Teaching China ’ s Cultural Revolution through Film : Blue Kite as a Case Study

“The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (1966-76), or Wenge , as it is referred to in its condensed Chinese equivalent, represents a collective trauma for the Chinese nation and people in the twentieth century. However, compared with more amply researched and lucidly presented parts of modern Chinese history in English language scholarship outside China, its ambiguity, complexity, and political sensitiveness all make this period more elusive and harder to grapple with for scholars and teachers of Chinese history and culture. Within China, although more diverse historical narratives about this period have emerged in recent years, the Cultural Revolution is still barely mentioned in standard high school history textbooks even today.


Teaching China's Cultural Revolution through Film:
Blue Kite as a Case Study Jin Feng  Grinnell College   "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" (1966-76), or Wenge, as it is referred to in its condensed Chinese equivalent, represents a collective trauma for the Chinese nation and people in the twentieth century.However, compared with more amply researched and lucidly presented parts of modern Chinese history in English language scholarship outside China, its ambiguity, complexity, and political sensitiveness all make this period more elusive and harder to grapple with for scholars and teachers of Chinese history and culture.Within China, although more diverse historical narratives about this period have emerged in recent years, the Cultural Revolution is still barely mentioned in standard high school history textbooks even today.
Yet the Cultural Revolution reveals, in bas relief, the many irresolvable contradictions in China's quest for cultural modernization and national sovereignty in the twentieth century.Narratives of Chinese people's experiences of the Cultural Revolution not only expose the dire consequences of Maoist ideologies unchecked by critical thinking, self-reflexivity, and considerations of individual rights, they also show the continued and intensified conflicts between traditions and modernity, nationalism and individualism inherent in the May Fourth radical project of national salvation. 1It is thus all the more crucial to teach our students the historical and cultural lessons learned from China's Cultural Revolution, and teach them effectively, if we agree with Johnnella E. Butler, who endorses the arts and humanities as wellsprings of empathy and of sustenance for participatory democracy.
Butler argues that democracy requires engagement with others beyond one's community and thrives on feelings of connectedness to others.At the least, it requires us to accept respectfully the existence of narratives and experiences different from our own.This acceptance relies on empathy, defined by her as the ability to understand and share the feelings of others.Since each person cannot know every historical or imagined fact, or perceive experience exactly as another does, the connections between self and others are not inherent to humankind but require nurturing through exposure and experience.According to Butler, the arts and humanities instill in us precisely the necessary empathy that guards against misunderstandings, fear, essentialism, and hostility. 2utler in effect also asserts that human beings have a capacity for empathy that transcends boundaries of language, culture, religion, age, gender, and physical ability.The arts and the humanities can inculcate empathy, because in the immortal words of Ronald Takaki, they provide us with "a different mirror" to reflect the connected histories and shared narratives of human beings, be they conflicting or complementary to one another. 3Yet, from my own experience of teaching Chinese literature and film to undergraduate students at a liberal arts college in the United States, it is equally essential to help students explore the most productive way of using this mirror, since we only see what we wish to see most of the times.Thus, only by developing the proper ways of "seeing," can we derive the most benefits from such a different mirror, and learn to use it to weigh, consider, analyze, and reconcile our relationships to one another.
For my students, the value of studying Chinese literature and film lies in the development of their imagination, sensitivity, and eventually critical thinking and self-awareness.My experience of using Blue Kite, a Chinese language film by the Fifth Generation director Tian Zhuangzhuang (b.1952), to teach China's Cultural Revolution shows that it provides not just a mirror for the self, but more importantly, a window on the experience and inner life of others.
In this article I will use Blue Kite as an example to explore some effective ways to teach Chinese film to undergraduate students in the United States.As I will show below, Blue Kite attracted my students because of its unique combination of accessible and gripping plot, provocative yet relatable messages, and, not the least, fluid but complex storytelling through a unique cinematic language.Thus, my students not only found echoes of its central themes in other literary and filmic works that we have discussed in this class: such as the Chinese family, youth, and conflicts between traditions and modernity.More importantly, they responded to the film's subtle yet haunting artistic effects both viscerally and intellectually, even though it may appear to be less visually striking than some other Fifth Generation films, such as Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige [b.1952],  1985), which boasts sculptural landscape and a powerful color scheme of yellow.

