Term paper for moive commentary

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjcc20

Journal of Chinese Cinemas

ISSN: 1750-8061 (Print) 1750-807X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjcc20

Eulogistic comedy as domestic soft power: Biopolitical self-fashioning in It's My Day Off (1959)

Yingjin Zhang

To cite this article: Yingjin Zhang (2018): Eulogistic comedy as domestic soft power: Biopolitical self-fashioning in It's My Day Off (1959), Journal of Chinese Cinemas, DOI: 10.1080/17508061.2018.1475966

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475966

Published online: 30 May 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Eulogistic comedy as domestic soft power: Biopolitical self- fashioning in It’s My Day Off (1959)

Yingjin Zhang

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA

ABSTRACT Soft power as a concept measures the ability of a nation in obtaining positive outcomes overseas through cultural means, but its core ideas of attraction and credibility are productive in analyzing eulogistic comedy’s contradictory functions of propagating official policy and refashioning self-interests in socialist China. It’s My Day Off (1959) satisfies official expectations of constructing positive models for viewers to emulate, but it also reveals the technology of self-fashioning as a process under surveillance by the Party and the patriarch. A series of comic situations of missed opportunities foreground the logic of instant public recognitions and deferred libidinal gratification that overdetermines socialist self-fashioning as an endless psychic-somatic mechanism of self-othering. Surprisingly, it is by demonstrating the attraction of altruism that the film may have gained its unintended critical edge in disclosing the panoptic biopolitical condition in a socialist utopia.

Soft power: from international to domestic

In recent years, Western media and academia seem to have reached a consensus that China suffers from a ‘soft power deficit’ (Nye 2012) due to its persistent – and lately increased – censorship and repression of civil society (Zhou 2015). As one critic elabo- rates, ‘Free speech restrictions and censorship not only reduce the creative output of Chi- nese filmmakers but also raise credibility issues for foreigners’; as a result, ‘film’s soft power capacity is likely to remain dormant’ in China (Lovric 2016, 34). This consensus on China’s ‘dormant’ or ‘weak’ soft power is occasionally challenged by scholars who cite China’s successes in its state-run, top-down, and propagandist soft power initiatives, such as CCTV’s (China Central Television) foreign language channels (especially those target- ing Africa), although even challengers tend to accept that soft power may be best articu- lated in non-state, sub-state, bottom-up, and grassroot operations (Voci and Luo 2018).

My intervention in this article is twofold. First, I propose that we resituate the soft power discourse in a longer historical context of propaganda in which competing powers in a modern nation-state have always relied on communication technologies and popular cultural forms to advance their interests both domestically and internationally, and mod- ern China is no exception, neither in the twentieth century (Johnson 2013) nor in the twenty-first century (S. Cai 2016). Second, I borrow soft power’s core ideas of attraction and credibility to measure its domestic operations and demonstrate that, at least during

CONTACT Yingjin Zhang [email protected]

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

JOURNAL OF CHINESE CINEMAS, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2018.1475966

the late 1950s and the early 1960s, China’s soft power worked effectively by bringing state institutions, cultural workers, and target audiences together to construct a socialist utopia seemingly desirable and satisfactory to all parties involved. My intervention here is not to privilege soft power, which is a concept recently formulated and now desired as a policy goal by a growing number of nation-states in Asia, Europe, and South America (Cooke 2018), over propaganda, which has been a longstanding practice of nation-states, but which has suffered persistent negative publicity since the Cold War period. Rather, I seek to examine how this perceived ‘soft’ side of propaganda worked in socialist China when it is directed to the domestic front, although historically China’s socialist film culture had its own international ambition (Chen 2009).

Joseph Nye, Jr. defines soft power as ‘the ability to get what you want through attrac- tion rather than coercion or payments’ (2004, x). In modern public diplomacy and world politics, ‘coercion’ refers to military threats and ‘payments’ to economic means. Since both coercions and payment are perceived as measures of ‘hard’ power internationally, cultural influence is therefore ‘soft’ by comparison but is judged nonetheless to be effective in the long run. Nye’s ideal example is the United States, which ‘has long had a great deal of soft power’ not controlled by its federal or state government but ‘produced by Holly- wood, Harvard, Microsoft, and Michael Jordan’ (2004, x, 17) – that is, by a variety of non- state sectors such as visual entertainment, higher education, innovative high-tech firms, and competitive sports. For Nye, soft power is ‘the ability to get preferred outcomes through the co-optive means of agenda setting, persuasion, and attraction’ (2004, 16). The adjective ‘co-optive’ stipulates that the nation-state’s top-down ‘agenda setting’ must be supplemented by bottom-up acceptance of such agenda at a grassroot level for the intended ‘persuasion’ to work, and ‘attraction’ is thus posited as a required means of effec- tively bringing various parties together in pursuing a common goal.

To illustrate how soft power works domestically as persuasion and attraction, I exam- ine It’s My Day Off (Jintian wo xiuxi, dir. Lu Ren 1959) as an urban light comedy that suc- cessfully negotiates the contradiction between top-down propaganda and bottom-up self- fashioning in a radically changed society of socialist China in the 1950s–1960s. It’s My Day Off satisfies the official expectation of constructing positive screen images as credible models for viewers to emulate in public, but it also reveals the technology of self-fashion- ing as a process under strict surveillance by the Party and the patriarch. Aligned with the dominant ideology, cinematic surveillance maps the new metropolis of Shanghai as a giant knowable community populated by altruist people everywhere, in all walks of life, but a series of comic situations of missed opportunities foreground the logic of instant public recognitions and deferred libidinal gratification that overdetermines socialist self- fashioning as an endless psychic-somatic mechanism of self-othering. Before addressing self-fashioning as a new biopolitical condition in socialist China, we should revisit the ways film comedy was radically reinvented in the late 1950s to meet urgent socialist pro- paganda needs.

