009. This number is expected to exceed 500 in 2010. By the end of 2009, the total number of multiplexes was 1670 and the total number of screens 4723, 626 of which were new screens added in 2008.[3] And the daily growth rate for the number of screens is currently at 3.3.[4] Major South Korean exhibitor Lotte Cinema is set to launch its first theatre this month. It also plans to open ten more sites in China in 2011, adding 70 more screens in 2011 and another 52 in 2012.[5] Reading these numbers I can feel blood pounding in my ear. On the one hand, they harbinger a great march forward. On the other, the rocketing numbers make me uneasy. I wish I could find out exactly how much revenue share Chinese domestic films have made in all the yearly totals from 1994 on so that I can then compare their growth. Unfortunately the statistics on the Chinese film industry are hard to come by even through the official Chinese websites.[6]
The growth of the Korean film industry is told in many different ways; one may perhaps attempt to tell it as a series of successful films that overtake Hollywood films in attracting the domestic audience. Shiri (1999), JSA (2000), Friend (2001), Silmido (2003), Taegukgi (2004), The King and the Clown (2005), Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005), The Host (2006), Scandal Makers (2008), The Good, the Bad, and the Weird (2008), Haeundae (2009) are all such examples. From the list, it is not too hard to see that their themes and undertones have shifted from more solemn topics involving sensitive political history to relatively lighter-hearted topics that deal with imaginary disasters or fantasy history. I think that the same trend applies to Chinese blockbusters, which are starting to lighten up their stories. Feng Xiaogang’s If You Are the One (2008) is a comedy; it is the third highest grossing domestic film. Feng’s latest big hit Aftershock (2010), which topped the chart, is a tragic drama dealing with the aftermath the 1978 Tangshan Earthquake. Up till this point, Feng has been making comedies only. For the purpose of this paper, my focus is set on another Chinese blockbuster The Founding of a Republic (2009). In my opinion, this film roughly sets the life clock of the Chinese film industry to Korean’s JSA (2000) a decade earlier. Both films have created box office miracles but are not the first ones to do so in their respective countries. I think that it will be interesting to compare how they tell extremely well-known histories to their respective national audiences in ways that are new and engaging. Can their successes be copied? If so, what lessons can we glean from them so as to serve the ever present need of constructing national cinema?
The Founding of a Republic (2009) was made for the 60^th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China and the First Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). It covers the Chinese history from the end of World War II to 1949, known as the Chinese civil war between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Party of Communists (CPC). The film does not focus on the battles. Instead, it focuses on the important historical figures during this history, like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Chiang Kai-shek, Soong May-ling, Soong Ching-ling, etc. However, it is not a drama about only a few of them either. The history is told through all of them without dramatizing any one of them. As is unbelievable as it sounds, 170 Chinese movie and television stars played in this film. Many of them appear on screen for just over a few seconds for very small roles. Jackie Chan plays a journalist for example, Zhang Ziyi is one of the women’s representatives who are taking a photograph with Mao, and Tony Leung Ka Fai shows up briefly as a photograph intruder. It is said that many of the stars came to act in the film without demanding any pay. In fact, if everyone did, the budget would have gone way beyond 37 million yuan ($5.56 million). I shall note here too that the film had a comparatively much shorter production period than most Hollywood films. It was made in roughly ten months, one third of the time of an average Hollywood film. In the beginning, the production team only assembled the core group of actors and actresses. The extreme successful marketing team, which advertised for this film while it was still in the production stage, did a great job of attracting star attention. New players joined the group as the production was taking place, and the team grew bigger and bigger as time went by in the snowball effect. Though new hiring was not included in the original budget, since many of them volunteered, the film was able to get completed within its budget. Some have attributed the snowball effect to the personal clout of one of the directors of this film, Han Sanping, who is also the chairman of the China Film Group Corporation (another name for the CFC), which as is mentioned earlier, is a very powerful national institution. This view may be a little skewed because patriotic sentiments are quite enough for a Chinese actor or actress to raise him or herself to this kind of occasion (sadly things may change in the future). Although on the one hand, no consumer will want to pay to watch a leitmotif film about China’s national history, on the other, the deep seated humiliation that Chinese bear of their modern history not counting the most recent two decades is not easily suppressible, especially if it has been aroused in the right manners.