Notes on Blue Kite
Filmed in 1993 with funding from both Hong Kong and Japan but banned by the Chinese government upon its completion, Blue Kite nevertheless won the Grand Prix at the Tokyo International Film Festival and Best Film at the Hawaii International Film Festival, both in 1993.The story is told from the perspective of a young boy called Tietou growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Beijing, and describes the experiences of ordinary Chinese people among all the political chaos of the period, such as the "Anti-Rightist Movement" (1957-59) and the Cultural Revolution.Blue Kite is generally regarded as a quintessential example of China's Fifth Generation filmmaking and one of their representative historical narratives of and collective reflections on the Cultural Revolution, along with works by other Fifth Generation directors such as Zhang Yimou's  (b.1951) To Live (1994) and Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine (1993).
The Fifth Generation filmmakers, mainly composed of the class of 1982 from the Beijing Film Academy, are well known for their emphasis on personal style and language as well as their political and cultural commentaries. 4For the first time in modern Chinese cinema, they insisted that film be viewed as an object of aesthetics and the filmmakers themselves as artists, and commented on the totality of national culture and history at an allegorical level.The Fifth Generation also took a more antiestablishment stand than previous generations of filmmakers in China, who often reproduced standard images of mainstream ideology in their works. 5Trained in Western cinematography and interested in reaching out to an international audience, the Fifth Generation also produced works that can better serve as "mirrors" for American undergraduate students to reflect their lives and interests. 6lue Kite, in particular, possesses unique artistic features that distinguish it as an especially "teachable" film, compared to other Fifth Generation films I have taught.Unlike the more "artsy" Yellow Earth, which to my students seemed to lack plot and action, Blue Kite tells a riveting story of an ordinary Chinese family.It also seeks to construct a historical narrative that is highly political yet at the same time deeply rooted in the personal and familial.This characteristic, along with its distinctive cinematic language, enabled me to guide students to both make connections within this course by investigating its central themes and imagery, and increase their self-reflexivity even as they readily related to the characters in the film.Blue Kite later also became a point of reference, against which my students compared other cinematic representations of the Cultural Revolution, such as Xie Jin's (1923-2008) Hibiscus Town (1986)  and Zhang Yimou's To Live.
By employing long shots and long takes, Blue Kite not only presents avian views of Beijing and hence a historical, panoramic perspective, but also enhances a "realistic" feel, since it apparently follows the scenes of everyday living of the common Chinese people: such as a busy courtyard (siheyuan) where different households interact with one another, and a small lane (hutong) that witnesses both people's daily businesses and the sudden and unexpected tragedies in life.The spatial arrangement of Blue Kite has subverted more standard historical narratives endorsed and disseminated by the Chinese state, particularly if seen against Hibiscus Town, a film also set in the Cultural Revolution by then more established director Xie Jin.Perhaps China's best known director, Xie Jin's career spanned six decades and his works had a profound influence upon Chinese society particularly in the 1980s, the decade immediately following the end of the Cultural Revolution.Scholars have seen Xie's works as "melodrama," with not only dichotomizations of good and evil (and insider and outsider) but also static spatial code adopted from traditional theater.As Ma Ning argues, melodramatic conventions in Chinese theater typically code male and female according to a yin/yang dichotomy: "The right designates yang, which means masculinity/ positivity/ law/order, while that of the left denotes yin, which means femininity/ negativity/ lawlessness/ disorder." 7Ma remarks that Xie Jin adheres to the same gendered spatial coding even while attempting to reverse traditional class structure and depict the profound social transformations brought about by the Chinese Communist Party. 8n Hibiscus Town, which depicts the trials and tribulations of the lovers Sister Hibiscus (denounced "landlord") and Qin Shutian ("rightist" and "anti-revolutionary") especially during the Cultural Revolution, Xie Jin typically places female characters on the left side of the screen.This is especially striking when a newly rehabilitated Qin Shutian meets Li Guoxiang (former "revolutionary rebel," and nemesis of Qin and his romantic interest) at the ferry toward the end of the film.While Qin is shot with a full frontal image, standing tall and straight and almost filling out the whole screen, Li is depicted as crouching and cowering on the left side of the screen, barely daring to look Qin straight in the eye.Small wonder my students complained about the simplistic way that Xie Jin treats this female character in the film, pointing out that he does not allow the audience to see the psychological abuses that Li had received prior to the Cultural Revolution, even though the novel by Gu Hua, 9 from which the film was adapted, originally describes Li's psyche and motivations for joining the Cultural Revolution.Introducing Xie Jin's melodrama thus helps students understand not only the effective spatial arrangement in Blue Kite but also how Tian Zhuangzhuang and directors of his generation attempted to rebuke dominant conventions in order to create their own distinctive styles.