Attraction: comedy as eulogy

Given the new official expectation that film, like other forms of literature and arts, must obediently serve politics in socialist China (Clark 1987), ‘film workers’ (dianying gong- zuozhe) – a new appellation for filmmakers to highlight their new identity comparable to

2 Y. ZHANG

other workers in the city and the countryside and to connote ‘a deep-seated egalitarian understanding’ that ‘to work is glorious’ (Lu 2010, 99) – attempted in earnest to reinvent film comedy in order to come to terms with a radically changed society. For one thing, they quickly discovered that time-honored comic devices such as farce (huaji), gags (jiguan), gimmicks (xuetou), and humor (youmo) – all standard in a long tradition in pre- 1949 cosmopolitan culture of Shanghai1 – were now likely to generate misinterpretations and inflict unintended consequences. For another, they learned as a bitter lesson that comic functions of satire (fengci) and criticism (pipan), both previously acceptable and even deemed progressive, were no longer favored by the Communist authority. Satirical comedies that ridicule bureaucracy or reconnect with the artistic tradition of 1930s leftist films, such as Before the New Director Arrives (Xin juzhang daolai zhiqian, dir. L€u Ban 1956) and Unfinished Comedy (Wei wancheng de xiju, dir. L€u Ban 1957), were criticized nationwide as ‘poisonous weeds’ (ducao) and ‘white flags’ (baiqi) to be eradicated within a year (Rao 2005, 141–150). Several veteran Shanghai filmmakers – for instance, L€u Ban (1912–1976), who acted in the classic leftist talkie Crossroads (Shizi jietou, dir. Shen Xiling 1937), and Wu Yonggang (1907–1982), who directed the celebrated silent film Goddess (Shenn€u, 1934) – were persecuted as Bourgeois Rightists in 1957 and banished from the socialist film world for decades (Zhang 2004, 205–208).

The radical reinvention of film comedy as a genre came to the spotlight in a high-pro- file forum held in Beijing in 1960. The occasion was to assess ‘eulogistic comedy’ (gesong xing xiju),2 as exemplified by It’s My Day Off and Five Golden Flowers (Wuduo jinhua, dir. Wang Jiayi 1959), as a new type of comedy that satisfies both the political criteria of celebrating socialist construction and the artistic criteria of providing attraction and credi- bility. Cai Chusheng (1906–1968), a veteran leftist film director from the 1930s and one- time Deputy Director of the Film Bureau under the Ministry of Culture in the 1950s, cited Party Chairman Mao Zedong’s differentiation between targets of satire in his agenda-set- ting ‘Yan’an Talk’ in 1942 – namely, while it is politically correct to criticize enemies, we must abolish the ‘abuse’ or ‘excessive use’ (lanyong) of satire when referencing our allies and our own ranks. Instead of exposing darkness and ugliness as the majority of satiric ‘old comedies’ in pre-socialist China had done, new socialist comedy was expected to eulogize brightness, specifically ‘the new era, new life, and new people’ (Cai Chusheng et al. 1960, 34).

The political realignment of darkness with enemies and brightness with revolutionaries means that film workers could no longer honor Lu Xun’s 1925 dictum on two theatrical genres – ‘tragedy shows how what is worthwhile in life is shattered, comedy shows how what is worthless is torn to pieces’ (Bao 2008, 185) – because what is worthwhile or worth- less would now depend on the Party’s interpretation. According to the new expectation, mischievous gags, slapstick routines, and farcical elements – as in the pairing of clown- like skinny Han Lan’gen (1909–1982) and fatty Yin Xiuchen (1911–1979), and their sig- nature exaggerated gestures, facial expressions, and bodily entanglements modeled after Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (Rao 2005, 4) – in Unfinished Comedy became the display of an inappropriate ‘lowly taste’ (diji quwei), even though Han and Yin had been the sta- ple as a pair or individually in several leftist films of the 1930s, such as Big Road (Dalu, dir. Sun Yu 1934) and Fisherman’s Song (Yuguang qu, dir. Cai Chusheng 1934). Similarly, the comedy of manners, which is traceable to the cross-dressing, gender-bending ‘soft films’ (ruanxing dianying) like Girl in Disguise (Huashen guniang, dir. Fang Peilin 1936),

JOURNAL OF CHINESE CINEMAS 3

if not earlier, and which became popular in postwar Shanghai, as exemplified by Phony Phoenixes (Jiafeng xuhuang, dir. Huang Zuolin 1947) and Long Live the Wife (Taitai wan- sui, dir. Sang Hu 1947), would become ideologically problematic in the socialist era as they mock human weaknesses in most characters, regardless of their class backgrounds or ideological affiliations (Zhang 2011). As in The Man Who Doesn’t Bother about Trifles (Buju xiaojie de ren, dir. L€u Ban 1956), the criticism of the uncivilized behaviors (e.g. occupying two seats on a train, littering in public) exhibited by a writer of satire literature may strengthen the entertainment value of comic laughter, but it is far from setting an ideal model for the socialist audience. Steeped in the tradition of satire, humor, and farce, film comedy thus had a bumpy start in the early years of socialist China and seemed to have hit a roadblock by 1957 during the Anti-Rightist Campaign.

