What China's most successful film, Ne Zha 2, reveals about her people (Completed)

...and their attitudes towards personal life, domestic politics as well as geopolitics

For those of you waiting for the second part of my review about Ne Zha 2, here it is! For part 2, I will discuss what the “duality between control and rebellion” inherent in our cultural memories means for our attitudes toward personal & business life, politics as well as geopolitics. In the end, I will also explain the limitations that this kind of cultural setup has on our future growth.

For the sake of a complete reading experience, I also combine Part 1 here in the same post, with some important edits. If you have already read Part 1, you can just scroll down to the section titled “Implications”.

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What China's most successful film reveals about her people

These past 2 weeks will have a special page in the history of Chinese cinema.

Ne Zha 2 has just broken the record for China's highest-grossing film. At the time of writing this article, it had already earned $1.5 billion, bringing it very close to the celestial hall of the top 10 grossing films of all time. In the end, it may surpass The Lion King and even Jurassic Park.

A commercial success of this magnitude, just when the Chinese economy is fabled to be “crashing”, demands our attention and should be a good opportunity to give us a unique peek into China’s collective psyche

(I don’t think there are any spoilers in this article, so rest assured! But below is its trailer if you are not familiar.)

Ne Zha 2 is the sequel to the also-successful 2019 film Ne Zha, which features the eponymous mythical figure 哪吒Nezha—a demon-child-turned-deity known by almost every Chinese person for his rebelliousness and destructive behaviors but also martial prowess and heroic feats.

What’s also interesting is the stark contrast between Ne Zha 2 and another movie in Chinese cinema right now called Operation Leviathan, a patriotism-themed movie set in a nuclear submarine. The movie had a dismal performance, and controversy is currently brewing that bad reviews by made cultural “rebels”, who despise commercializing nationalist sentiments, have led to its poor performance.

Compared with Operation Leviathan, Ne Zhe 2 belongs to a completely different breed. One of the most important lines in the film is "My life is up to me, not up to the gods我命由我不由天," a line first popularized by the 1993 movie Taichi Zhang Sanfeng, in which the presumed villain told the same line, but who was later turned into an anti-hero in popular culture, inspiring generation of people to say no to destiny.

The same theme of rebellion and nonconformity was also tightly intertwined with the Wukong (monkey king) story, now popularized by the Black Myth franchise. Last year, I wrote about the story of Wukong:

At its very core, it’s the story of a rebel, who acquired some magical powers, cherished liberties, had some fun, created troubles, got bestowed with some official job but was looked down upon as an under-class, rose up in rebellion against the hypocritical court, got severely punished, rose up again and almost destroyed the heaven, got jailed for 500 years, and finally went on a journey for the common good, and beaten up demons along the way, and finally became a buddha himself.

This leaves us with the obvious question: the stereotype about Chinese is that we are very obedient people. Our government is always bad, our laws are always draconian, and our people are always nice but sheepish. So how would the Chinese, supposedly obedient to the ruling class, openly treasure those figures of rebellion so much?

Two sides of the same coin

The stereotype is not completely wrong. On a daily basis, Chinese people tend to look up more to authority than those from Western and especially American cultures.

But it’s only half of the story. like a coin, there is always a flip side.

And that coin was forged from the very beginning of our collective history.

China’s first emperor was Qin Shihuang, the “First Emperor” (259-210 BC). He was the very first Chinese emperor in the sense that he, for the first time, ruled over Chinese land through a centralized political system, dismantling the feudal system before him.

The same feudal system was prevalent in Europe, Japan, and many parts of the world. When a Chinese student learned about Western feudal systems, we all read the line “The lord of my lord is not my lord, the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal.领主的领主不是我的领主，附庸的附庸不是我的附庸.” So, in Europe, a fief was only answerable to his duke, and the duke was, in turn, only answerable to his king. In Japan, it’s the many shoguns who held real power in their respective fiefdoms. Each person was born and more or less died in the same position in society’s ranking order from generation to generation.

However, China’s system after the First Emperor was very different. The right characterization is instead, “All the land under heaven belongs to the king/emperor普天之下莫非王土,” and so that, unlike in Europe, the lord of my lord IS my lord, the lord of all lords.

Just when this absolutist power was set up at the expense of feudal nobles, people became more atomized, and the seeds of rebellion were also sown.

Only one year after the First Emperor died, the Chen Sheng and Wu Guang uprising broke out. Chen Sheng, the peasant rebel leader, was immortalized for his famous quotes, “Are kings and nobles given their high status by birth?(王侯将相宁有种乎?) and “How can a sparrow comprehend the ambition of a swan?" (燕雀安知鸿鹄之志哉?)