The image of the kite is invested with rich symbolism and thematic concerns.It simultaneously symbolizes freedom, a carefree childhood, and the parent-child relationship on the one hand, 10 and also represents rootlessness, destruction, and family tragedy on the other.One of the most memorable scenes that feature a kite is the ending of the film, where Tietou lies unconscious on the ground, after having suffered a severe beating by the Red Guards because he has tried to protect his mother, who is being dragged away to a labor camp.Through his half-closed eyes, we see that his kite is stuck in a bare tree, broken and desolately fluttering in the wind, and we also hear the refrain of a childhood song that his mother has taught him, which describes the loving relationship between a mother crow and her son.This scene effortlessly invokes for the audience Tietou's memories of happier times, such as how his father made a kite for him to play with, how his first stepfather promises to fix a broken toy for him, and how he later also teaches the granddaughter of his second stepfather how to fly a kite.It also makes the breakup of Tietou's family, including the death of the three father figures in his young life and the forced separation of mother and son all the more poignant.The audience can feel that Tietou is really and utterly alone at this point, even though his mother has been a constant and nurturing presence in his life throughout previous tragedies.The broken kite thus symbolizes the severing of his final family tie and the resulting sense of disorientation and uprootedness.
Additionally, the dominant hues of blue and gray of the film, a "realistic" and forceful recall of the blue and grey Mao suits worn by Chinese people at the time, add to the general tone of melancholy and tragedy, while the bits of red either portend ominous happenings later or prove that personal pleasures and happiness are only too transient and fragile at this trouble-ridden historical moment.For example, the broken head of the red horse figurine, a wedding gift for Tietou's parents, foreshadows the death of Tietou's father.Moreover, Tietou's mother does not dare to wear a traditional-style red Chinese qipao that her mother has made for her wedding, because she fears that the dress's associations with "old forms" would indicate political incorrectness in the somber atmosphere following Stalin's death.Tietou's celebration and enjoyment of the Chinese New Year, full of red fireworks and lanterns, also prove only too fleeting, when his first stepfather falls seriously ill and dies shortly afterwards.The color scheme of Blue Kite also sets up striking contrasts with other films that I have introduced to my students, such as Red Sorghum (1987) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), both directed by Tian's former classmate at Beijing Film Academy, Zhang Yimou.Originally trained as a photographer, Zhang's films feature the overpowering use of red, an auspicious color in Chinese cultural traditions, to symbolize the celebration of vital life force even as it also signifies violence and bloodshed in his films.
As will be seen below, precisely because of the rich and complex cinematic language of Blue Kite as both a rebuke of established conventions and a bold experiment of new styles of narratives, it provided not only a mirror for my students to see their own images reflected but also a window onto a tumultuous, tragic, and often frighteningly confusing historical period to both those directly involved at the time and later generations.

Teaching Blue Kite
At Grinnell College, I regularly teach a culture-in-translation course entitled "Modern China through Film and Literature."Since this course has no prerequisites and all readings are in English, non-majors as well as majors from all four years can take it.This provides distinct challenges to me as the instructor.I have to consider not only students' different levels of previous knowledge and experience related to Chinese culture, but also their different levels of basic academic skills such as discussion, writing, and oral presentation.On the positive side, non-major students take this course mostly out of personal or academic interest, and they are usually curious and motivated in class.Since I do not believe in "dumbing down" course content to suit students, this also provides an opportunity for me to seek a common meeting ground between students and instructor, one that can on the one hand bring recent scholarship in the field to undergraduate education, and on the other train students with a rigorous and engaging curriculum.
In light of these characteristics of students and my own pedagogical goals, I usually do the following things when preparing to teach the course: I compose detailed handouts outlining my expectations, set up a discussion forum online, and scaffold my oral and writing assignments in such a way that students can have some lead time to familiarize themselves with my requirements and build on previous assignments for more complex and challenging tasks later.I also arrange the readings for this course both chronologically and thematically, and include a variety of genres, such as short stories, novels, critical essays, as well as several films in order to give students a general sense of the evolution of Chinese history and literary culture in the twentieth century.
However, nothing can replace the essential interactions and dynamics that the instructor must create, monitor, and modify in a classroom setting.I am also keenly aware that the nature of this course as a general "survey" requires an eye to the proportion and time devoted to each historical period and representative work, as it could all too easily lend itself to superficiality and monotony.Therefore, it is all the more important for me to facilitate classroom discussion in ways that can both invoke students' previous experiences and personal memories from the very beginning of the course, and also lead them to eventually step back and evaluate critically both the work under discussion and their own response to it.