Given this impasse, film workers realized that comedy must be reinvented to eulogize socialism. In a complete reversal of ‘the cynical, critical, and accusatory “laughing at” mode of satire’, they quickly moved to produce ‘eulogistic comedy [that] endeavored to engage the audience in “laughing with” cheerful and positive characters in a collective celebration of the joie de vivre in a new society’ (Bao 2008, 217). The attraction of eulogis- tic comedy was both timely and obvious in the late 1950s. To film workers, they were not obliged to develop class struggle as a required narrative plot or expose contemporary social problems, both of which tended to backfire politically due to unpredictable cycles of changes in Party policy (Wang 2014). To the film audience, they enjoyed the pleasure of laughter without the guilty conscience of indulging in entertainment and were delighted in experiencing an idealized society populated by ‘all positive characters’ (Cai Chusheng et al. 1960, 35), as described by Tian Han (1898–1968), one of the most famous screenwriters and a ranking cultural administrator in socialist China. To Party leaders, they found a new art form that would help propagate their policy as major attraction without making themselves appear either too coercive to the audience or too obstructive in the narrative. Indeed, film critics and cultural administrators who attended the 1960 forum mentioned above brushed aside a stringent criticism of the absence of the authority figure in It’s My Day Off, for they were eager to credit the emergence of ‘new people and new things’ (xinren xinshi) in the film to the correct Party’s leadership (Cai Chusheng et al. 1960, 42).

The absence of the conspicuous Party leadership in It’s My Day Off drives home two interrelated points. First, from the perspective of biopolitics, this absence reveals precisely the invisible but omnipresent way in which power operates itself by organizing space and human beings in a panopticon form: ‘In this form of management, power is not totally entrusted to someone who would exercise it alone, over others, in an absolute fashion; rather, this machine is one in which everyone is caught, those who exercise this power as well as those who are subjected to it’ (Foucault 1980, 156). Second, this absence helps con- struct a socialist utopia in which people, to be new as expected in a new society, have learned to internalize new political expectations and discipline themselves to become spontaneous in their altruist responses to social – and indeed socialist – needs. New posi- tive characters are developed in such a way that they appear all the more attractive with- out official coercion and credible without personal pretension. As illustrated below, the attraction of socialist virtues (e.g. altruism, modesty, obedience) is best embodied by the protagonist Ma Tianmin, a policeman in It’s My Day Off who works through his nominal ‘day off’ and serves as a model for emulation on and off screen.

4 Y. ZHANG

Emulation: biopolitical self-fashioning

Emulation is a process of biopolitical self-fashioning, a process of training oneself men- tally and physically to perform in conscientious imitation of the models endorsed by the authority. For Michel Foucault, the modern organization of power over life was developed around two poles, ‘the disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population’, both integral to ‘a bio-politics of population’ (Rabinow 1984, 262; original emphases) that oper- ates through a system of normalization. Foucault thus observes of ‘subject’ within this bio- political system: ‘There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to’ (1983, 212). In terms of biopolitics, emulation combines subject-formation with subjugation to power and becomes an active practice of self-discipline and self-regulation, ‘a process of self-understanding … mediated by an external authority figure’ (Rabinow 1984, 11).

In socialist China, emulation took on special significance when the supreme leader Chairman Mao personally calligraphed a slogan in 1963 and exhorted the entire popula- tion to ‘learn from Comrade Lei Feng’. Lei Feng (1940–1962) was an ordinary army sol- dier who dutifully studied Mao’s thought and came to exemplify self-sacrifice because he had spent most of his off-duty time to help others in need before he died on duty in a truck accident. The ensuing nationwide campaign to learn from Lei Feng and ‘serve the people’ (wei renmin fuwu) would require the self-formation of the population through what Foucault enumerates as a variety of ‘operations on [people’s] own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct’ (Rabinow 1984, 11). In socialist China, Lei Feng exemplified ‘the direct translation of revolutionary culture … into subjec- tivity, and the extension of that idea into and through behavior, thought, and emotion’ (Larson 2009, 110). Remarkably, It’s My Day Off predated the campaign to learn from Lei Feng by four years and proactively experimented with constructing a screen model for public emulation.

For emulation to work, models must be attractive and credible, and they must appear to love what they do and do it spontaneously. In It’s My Day Off, policeman Ma does not intentionally set out to help others on his day off; otherwise, his altruism would be in question and he might not be as attractive or credible. In fact, Ma’s most important assignment for the day is personal: to meet his date as arranged by the wife of his police station chief. Yet, unexpectedly, he runs into one situation after another in which he vol- unteers his help and misses the scheduled meetings with his date again and again. The comic tension in this film derives largely from the conflict between Ma’s unfailing com- mitment to the public and his neglected or negligible need for the private. Significantly, even though the public overrides the private all the way through, the film stages a coinci- dence in the climax that ultimately rewards the private, as we shall see in the next section.

As a policeman (i.e. a man of the polis) in charge of residential neighborhoods, Ma works for the public and knows Shanghai very well, and his altruist ventures of the day provide a reliable guide to new socialist developments in various sectors of the city – neighborhoods, factories, the market, the postal office, the hospital, hotels, street intersec- tions, and so on. Even visitors from outside the city are purposefully included to eulogize socialist construction elsewhere in the New China. Grandpa Liu from the countryside is there to reference the Great Leap Forward, a much-hyped socialist campaign in rural

JOURNAL OF CHINESE CINEMAS 5

China in the late 1950s, while Luo Ailan from Lanzhou, the capital of Qinghai province, is needed to praise those Shanghai residents who followed the government’s call and relo- cated themselves to work in remote hinterland regions in western China. In the film, Luo is the only character with blemishes because he disregards public safety when riding his bicycle recklessly across street intersections and refuses to admit his fault when he is caught by Ma, but he eventually gains sympathy when he tells Ma that he loves his adopted hometown Lanzhou so much that he has changed his name to Ailan (literally ‘loving Lan(zhou)’), which sounds like a woman’s name in Chinese (‘lan’ denoting ‘orchid’) and furnishes another occasion of mirth in the film.