In his essay “Waiting to Exhale: The Colonial Experience and the Trouble with My Own Breathing,” Frances Gateward comments on the relationship between cinema and national history. He writes that “cinema has become central to the national historical memory, providing younger generations engaging and readily available mimetic experiences of the monumental traumas of which they have no firsthand recollection.”[7] The marketing team of the film knew very well that they were going to face an audience that was young, most of whom would be in their 20s and 30s. As the subsequent market survey results show, 51.81% of the sample audience who watched this film was between 20 to 29 years old, roughly 20% was from each of the 30- to 39-year-old group and the 40-and-above group, and the rest came from people below 20.[8] How to make the 20-year-olds understand how the CPC gained its legitimacy as the leading party of China and why the KMT failed in this cause? Indeed, how did the KMT fail? I will discuss one scene in the film. I argue that this scene helps neutralize Chiang’s character, contrary to the more popular but negative imagination of Chiang for majority of people in mainland China. Together with the rest of film, Chiang’s mistakes and his resultant defeat are cleverly contextualized. The message is such that history can be cruel sometimes; bad political decisions can and will result in disastrous outcomes.
This scene happens in the quiet open space of a park. It says “Nanjing” on screen. Chiang and his son first appear in an extreme long shot, walking and talking. The color scheme is toned down, showing the wet rain-washed cement floor in black and grey and the distant foliage in dark shades of green. Chiang is dressed in a black changshan (a traditional Chinese long shirt for men) while his son Ching-guo in a grey Zhongshan suit (also known as Mao suit in the west). A flight of pigeons wipe the screen every now and then as they fly across the foreground to the background and back again. Chiang tells his son in a solemn voice that he flew back from Manchuria because of him. Madame Chiang was leaving for the U.S. to ask for help (effectively money help). At this crucial point, the KMT could not afford any tumult. A heavy tap of his walking stick on the ground followed by a sudden close-up of him accentuates this message, which is targeted at Ching-guo. Ching-guo responds by saying that the entire economy of China would collapse if the corrupted Kong family was not punished. “I absolutely understand,” Chiang lets out a deep sigh. “The corruption of the KMT is in the bones.” He continues to exhort his son that although punishing the corrupted is important, the timing and the degree are crucial too. A shot-reverse-shot shows Ching-guo in a grimace. The shot returns to Chiang as he utters, “It’s tough. You lose the party if you proceed. You lose the country if you don’t.” The disagreement between them is subtly conveyed through another medium shot of Ching-guo. Although he tells his father that both the country and the party are at the brink of disaster, his father cuts him short. Chiang gives a one-sided exhortation-cum-lecture on the most crucial things at hand. He walks up the stairs, exits the frame, leaving Ching-guo in an ethical suspension. A slightly tilted high-angle camera shot on Ching-guo suggests his inferior position in this matter. Even though he is eager to help, the corruption of the KMT, as Chiang says, has become incorrigible. By contrasting the will to correct evil and the evil itself, the point on the corruption of the KMT is very well delivered. Moreover, it is extremely easy to relate to for contemporary Chinese audiences because ironically, the CPC has also become a corrupt party after it gained power (despite its constant crackdowns on corruption). In as short as 2 minutes and 8 seconds (the entire length of this scene), we see that as a leader, Chiang has his priorities – he needs to call the U.S. for help and he needs to save the South (the North is taken by Mao). However, Chiang is bound hand and foot. His armies are tired; his people are suffering; his leadership is in a peril.