For the period of Cultural Revolution, I chose several literary pieces such as Lu Xinhua's short story "The Wounded," a canonical work of the post-Mao "Scar Literature," Wang Anyi's short story "Lao Kang Is back," and Gu Hua's novel Hibiscus Town.I have also selected several films, including Xie Jin's film adaptation of Gu Hua's novel Hibiscus Town and Blue Kite.Additionally, I have recommended secondary sources to the students, such as Jonathan Spence's "Launching the Cultural Revolution" in his The Search for Modern China and documentary film Morning Sun, directed and produced by Carma Hinton, Geremie Barmé, and Richard Gordon.I utilized a variety of historical, literary, and filmic materials in this course mainly in light of my students' needs, interests, and degree of prior (under)exposure to Chinese history and culture.Furthermore, I also generally adopt an interdisciplinary approach in my teaching for its effective inculcation of integrative thinking and collaborative synergy among my students, who usually come from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds.
While Jiang Wen's (b.1963) In the Heat of the Sun (1994)  and Dai Sijie's (b.1954) Balzac and the Little Seamstress (2002) also approach the Cultural Revolution in their own distinctive ways, I chose Blue Kite and Hibiscus Town not only because of the limited space in this course, but also because they fulfilled my pedagogical goals in two important ways.On the one hand, they complemented the literary works about the Cultural Revolution in this course, illustrating in a painfully vivid way the irreversible losses and ineradicable scars caused by this national trauma, and thus helped my students to understand what had remained inexplicable or mysterious to them in Wang Anyi's work, in which a survivor of the Cultural Revolution has been reduced to a "black hole" and spends his days repeatedly tracing the Chinese character "rice" on a piece of paper.On the other hand, they dovetailed with the materials we had examined earlier on in the semester.Later films such as Balzac tend to dwell on individual memories of youthful passion and personal nostalgia rather than engage in collective reflections of the "sufferings, scars, and indictment of the Cultural Revolution." 11 In contrast, Blue Kite, especially, reinforces and renders anew the central themes and concerns of twentiethcentury Chinese intellectuals who promoted the project of selfstrengthening and modernization: such as education of the masses, enlightenment of the young generation, and rebellion against the traditional patriarchal Chinese family and power structure. 12t may be stating the obvious to observe that American undergraduate students usually demonstrate more aptitude in interpreting films than literary works, since they have grown up immersed in a more visual rather than textual culture.Yet, learning from their experiences of analyzing novels and short stories earlier in the semester, my students showed remarkable progress in skills when we came to this point of the course, about midway through the semester.For example, they could by then come up with nuanced readings of characters in Gu Hua's novel Hibiscus Town.They could better understand and appreciate how the sweeping and relentless force that was the Cultural Revolution brought out weaknesses in normally decent people.
Of course, not all films are created equal when it comes to teaching the Cultural Revolution.While my students unanimously praised Blue Kite, they did not show as much enthusiasm for the film version of Hibiscus Town, though they liked the original novel better than the film.This was because, they claimed, they could "relate" to Blue Kite better than Hibiscus Town.I sensed this to be a wonderful teaching moment, for I always feel that instructors should not only remain alert and responsive to students' needs and limitations, but also try to guide their learning processes in order to help them gain more in-depth knowledge and skills.
Consequently, when leading classroom discussion of Hibiscus Town, I told them about the wide popularity of this film in China at the time of its release, and then asked them to try to explain the reasons.Drawing on other stories and critical essays about the Cultural Revolution and the characteristics of Xie Jin's directing style that they had read, the students were able to come up with several plausible explanations, including the satisfying ending that sees justice meted out, good rewarded, and evil punished.Thinking back on the long years of repression of human emotions, moreover, they came to understand that Xie Jin's film at that point provided the first and perfect catharsis for the Chinese people after a decade of nightmarish sufferings.
At the same time, my students were also able to provide more nuanced and reflective comments about their own preference.They had identified reasons for their likes and dislikes of the two films.First of all, Blue Kite is narrated from the perspective of a first-person narrator, a little boy who gradually grows up in the film, while Hibiscus Town has an omniscient narrator who tells the story from an external point of view.Secondly, Blue Kite depicts a tumultuous period in modern Chinese history by focusing on the tragedies of an ordinary family in Beijing.It conveys the confusion, sorrow, and kindness of common Chinese people very effectively.Hibiscus Town, in comparison, provides a more panoramic view because of its narrative perspective.Thirdly, while both films use long shots and long takes, the former provides a more "realistic" feel through the way that it follows real-life details and feelings, while the latter falls into the category of "melodrama" that my students disparaged at points.My students thus discovered that they regarded one film as more "relatable" than the other because their own age, background, and learning experience had molded their preferences for certain kinds of literature and film.