As an ordinary policeman who renders an extraordinary amount of ordinary services to the city, Ma is a model who is made so accessible for the audience’s identification that the chance of their emulation of his altruism is maximized.3 Krista Van Fleit Hang thus observes of Zhong Xinghuo (1924–2014), who plays Ma Tiamin in It’s My Day Off: ‘Zhong Xinghuo used humor to stimulate a comic identification in the audience’, and his embodiment of the ‘combination of extraordinary and ordinary is quite well suited to a socialist realist aesthetic, which imagines ordinary citizens moved to commit themselves to the socialist cause after being stirred by an artistic experience’ (2010, 108, 114). For Hang, socialist stars and Hollywood stars are positioned similarly in that they both sell dominant ideologies to respective audiences – the socialist values of ‘working as glorious’ (laodong guangrong) by the former, and commodity consumption by the latter. The public perception of film stars as simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary works at once to make them accessible to the viewer as object of desire and to distance them outside the viewer’s reach. As John Ellis (1982, 97) remarks,

The star is ordinary, and hence leads a life like other people, is close to them, shares their hopes and fears; in short, the star is present in the same social universe as the potential film viewer. At the same time the star is extraordinary, removed from the life of mere mortals, has rarefied and magnified emotions, is separate from the world of the potential film viewer.

The combination of ordinary and extraordinary sustains the dynamic of desire and sat- isfaction in the audience’s identification and emulation: stars are desirable as ordinary fel- lows in familiar everyday situations, yet unreachable or at most partially reachable due to their extraordinary personae; nonetheless, precisely due to repeatedly frustrated or incom- plete satisfactions, stars are all the more desirable.

In eulogistic comedy, humor is deployed to enhance a star’s ordinariness, to further attract viewers’ identification with and emulation of the model on display. In It’s My Day Off, Zhong Xinghuo’s humor is more performative and situational than verbal. His repeated line to others, ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s my day off’, becomes comical in that the viewer knows it matters indeed because the character he is going to miss the next appoint- ment with his date. Other humorous scenes in the film involving Ma include his jumping into a river and rescuing a small pig, his mistaken identity as the caring father of a sick child, his bewilderment when Luo Ailan turns out not to be a woman as expected, and his clumsy way of offering apples to others when apples are still wrapped in a basket.

One distinctive feature of Zhong’s comic performance is his habitual smiles, which seem contagious in the film because almost all characters smile and laugh in one way or another, especially when they are called to help others. Ma’s smiles show his satisfaction of helping others on the one hand and his reluctance to claim credit for his altruism on

6 Y. ZHANG

the other. Indeed, when his police chief’s wife blames him for always putting on ‘silly smiles’ (shaxiao) after repeatedly missing the appointments, her intention is to highlight Ma’s lovability derived in part from his silliness (sha de ke ai). Ma’s silly smiles add to the model’s ordinariness and promote identification and emulation on and off screen.

Off-screen emulation of socialist models has been lavishly documented, especially in connection with Lei Feng. As one anthropologist concedes, ‘the extent to which Lei Feng and his like were “modes of and models for” a whole way of life suggest [sic] that there are settings in which the state and the people, culture and propaganda, are hard to distin- guish’ (Farquhar 2002, 37). Socialist China is one such setting in which propaganda per- meated the culture of everyday life, and ‘the revolutionary subject was consumed … by a social vision that demanded a keen sense of one’s position and one’s relationship to power and a well-developed emotional and intellectual expression of this position’ (Larson 2009, 112–113). In other words, socialist models represent the ideal position the rest of society would aspire to occupy and experience by virtue of emulation.

Not surprisingly, onscreen emulation of ‘serving the people’ is visible everywhere in It’s My Day Off. Factory workers volunteer in the neighborhood cleaning before they go to work at a steel plant. Passengers in a bus agree to let the driver skip their stops and go directly to the hospital so that a sick boy can get emergency treatment. An old woman from the neighborhood sneaks into Ma’s room and takes away his dirty clothes to wash. A group of children find Luo Ailan’s lost wallet containing cash, invoices, and a train ticket and deliver it to the police station. When all dramatic events of altruism are appar- ently over for the day, the viewer is pleasantly surprised – and so is Ma in the diegesis – to see that the barber remembers Ma’s missed haircut earlier in the day and has waited patiently in Ma’s dorm room to offer him an offsite, late-night service. After all, both Ma and the barber are model workers (xianjin gongzuozhe) who no longer distinguish between public and private, labor and leisure, day and night. By mapping a variety of urban spaces throughout the day, It’s My Day Off constructs a socialist utopia where ‘one serves all, and all serve one’ (yiren wei dajia, dajia wei yiren), as a scholar described it back in 1960 (Cai Chusheng et al. 1960, 42).

Gratifications: instant and deferred

It is observed that Chinese film comedies from 1950 to 1966 typically place viewing sub- jects in a gratifying position of superiority because they know what characters do not know or only know partially in the diegesis (Wan 2000, 50–51). This narrative structure generates laughter when a character unknowingly enters a situation when the viewer knows the character is going to behave awkwardly. Such situational comedy depends on the unequal distribution of the known (to viewers) and the unknown (to characters) and results in suspense (something expected to come) more than surprise (something totally unexpected). In It’s My Day Off, the viewer knows all too well by the time Ma misses the first appointment with his date that he will miss the next one for sure, but exactly how it happens is a matter of suspense.