In JSA (2000), as we have seen, the North Korean soldiers are humanized. They are shown to be just as curious, funny, warm-hearted, and yet powerless as the South Korean soldiers. Even though these approachable images of them as created by the film go against the prevalent demonized images in popular media, they are easy for South Korean audience to accept through dramatization. After all, North Koreans and South Koreans are related both jus sanguinis and jus soli. The foregrounding of their male bond, fraternal love, and mutual devotion sweeps aside the political disparities between the two sovereignties. Tragedy only ensues when the political disparities erupts from below again. I read somewhere that Director Park Chan-Wook once said that he was a devout reader of Sophocles. Antigone, written by Sophocles in 442 BC, is exactly a tragedy brought about by the conflict between one’s devotion for one’s family and one’s devotion for one’s city. In theorizing tragedy, Hegel has deemed Antigone the best Greek tragedy ever written because it shows the underlying rubric of the tragic form – the conflict of two equally good causes. Interestingly, Park’s film Old Boy (2003) also resonates with another Greek tragedy by Sophocles, Oedipus the King, written in 429 BC. (The voluntary blinding of his eyes by Oedipus and the voluntary cutting of his tongue by Oh Dae-su powerfully pass on a cluster of metaphorical messages. For example, in order to gain true insights and peace of mind, corporeal faculties like vision and speech may not be the relevant any more. Oedipus the King was deemed by Aristotle as the best Greek tragedy in his book Poetics. As for Sophocles, his playwright career is developed highly systematically. He constantly seeks improvement using theory.) By absorbing the vitality of Greek literature and mixing it in his Korean movies, Park is “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
In the case of The Founding of a Republic, literature and other established cinematic methods are borrowed but new grounds are broken too. If The Founding of a Republic had tried to humanize Chiang as well as the others instead of historicizing them, it would have ended up a historical drama. I think that China’s founding history is perhaps too heavy and expansive to allow for simple dramatization, which could easily trivialize or travesty history. Maybe I feel this way because I was not raised in a democracy and therefore resist trying to understand history from more personalized points of views, or through heroism, friendship, etc. I respect literature with all my heart; however, I like to see cinema being challenged to explore its capacity too. As we know, personalized accounts of history are copious in cinema. In China, dramas about Mao and on Chiang are everywhere. The Found of a Republic does something quite different from those dramas because Mao is not the protagonist and certainly not the entire story. This is not to say that the film does not humanize the characters. Rarely can one imagine Mao Zedong happily getting drunk or Zhou Enlai losing his temper. These unconventional snippets of their lives aim to shorten the distance between the national leaders and the general public. However, that said, I can see that these character subplots are never developed fully, meaning that The Founding of a Republic is still firmly about the history and not about the people. The film does not judge individuals based on who they are. Nothing is personal. For example, when David Kung, the General Manager of the Yangtze Company and also Ching-kuo’s cousin, defiantly refuses to sell his hoarded supplies in his godown, he says that he is a businessman and this is how to do business. In fact, conflicts abound in this film, but time and again, every bad guy is contextualized, historicized.
Other noteworthy sequences in The Founding of a Republic include the round table discussion about the design of China’s national flag and the voting on China’s national anthem. These symbolic objects are highly emotionally charged for Chinese nationals. How the design and the song are determined behind the scene has never been depicted in cinema until in this film. During the voting, a delegate, who is played by a very famous Chinese actor and comedian, Feng Gong, keeps raising his hand to speak but keeps missing the opportunity as others speak first. Finally he speaks after the camera falls on him the twelfth time, but he says coyly that everything has been said already. This kind of humor downplays the individual. We laugh at him because we understand that he is just as eager as everyone else except not as lucky to be the first one to speak. By laughing at his final and only remark, we acknowledge that the agreement has been reached; our laughter is our way of participation and our way of support. In fact, humor is a great way of reaching out to the audience. In JSA, there are many memorable scenes where we laugh at the characters too. For example, while every other guard is standing like a column in the demilitarized zone, Sergeant Lee and Jeong Woo-Jin spit on each other across the border, violently suppressing their own laughter. In a way, if the audience laughs too, they are guided into being subversive and into disrespecting the border.
