"Race" ([min] [zu]): Chinese Film and the Politics of Nationalism

Contemporizing the National Style in Chinese Animation: The Case of Nezha (2019)

“…The term originated in the 1950s but is linked with the notion of ‘the Chinese School of Animation’ (Zhongguo Xuepai), a term originating in Yin’s (1988) article which argued there are intrinsic minzu (Chinese ethno-national) features which render Chinese animation unique. Both MacDonald (2016) and Berry (1992) trace a much older legacy for this notion of ‘national uniqueness’ applied to cinematic works, dating back to the early days of Chinese cinema. Berry (1992) argues that, as an ambiguous abstract ‘ideal’, the notion of ‘ minzu -characteristics’ is both problematically essentialist but also a form of flexible censorship: it remains up to those in power to determine what, out of the complex, rich and hybrid elements of China’s long history and heterogeneous cultures, should be posited as legitimately representative of a unified notion of China, and which of these characteristics are free from ‘foreign influences’ to the extent they can be held up as ‘uniquely’ ‘Chinese’ (p. 48).…”

“…Both MacDonald (2016) and Berry (1992) trace a much older legacy for this notion of ‘national uniqueness’ applied to cinematic works, dating back to the early days of Chinese cinema. Berry (1992) argues that, as an ambiguous abstract ‘ideal’, the notion of ‘ minzu -characteristics’ is both problematically essentialist but also a form of flexible censorship: it remains up to those in power to determine what, out of the complex, rich and hybrid elements of China’s long history and heterogeneous cultures, should be posited as legitimately representative of a unified notion of China, and which of these characteristics are free from ‘foreign influences’ to the extent they can be held up as ‘uniquely’ ‘Chinese’ (p. 48). This is therefore a process of privileging certain examples of ‘Chinese’ ‘culture’ while symbolically eliding others.…”

“…This is therefore a process of privileging certain examples of ‘Chinese’ ‘culture’ while symbolically eliding others. This also depends upon a tautological bind: films needed to have ‘Chinese characteristics’, but what these were exactly were never precisely set out; but de facto anything that was approved ‘must have had them’, therefore approved cinematic texts became the point of reference for such characteristics – even when their aesthetics were clearly being drawn both from Hollywood and Soviet socialist realism (Berry, 1992: 50). This also means that such cultural productions become expressive of an imagined ideal, what we might phrase as ‘culture’ not as ‘whatever beliefs and practices we actually happen to have but instead the beliefs and practices that should properly go with the sort of people we happen to be’ (Michaels, in Appiah, 2005: 309).…”

“…And, we would emphasize, some sense of ‘theoretical problem’ of ‘Chineseness’ (Chow, 1998). As a variety of scholars argue, ‘Chinese’ is a highly contested category, including not only the tensions between the PRC and Taiwan in regard to the safeguarding of ‘traditional Chinese culture’ and indeed the notion of the ‘Chinese’ ‘nation’, but the question of how to conceptualize the varied Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia and North America, and also the ambiguity of nominating China’s diverse ethnic minorities, their histories and their cultures (Berry, 1992; Chow, 1998; Fleming and Indelicato, 2019). As Chow (1998) argues, Chinese nationalism has struggled with its own ambiguous ‘post-coloniality’, what she calls the ‘victim-cum-empire status of the term Chinese ’ (p. 8, emphasis in original).…”

In Memory of Meishu Film: Catachresis and Metaphor in Theorizing Chinese Animation

“…3 From here on, for easy readability, SAS is used instead of 'Shanghai Meishu Film Studio', except when the term meishu film is used in analysis and discussion that refers to 'the works of the Chinese School' or describes a particular animated film genre. 4 ChrisBerry (1992) considers that the Chinese minzu style reveals 'race-centrism' because he juxtaposes the ambiguous minzu with 'race' and puts post-1949 Chinese film into the misread field of 'race-centrism' (pp. 45-58).…”