The unequal distribution of the known and the unknown puts in place three other comic devices – exaggeration (kuazhang), coincidence (qiaohe), and misunderstanding (wuhui). The logic of exaggeration means that comic situations will be repeated (e.g. miss- ing the date over and over contrary to one’s promise of doing otherwise), and such

JOURNAL OF CHINESE CINEMAS 7

exaggeration benefits from narrative coincidences, which make likely what otherwise might be unlikely to happen. Exaggeration and coincidence combine to create further misunderstandings between characters, which appear comic because the viewer knows these are misunderstandings whereas the characters do not know. To make such misun- derstandings even more comic, exaggeration ensures that certain built-in personality traits, such as Ma’s ‘silliness’ (sha), prevent a character from explaining his or her behav- ior upfront and thus further complicate a previous misunderstanding.

All these comic devices are packed in the climactic scene of It’s My Day Off. Because he has spent time checking on various hotels in Shanghai to find the owner of the lost wallet, Ma fails to show up in time for his date Liu Ping’s home-cooked dinner, as cooking is still a traditional test of a woman’s virtue in China. Liu takes away her special dish of sweet- and-sour fish in disappointment after Ma says, out of his candid silliness, that he has eaten dinner with a friend elsewhere, which is an added offense to the hostess on top of being extremely late for dinner and missing all previous appointments on the day. The awkward tension in the room is palpable when Liu ignores her post office colleague’s suggestion for another date at an opera theater, but all the while Ma is incapable of explaining exactly what had happened that prevented him from meeting in time. Just as Ma, now himself disappointed, is leaving the apartment, and the matchmaking verges on failure, Liu’s father comes out from his room and discovers to his delight that Ma is none other than the policeman who helped him rescue a drowning pig in the river and who mobilized workers in a local market to sweep up scrapped vegetables and feed his boatful of hungry small pigs. Ma’s anonymous acts of altruism, now fully recognized, are credible enough to clear Liu’s misunderstanding.

The mise-en-sc�ene of the climax deserves further scrutiny. First, the prioritization of the public over the private is reaffirmed when the romantic relationship between Ma and Liu is witnessed in public, with not only the blessing of Liu’s father (i.e. patriarchy) but also the approval of Ma’s police chief (i.e. the Party) and his wife (Liu’s colleagues), as well as Liu’s brother and sister-in-law. Such public approval of a private relationship may appear hilarious or even outrageous to present-day viewers, but they were politically necessary in the 1950s–1960s, as evident in a similar climactic scene in Five Golden Flowers in which the two ethnic minority lovers’ romantic rendezvous at the picturesque Butterfly Pond is rejoined and rejoiced first, voyeuristically, by two Han cultural workers hidden behind the bushes and then, performatively, by four other ethnic minority couples singing and danc- ing across the screen. The communal consummation of romance and the public celebra- tion of socialism go hand in hand at the end of a memorable eulogistic comedy in Five Golden Flowers.

Second, to return to It’s My Day Off, the climactic scene engineers an emotional roller- coaster ride for both Ma and Liu, plunging them into such a deep hole of misunderstand- ing that even Liu’s sister-in-law sees no point in fixing another date for them right away. Ma is already out of the front door when Liu’s father comes out to say goodbye to the guests and finds it a ‘coincidence’ (qiao) that Ma has managed to discover where he lives. Liu’s father creates a comic situation because by that time he is the only character who does not know the missed date and who mistakes his daughter’s demure manner to be her reluctance to accept the matchmaking. When he is informed, he is overjoyed and repeats the word ‘perfect’ (hao) several times and enthusiastically approves this ‘perfect’ matchmaking.

8 Y. ZHANG

As a source of gratification, the viewer’s sense of superiority is maintained in the film because all along they are attracted to identify with the camera, which represents the pan- optic surveillance enacted by the omniscience of the dominant ideology. The satisfaction of eulogistic comedy derives from the viewers’ double identification. First, they are required to identify with the dominant ideology, which, through what Louis Althusser calls ‘ideological state apparatuses’ that include film, ‘has always-already interpellated individuals as subject’ (1971, 175), as the subject of socialist construction in this case. Par- adoxically, the viewers can acquire such a subject position only by subjection because ‘there are no subjects except by and for their subjection’ (Althusser 1971, 182; italics origi- nal). Second, the viewers are compelled to identify with the protagonist Ma because the cinematographic apparatus ‘offers the subject perceptions “of a reality” whose status seems similar to that of representations experienced as perception’ (Baudry 1999, 774; italics origi- nal). Through the ideological working of film apparatuses, the viewers’ experience is shaped by their acceptance of representations as reality itself, or at least as an ideal form of reality to be desired through representation. Ma’s ordinary acts of extraordinary altru- ism on screen thus offer a model for them to emulate off screen, and to make such emula- tion even more desirable and pleasurable, Ma’s self-sacrifice must be rewarded by the end of the film.

I emphasize that to reward altruism is key to the effective identification propelled by a structure of instant public recognitions and deferred libidinal gratification in eulogistic comedy. From Ma’s perspective, his desire for his date is deferred in a series of exagger- ated coincidences, the purpose of which is to put his commitment to the public to repeated tests. Yet, his frustrated desire is compensated by another form of gratification, which is instant public recognition of his altruist deeds as people constantly thank him for his timely assistance. Ma misses his second appointment at the movie theater because he sends a sick boy to the hospital. The head pediatrician praises Ma as an exceptionally caring father and, when informed that Ma is not the father, she urges her medical staff to learn from Ma in serving the people wholeheartedly. In this case, Ma is doubly compen- sated by an instant public recognition and an intimate sense of family: when he carries the recovered boy out of the hospital with a satisfied smile, Ma is no longer an orphan boy he used to be but a recognized member of a large socialist family.