That uprising was unsuccessful, but Qin Dynasty collapsed under its weight, giving rise to intense civil war. A prominent player in that civil war was Xiang Yu. When Xiang Yu was a kid, he was one of the onlookers witnessing the fantastical imperial procession of the First Emperor. But instead of worshipping, the future Hegemon-King of Western Chu murmured to his uncle: “Someone can take his throne.”

The Hegemon-King was eventually defeated and killed (but immortalized in the Farewell My Concubine storyline.) The final victor was Liu Bang, originally no more than a lowly bureaucrat at the bottom of the First Emperor’s august state machinery. From that humble beginning, it took Liu Bang only six years to found the Han Dynasty, take the throne, and unify the country. His Han Dynasty went on for 400 hundred-odd years, collapsed again under another peasant uprising, and gave rise to another civil war period: the Three Kingdoms.

Rebellions, peasant uprisings, and acts of armed defiance, large and small, happened throughout China’s history. There is an endless list of low-lives taking the throne for themselves. Most of them failed in their endeavors and were killed, but a few of them actually made it to the end. And when you have so many success stories (even if that’s only 0.01% of all cases, they are sufficient to be an inspiration for all future rebels.

By now, you should be able to realize that this streak of rebellion has always been with us. At its core, it’s about not accepting destiny when destiny turns against us. It’s about never being satisfied by the status quo if the status quo is terrible. It’s about staying tenacious, despite setbacks.

Just as Mao Zedong, a quintessential rebel in a semi-modern form, whose political party was once a quintessential peasant rebel force, famously said:

哪里有压迫，哪里有反抗。

Wherever there is oppression, there is rebellion.

In comparison, it is much harder to find similar cases in Europe, Japan, or the Indian subcontinent, where it’s more likely for someone to accept the fixed roles they were born with. Moreover, in many societies and cultures, great theological efforts are made to turn people’s attention to the afterlife so that they can feel less pain in the present life.

But China is different. We do not have a coherent imagination of the afterlife. The problems we face today must be dealt with now and here. And if that involves “taking the throne,” then so be it. There are just simply too many success stories to kill off that thought.

Implications

This duality between control and rebellion and this deep tendency to “say no to fate” translate into how Chinese people deal with their personal & business lives, politics, and geopolitics.

On personal and business life

Deep down, every Chinese understands Xiang Yu’s words: “Someone can take his throne.” We do not believe any person’s societal role should be fixed forever. The urge for self-growth and self-cultivation is huge. And even when, at some stage in our lives, we feel we can’t advance anymore, many of us will count on our children to continue the race, which is the source of Chinese parents’ obsession with education.

Social mobility is of paramount importance, and our faith in social mobility is at the core of social stability. That’s why a system as “inhumane” as Gaokao, China’s college entrance exam system where each individual student’s life is to be determined by a single exam continues to last, because it may be the fairest system out there in terms of social mobility. As Amber Zhang observed in Baiguan’s YouTube channel, stealing money is a lesser crime than stealing Gaokao test papers in China because the latter is a matter of national security.

This is also why Chinese people can be very entrepreneurial. It is no coincidence that Chinese immigrants in Southeast Asia and many parts of the world came out of nothing but eventually formed large merchant families in their respective countries despite all the odds stacked against them.

“My life is up to me, not up to the gods.”

On politics and governance philosophy

That the Chinese people can always be the most radical rebels is a major fact that always looms large in the psychology of China’s ruling class.

The Chinese word for this is “造反 create rebellions”, and virtually all of Chinese politics revolves around making sure that people won’t “create rebellions”.

Yes, some instruments of control and even oppression are necessary for this policy goal. But the thing about China is that we have had so many dynastic cycles that any generation of ruling elites knows those instruments alone would only be expedient. To really prevent 造反, you have to, eventually, make people satisfied with their lives.

It’s only within such a context that you would understand why, a few weeks ago, our Ministry of State Security, a key component of the “instrument of control” and China’s CIA (some people would think it’s the KGB), would publish a history treatise on their WeChat discussing the downfall of Qin Dynasty, the very dynasty founded by the First Emperor. That MSS article specifically discussed why the Qin collapsed so quickly, despite pioneering a set of draconian laws and mass control mechanisms.

That reason is easy to find. You only need to look at the story of Liu Bang, the above-mentioned lowly-bureaucrat-turned-Han-emepror to understand why.

