What China's most successful film reveals about her people (Part 1)

...and their attitudes towards business dealings, domestic politics as well as geopolitics

This week 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 and is on track to potentially become the first film to earn $1 billion in a single territory. Some analysts predict it may gross 9.5 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) in the end.

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 same line was told by the presumed villain, 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 always draconian, and our people 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.

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.

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, the seeds of rebellion were also born. 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 years¹, 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 oppression.

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.

To be continued

In the next part of this article, I will explain how this duality between control and rebellion translates into how Chinese people deal with business / economic development, domestic politics / policies, and geopolitics / external relations.

I will also discuss how this duality will also impede China’s future growth.

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The full version can be read here.

1. Many scholars argue that the Western Han Dynasty and the Eastern Han Dynasty were not the same dynasty. Here, I am assuming they are but one.