Given the structure of instant public recognitions, the more Ma’s libidinal gratification is deferred, the more gratified he feels in the public domain. It is in the public that his self-fashioning as an altruist policeman is fully displayed and justified. Yet, his self-fash- ioning is also a process of self-othering in that he is compelled to prioritize the public (communal well-being) over the private (personal desire) all the time. The only exception is the climactic scene in which such prioritization is performed for him, because this time his acts of altruism are narrated by Liu’s father and the police chief (who reveals the lost wallet as Ma’s reason for missing the dinner). Still, it is essential that Ma must be rewarded in public, with the Party’s and the patriarch’s dual approvals, and his reward must also be politically legitimate, as Liu is introduced as a fellow model worker in Shang- hai to begin with.

The viewers are completely vested in this structure of deferred gratification not only because such deferment translates into more dramatic suspense and comic enjoyment for them but also because they know all along that the ultimate reward will come at the end of deferred gratification. Not surprisingly, the climactic scene concludes with the camera

JOURNAL OF CHINESE CINEMAS 9

switching from a group scene of the public approval of the matchmaking to a medium shot of Ma and Liu in the same frame, and then zooming to a close-up of Liu, who finally breaks into a satisfied smile of her own. The happy ending in It’s My Day Off thus meets both political and artistic expectations and provides viewing pleasures on and off screen.

Historically, the convergence of public recognitions and private gratifications contin- ued to make eulogistic comedy attractive and credible in the early 1960s, although the for- mula of ‘major eulogy with minor satire’ was soon imposed to restrict eulogistic comedy to such settings as sports and service sectors (Rao 2005, 6). Big Li, Small Li, and Old Li (Da Li, Xiao Li, he lao Li, dir. Xie Jin 1962) is replete with enthusiasm for socialist con- struction while poking fun at people who try to skip daily exercises to their own embar- rassment or detriments. Satisfied or Not (Manyi bu manyi, dir. Yan Gong 1963) presents a series of hilarious scenes that eventually convince a young restaurant waiter to change his nasty attitude and to serve his customers in earnest, thereby satisfying his own desires both at work and in love at the end (Ma 1987).

Revision: (in)credibility and (il)legitimacy

This article suggests that, when we acknowledge the link between soft power and propa- ganda and adopt soft power’s core ideas of attraction and credibility to measure the domestic impact of socialist cultural production, the recent verdict on China’s soft power deficit or dormancy becomes historically inaccurate and theoretically unsubstantiated. In the heyday of socialism, soft power worked effectively inside China to propagate official policy and reinforce the Party’s legitimacy. Distinctive from other film genres, eulogistic comedy constructs an idealized world in which people help each other all the times and their needs are satisfied either instantly or eventually. As domestic soft power, eulogistic comedy ‘works on attraction but strives towards understanding rather than domination, empathy rather than rivalry, and perhaps even, in a less programmatic way, towards “har- monious society”’ (Luo 2018, 143). The socialist utopia constructed in It’s My Day Off projected such a harmonious society and presaged a new Chinese vision of ‘harmony’ (hexie) in the early twenty-first century by four decades.

Yet, upon closer scrutiny, we may interpret the film’s title – It’s My Day Off – as announcing a dilemma in which the individual is helplessly subsumed by the collective, the private overwhelmed by the public, and leisure overtaken by labor. The vision of socialist utopia dictates that there is no more day off for anyone, that individuals are expected to labor in leisure times, and that their libidinal desires must be deferred again and again. All this is part and parcel of biopolitical self-fashioning in socialist China where people were required to reshape their sense of self and society and dedicate themselves exclusively to the socialist cause. Surprisingly, it is by constructing the attraction of altru- ism that It’s My Day Off may have gained its unintended critical edge in disclosing – albeit not explicitly criticizing – panoptic biopolitics in socialist utopia. Hidden behind the façade of a harmonious society in It’s My Day Off is the obvious absence of the ‘day off’ (xiuxi, literally ‘rest’) as a private chronotope outside public surveillance, and the declara- tive ‘it’s my …’ in the film’s title ironically foregrounds the conspicuous lack of an individ- ual’s right to declare or define any alternative value when the possessive content of ‘my’ has already been preempted by the collective in a socialist utopia.

10 Y. ZHANG

As domestic soft power, eulogistic comedy mediates private desires and official demands, and the acceptance of a socialist utopia depends on the audience’s identification with the dominant ideology at a given time and their voluntary participation in emulation of models such as real-life hero Lei Feng or fictional character Ma Tianmin. In hindsight, we understand that the seemingly spontaneous identification in socialist China was indeed staged blindly because when urban viewers of It’s My Day Off celebrated onscreen achievements of socialist construction with laughter, they did not know that the Great Leap Forward had already plunged much of rural China into the tragic Great Famine, which lasted from 1958 to 1961 and resulted in 20–40 million deaths of starvation and related causes. The socialist utopia celebrated in It’s My Day Off thus functioned in effect to cover up the devastating reality in rural China at the time.