Thanks to the aggressive marketing by the Marketing Company of the CFC, the box office success of The Founding of a Republic was a miracle. An interview with the manager of the company, Jiang Fude, reveals many exciting new methods that they have adopted to promote this film. It used to be that marketing was never taken seriously for domestic films; the marketing branch of the CFC was set up as late as 2007. At first, they tried to market it as a holiday film for the 60^th anniversary of China. However, as more and more stars joined the production, they quickly changed gear and started marketing it as a commercial film instead. Also, they did not make use of the commercial space on the state television China Central Television (CCTV) but made use of available platforms and created new channels for film advertising. For example, 4,000 sales agencies of Tsinghua Tongfang Co. Ltd were mobilized to promote the trailer; yet, Tsinghua had never had any trade relation with the movie industry. The company’s strategic maneuvers greatly reduced the total marketing cost, which was budgeted at 10 million yuan ($1.5 million); the total revenue generated in the marketing sector tripled the cost. Many new chains were added on to the company’s existing operational chains, creating an expansive network of support.[9]
The Founding of a Republic made 420 million yuan ($63 million), ten times of its total budget. It is ranked as the second highest grossing domestic film made in China’s film history. This year, Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock, which made 647.75 million yuan ($97 million), trumped it. Aftershock was co-produced by Huayi Brothers Co. – a private company unlike the state-run CFC – and IMAX. It will be interesting to see how Huayi and the CFC compete to have a share in the Chinese market in the future. As is evident in the recent five years, Chinese domestic films are climbing up the box office revenue chart one after another. With the success of each one of them, the industry slowly matures too. I think this is probably what has already happened in South Korea a decade earlier. As for national identity in national cinema, I think The Founding of a Republic is a rare achievement because it strikes a balance between individuals and history. It is entertaining but it is not entertainment. The film actually requires one to pay close attention to grasp the history. Watching this film feels like walking into a huge historical museum; you can feel its solemnity and a certain kind of openness. In our last class, Professor Jung-Bong Choi suggested that culture had shifted from following politics to following economics in the last five decades. Maybe Korean cinema has completed this transition while Chinese cinema is still in it. On another note, if the CFC integrates well with the market but at the same time remains a state enterprise and pits itself against the more commercialized Huayi, will the Chinese film industry be divided? If that happens, maybe the CFC will continue to promote national cinema by making quality pictures with non-escapist content, while Huayi will join the league with CJ Entertainment, making whatever to sell?

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[1] Ying Zhu and Seio Nakajima, “The Evolution of Chinese Film as an Industry,” in Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema, edited by Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010): 23-8.
[2] Ibid., 28-33.
[3] Ding Wenlei, “Building China’s Hollywood,” Beijing Review, Feb. 18, 2010,
http://www.bjreview.com.cn/business/txt/2010-02/11/content_246761.htm.
[4] Cheng Qi, “China’s Box Office is Expecting to Exceed 10 Billion Yuan in 2010,” China Economy, Nov. 18, 2010,
http://www.ce.cn/culture/whcyk/gundong/201011/18/t20101118_21979862.shtml.
[5] “CineAsia to Honor Lotte Cinema in December,” Yahoo! Movie News & Gossip, Nov. 14, 2010,
http://fe.movies.fy6.b.yahoo.com/news/usmovies.thehollywoodreporter.com/cineasia-honor-lotte-cinemas-december.
[6] Here are some combined results of the ten highest grossing Chinese films from my own research: 1) Aftershock (2010) yielded 647.75 million yuan ($97 million); 2) The Founding of a Republic (2009) yielded 420 million yuan ($63 million); 3) If You Are the One (2008) yielded 325 million yuan ($48.8 million); 4) Red Cliff I (2008) yielded 321 million yuan ($48.2 million); 5) Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) yielded 295.5 million yuan ($44.4 million); 6) Bodyguards and Assassins (2009) yielded 293 million yuan ($44 million); 7) Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) yielded 291 million yuan ($43.7 million); 8) A Simple Noodle Story (2009) yielded 261 million yuan ($39.2 million); 9) Red Cliff II (2009) yielded 260 million yuan ($39 million); 10) Hero (2002) yielded 250 million yuan ($37.6 million). Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) is currently playing in theaters, so its box office revenue is still growing.
[7] Frances Gateward, “Waiting to Exhale: The Colonial Experience and the Trouble with My Own Breathing,” in Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, edited by Frances Gateward (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007): 194.
[8] China Film Art Research Center and China Film Archive, The Document of The Founding of a Republic (Beijing: China Film Press, 2010), 547.
[9] Ibid., 439-51.