The highlight of Liu Bang’s bureaucratic career during the Qin Dynasty was a mission to send some convicts (mostly were petty crimes but punishable by death) to their execution sites. But along the way, many convicts fled. If the harsh Qin laws were to be observed, Liu Bang himself would also be sentenced to death because of his negligence. Seeing this desperate fate ahead of him, Liu Bang chose to flee and turned into a bandit himself. Only 2 years later, Liu Bang’s rebel army charged into Qin’s capital.

The conclusion of the MSS about this whole episode, which is the same with generations of Chinese intellectuals across the two millennia, is that if a government wields its instrument of control too harshly but loses the hearts and minds of the people, it will collapse.

Yes, you hear me correctly, that’s the conclusion of an official article published to the whole world by, of all people, China’s Ministry of STATE SECURITY.

So, in a way, this knowledge about the rebellious potential of the Chinese people creates a unique structure of an “electoral system.” This “electoral system” is not about a usual election of votes, though, but an ultimate election of people’s choices. It does not have a fixed schedule, and it may not be held for a few hundred years. It will only organize itself and present a result under the most dire circumstances, and when the results are revealed, they usually come with rivers of blood.

In ancient times, people call this system of “elections” the “Mandate of Heaven.” The ultimate goal of China’s political leaders is to prove them worthy of this mandate.

This is the same electoral system that Mao Zedong himself participated in. Even during his own “bandit time”, he discussed in the famous “Cave-dwelling Dialogue” whether his party could, borrowing the words of the Dragon Queen, “break the wheels” of this historical boom-and-bust cycles.

It’s also the same question that Xi Jinping pondered heavily.

Rest assured, we might not discuss this daily, but the thought always lurks there and drives many of the policy choices.

On geopolitics and external relations

China may not like war, and its ambitions for expansionism have been kept at bay and became part of its culture a long time ago, but facing oppression, like Nezha or Wukong, China will also never really back down. Since even the gods won’t be respected, why should China care about the opinions of bullies?

This is the fundamental reason I always firmly believe that export controls or sanctions would never work on China and could only backfire. If the foreign policy goal of the US is to stop the rise of China, hoping that by sanctioning China they can pressure China to stand in line, it will only inspire China to rise even faster. Those people who are proposing these policy measures are utterly confusing the tactical “meekness” of the Chinese with strategic “weakness.”

Limitations

Again, like a coin, there is always a flip side. Just as our inner rebelliousness drives us to grow and prosper, it also creates an invisible cap on our potential. Because to see the world only as a constant battle of climbing the ladder and of “taking the throne” limits our fixation on only worldly exploits.

Since there is no respect for “the gods”, there is no respect for the immovable, the platonic, the abstract world of perfection removed from the practical world.

There is no respect for law.

There is the law of the land. A major difficulty in setting up the rule of law in China (which is necessary for a more participatory political system) is that deep down, most of us still believe people stand taller than laws, and the person stands taller than the office s/he occupies. The laws are not yet paramount, and gaming the rules and changing the rules arbitrarily is deeply embedded in our cultural genetics.

There is also the law of nature. It is not a coincidence that Newton, Gauss, or Leibniz were born in Europe in the 17th/18th century but not in the Ming or Qing Dynasties of the same era. It’s also not a surprise that the word “logic” had no origin in Chinese, and could only be phonetically translated to “逻辑luó ji”.

If some version of Newton was born in 1700 China and started to ponder the laws of gravity or calculus, he would been seen as a freak, to be either altered or banished, since what’s the good use of calculus? Because it is beautiful? Nonsense! It could not be eaten. Nor was it part of the imperial exam. Stop this nonsense!

We were too busy with the struggles of this world to look up at the sky.

Even today, whenever I watch a video explaining mathematical concepts in China, from time to time, I can see in the comment section someone asking:

“What’s the use of this?”

But seeing the beauty of the immovable, despite its apparent lack of real-world use, is, I believe, the West's core strength, which has enabled the West to achieve economic, political, and scientific dynamism, and made the West such an enduring inspiration for so many centuries.

This is not to say China has not changed. As soon as China finally met the West in 1840, we started to be altered too. A seed for the perfect world of laws and sciences has been planted in our collective consciousness and is blooming right now.

But stuff like “culture” changes as slowly as glacier, moving only a few inches a year. I can only hope for a future when we can finally find the good balance between our worldly resilience and appreciation for otherworldly beauty, and when we can say no to destiny, while also respect the invisible laws of universe.