The collapse of socialist utopia seems inevitable when dystopic realities become known and the once-dominant values of altruism no longer command the audience’s identifica- tion and lose all their attraction and credibility. After publicly staged revolutionary pas- sions were expended by the late 1970s and were rechanneled to the sphere of economic self-interests in the 1990s, perceptions of socialist ideology in post-Mao China switched quickly from credibility to incredibility, from attraction to suspicion, and from legitimacy to illegitimacy. In a culture overwhelmed by disillusionment, skepticism, and even nihil- ism, film comedy has returned to the once-tabooed satire and farce as renewed screen attractions in postsocialist China. Post-Mao comedies are best exemplified by film adapta- tions of the tongue-in-cheeks ‘hooligan literature’ (liumang wenxue) by Wang Shuo (b. 1958), such as Troubleshooters (Wanzhu, dir. Mi Jiashan 1988), which ridicules revolu- tionary passions, trashes elite values, and deliberately makes financial gains the primary motivation of serving the people. Wang Shuo’s collaborator Feng Xiaogang (b. 1958) quickly built up his repertoires of ‘new year comedies’ (hesuipian), from his episodic mockery of ‘totalitarian nostalgia’ (Barm�e 1999, 316–326) in Dream Factory (Jiafang yifang, 1997) to his full-fledged postmodern parody in Big Shot’s Funeral (Dawan, 2001), which showcases Chinese ingenuity in outsmarting transnational capitalism, and which harkens back to the aesthetics of attractions characteristic of early cinema (Kong 2007; Zhang 2008). By the time Feng released his comedy of manners-cum-tourist promotion, You Are the One, I–II (2009, 2010), gratification of all desires is instantaneous rather than deferred, and romantic love consists of performative acts rather than genuine feelings.

Admittedly, official propaganda has continued in state-sanctioned main melody or leit- motif (zhuxuanl€u) films, but they are far from being attractive and credible, and eulogistic comedy is out of date and out of fashion. Instead of eulogy, political satire abounds in Gimme Kudos (Qiuqiu ni, biaoyang wo, dir. Huang Jianxin 2005), a comedy in which altruism no longer meets immediate public recognition and any potential reward must be sought after individually, in such an unscrupulous way that the legitimacy of altruism and its justification for reward become questionable. After targeting bureaucracy in comedies such as Dislocation (Cuowei, 1986), Huang Jianxin (b. 1954) explicitly makes socialist practices of praises (biaoyang) and rewards a laughing stock in a theater of the absurd, punctuated by black humor.

Strangely enough, at a time when Chinese domestic productions have largely dis- counted the eulogistic mode in comedy or other genres, the rise of China as a twenty-first century superpower has generated a different type of eulogy and emulation, this time involving Hollywood as a surprise partner. Identifying the United States as the primary

JOURNAL OF CHINESE CINEMAS 11

model, ‘other parts of the world are seeking either to emulate – or indeed, as in the case of China, to co-opt – Hollywood to support their soft-power strategy’ (Cooke 2018, 304). China’s recent co-optive measures vis-�a-vis Hollywood include its Dalian Wanda Group’s high-profile acquisitions, such as AMC (the second largest movie theater chain in the United States) in 2012 and Legendary Entertainment (an established production and finance company) in 2015 (Kokas 2017, 164). As an immediate result, recent Hollywood epic blockbuster co-productions, such as The Martian (dir. Ridley Scott 2015) and Inde- pendence Day: Resurgence (dir. Roland Emmerich 2016), often portray – if not outright eulogize – positive images of China (Kokas 2017, 63–88), although how much soft power can be obtained for China in such transnational investment in production and exhibition remains to be determined.

‘The success of soft power is always rooted in a process of co-creation’, as Paul Cooke reminds us (2018, 303). Such co-creation of narratives occurs not only in production but also in reception, not only in entertainment media but also in state policy and academic scholarship. Competition over soft power and national narratives will surely continue, as it has been pursued in various parts of the world for over a century. This article demon- strates that eulogistic comedy participated in co-creating a utopian national narrative of socialist China and functioned as soft power on the domestic front in the early 1960s. Since then, drastic changes in postsocialist China have compelled film comedy to co-cre- ate other local, national, and transnational narratives that alternatively confirm, compro- mise, or contradict soft power and dominant ideologies.

Notes

1. For instance, in the 1910s–1930s, Shanghai cultural entrepreneurs worked across a variety of comic genres and media such as fiction, drama, film, theater, cartoons, newspapers, and maga- zines (Dong 2008; Rea 2008).

2. Li Tianji (1921–1995), the scriptwriter of It’s My Day Off, credits Zhou Cheng for coining the term ‘eulogistic comedy’ in a Wenhui Newspaper (Wenhui bao) article in 1960, although Li had previously published an essay bearing the title ‘The Needs to Learn and Eulogize’ (Yao xuexi, yao gesong) when the film started its theatrical run in late 1959 (Li 1991, 163). Li was the screenwriter of the all-time Chinese classic, Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhichun, dir. Fei Mu 1947) and played the villain role of a Nationalist Army officer in Crows and Spar- rows (Wuya yu maque, dir. Zheng Junli 1949).

3. Zhong Xinghuo’s popularity is evident in two counts. First, he won the best supporting actor at the second Hundred Flowers Awards in 1963, albeit for his subsequent role in Li Shuang- shuang (dir. Lu Ren, 1962), a film about socialist transformation in rural China. Second, he was deeply impressed four decades later when some people still recognized him on streets as policeman Ma Tianmin, not as actor Zhong Xinghuo (Hang 2010, 116).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Yingjin Zhang is Visiting Chair Professor of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China; Distinguished Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of

12 Y. ZHANG

Literature at University of California, San Diego, USA. His English books include The City in Mod- ern Chinese Literature and Film (1996), Encyclopedia of Chinese Film (1998), China in a Polycentric World (1998), Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai (1999), Screening China (2002), Chinese National Cinema (2004), From Underground to Independent (2006), Cinema, Space, and Polylocal- ity in a Globalizing China (2010), Chinese Film Stars (2010), A Companion to Chinese Cinema (2012), Liangyou, Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis (2013), New Chi- nese-Language Documentaries (2015), A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (2016), and Filming the Everyday (2017).

References

Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Bao, Ying. 2008. “The Problematics of Comedy: New China Cinema and the Case of L€u Ban.” Mod- ern Chinese Literature and Culture 20 (2): 185–228.

Barm�e, Geremie R. 1999. In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press.

Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1999. “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th ed., edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 760–777. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cai, Chusheng, Ma Shaobo, Tian Han, Li Jianwu, Feng Mu, Bing Xin, Chen Mo, et al. 1960. “‘Jintian wo xiuxi zuotanhui’ (Forum on It’s My Day Off).” Dianying yishu (Film art) 6: 34–46.

Cai, Shenshen. 2016. State Propaganda in China’s Entertainment Industry. London: Routledge. Chen, Tina Mai. 2009. “International Film Circuits and Global Imaginaries in the People’s Republic

of China, 1949–57.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3 (2): 149–161. Clark, Paul. 1987. Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949. New York: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press. Cooke, Paul. 2018. “‘Soft Power’ and Shifting Patterns of Influence in Global Film Culture”. In The

Routledge Companion to World Cinema, edited by Rob Stone, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison, and Alex Marlow-Mann, 299–309. London: Routledge.

Dong, Xinyu. 2008. “The Laborer at Play: Laborer’s Love, The Operational Aesthetic, and the Com- edy of Inventions.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20 (2): 1–39.

Ellis, John. 1982. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Farquhar, Judith. 2002. Appetites: Food and Sex in Postsocialist China. Durham, NC: Duke Univer-

sity Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977,

edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1983. “The Subject and Power”. In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and

Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., edited by Hubert L. Dryfus and Paul Rabinow, 208–226. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Hang, Krista Van Fleit. 2010. “Zhong Xinghuo: Communist Film Worker.” In Chinese Film Stars, edited by Mary Farquhar and Yingjin Zhang, 108–118. London: Routledge.

Johnson, Matthew D. 2013. “Propaganda and Censorship in Chinese Cinema.” In A Companion to Chinese Cinema, edited by Yingjin Zhang, 153–178. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kokas, Aynne. 2017. Hollywood Made in China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kong, Shuyu. 2007. “Genre Film, Media Corporations, and the Commercialisation of the Chinese

Film Industry: The Case of ‘New Year Comedies’.” Asian Studies Review 31 (3): 227–242. Larson, Wendy. 2009. From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century

China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Li, Tianji. 1991. “‘You fengyu yeyou xianhua’ [There Have Been Storms and Flowers].” In Shanghai

dianying sishinian [Forty Years of Shanghai Films], 161–169. Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe. Lovric, Bruno. 2016. “Soft Power.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10 (1): 30–34.

JOURNAL OF CHINESE CINEMAS 13

Lu, Xiaoning. 2010. “Zhang Ruifang: Modelling the Socialist Red Star.” In Chinese Film Stars, edited by Mary Farquhar and Yingjin Zhang, 97–107. London: Routledge.

Luo, Hui. 2018. “Towards a ‘Chinese Cinema’ in New Zealand: Transnational Cinema as Localized Soft Power”. In Screening China’s Soft Power, edited by Paola Voci and Hui Luo, 128–47. Lon- don: Routledge.

Ma, Ning. 1987. “Satisfied or Not: Desire and Discourse in the Chinese Comedy of the 1960s.” East- West Film Journal 2 (1): 32–49.

Nye, Joseph S., Jr. 2004. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs.

Nye, Joseph S., Jr. 2012. “China’s Soft Power Deficit: To Catch Up, Its Politics Must Unleash the Many Talents of Its Civil Society.” The Wall Street Journal May 8. Accessed 10 July 2017. http:// www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304451104577389923098678842

Rabinow, Paul, ed. 1984. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books. Rao, Shuguang. 2005. Zhongguo xiju dianying shi [History of Chinese Film Comedy]. Beijing:

Zhongguo dianying chubanshe. Rea, Christopher. 2008. “Comedy and Cultural Entrepreneurship in Xu Zhuodai’s Huaji Shanghai.”

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20 (2): 49–50. Voci, Paola, and Hui Luo, eds. 2018. Screening China’s Soft Power. London: Routledge. Wan, Chuanfa. 2000. “‘Shiqinian dianying zhong de xijupian yangshi qianshu’ [Preliminary Discus-

sion of Comedy Genre in Films of the Seventeen Years].” Dianying chuangzuo (Film Creation) 4: 49–52.

Wang, Zhuoyi. 2014. Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Zhang, Yingjin. 2004. Chinese National Cinema. London: Routledge. Zhang, Yingjin. 2008. “Big Shot’s Funeral: Performing a Postmodern Cinema of Attractions.” In

Chinese Films in Focus II, edited by Chris Berry, 17–24. London: British Film Institute. Zhang, Yingjin. 2011. “Gender, Genre, and Performance in Eileen Chang’s Films.” In Chinese

Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts, edited by Lingzhen Wang, 255–273. New York: Columbia University Press.

Zhou, Yuxing. 2015. “Pursuing Soft Power Through Cinema: Censorship and Double Standards in Mainland China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9 (3): 239–252.

14 Y. ZHANG