As can be seen, Blue Kite provided my students with a "different mirror" not only because it alerted them to the similarity and connectedness they shared with another culture and people, but also in that it revealed to them how different historical, political, and cultural forces shape people's experiences and tastes.This awareness can also come at unexpected moments during student-led discussions.Before class I had encouraged the students to find particular themes and images that they found most compelling, and try to tie this film with other works that we had discussed earlier in the semester.When the designated student leaders started the discussion, some of their classmates mentioned the representation of youth in this film, and by connecting Blue Kite to Family by Ba Jin, 13 an iconic work about young people's rebellion against traditional Chinese culture and society during the May Fourth period, were able to trace thematic concerns shared by Chinese authors and artists over the span of more than half a century.Others detected in this film the exploitation of youth and dissemination of communist ideologies, such as they had also seen in the film Yellow Earth, and began to appreciate more the common artistic goals and styles of China's Fifth Generation directors.
Still others looked at the narrator, and at the advantages and disadvantages of having a little boy providing the focal point and voice of the story.This last point was significant since from the start of the semester I had always emphasized to students that they need to look beyond plot and characterization, and grasp the formal features that make the work.Interestingly, at this moment of the discussion a controversy arose, regarding, apparently, a minor point in the film.Before Tietou's father is sent to a labor camp for being a "rightist," he spanks the little boy for his naughtiness.The boy gets upset and mimics shooting at his father with his hand.My students erupted into heated discussion about this scene.One American student commented that it was quite normal for kids to act out, and "we all say things like 'I hate you' to our parents."However, her classmate, a Chinese American student, saw this in a different light.He mentioned his own experience of growing up in a Chinese household, arguing that "the Chinese believe in tough love," 14 and the little boy would have been punished severely were he raised in his home, as his own childhood experience had shown.Although this appeared to be a digression from the normal course of discussion, my students did invest a lot of emotional energy and show a lot of conviction in their autobiographies.I then stepped in to help the student leaders to gear the discussion toward more productive, course-related directions.
We talked about the Chinese concept of filial piety and Confucian ideal of interdependence between family members and different generations.In this way, I helped students to develop their sense of empathy, which in turn aided them to discuss characters and aspects of Chinese culture that they might not understand or relate to otherwise.Gradually my students began to see why in the film all the father figures die away one after another.They remarked that the little boy's "military" and unfilial gesture (and the intrusion of modern weaponry into a Chinese family) on the one hand allegorizes the collapse of traditional family structure and ethical code caused by the increasingly violent and oppressive state control that led to the Cultural Revolution, hence parents' loss of their traditional authority.On the other hand, this scene foretells the "death of father"-the demise of father figures and patriarchal authority-in the works of Fifth Generation directors and even in modern Chinese culture as a whole.As we can see, even though the students tended to focus more on plots, images, and literary devices that resonated with their life experiences, they could be taught to take a step back and interpret the work in a more analytical and critical frame of mind.
My students' discussion about how parents educate their children also indicates that they were particularly able to relate to this film as though it were a "mirror" onto their own lives, because it depicted the Cultural Revolution from the perspective of a family, and in particular that of a little boy.Because of this empathy that the film induced in them, they were in turn better able to learn from the film as though it were a window onto another culture and period.Indeed, well-directed foreign films are well suited to serve as a window onto other cultures precisely because they are accessible and serve to mirror students' own emotions and life experiences.

Final Words
From the experience of teaching Hibiscus Town and Blue Kite, I have found that when teaching Chinese literature and culture to American undergraduate students, I have to keep in mind several important lessons.I need to be aware of the students' usual tastes and interpretive practices.Students at Grinnell are hard working, but they still show more experience with interpretation of visual images than texts.When analyzing films, they also tend to pay more attention to the plot than to the formal features such as camera takes and shots.I also would do well to use students' previous experiences, knowledge, and skills as a starting point to guide them through new, unfamiliar territories.Last but not the least, although the students sometimes may not respond to the film in the way that I would have expected or preferred, I can teach them how to interpret and self-reflect.
Additionally, although I focus mostly on classroom discussion in this article, I have found scaffolding assignments an effective way to teach any course, while online discussion forum can be utilized to encourage active learning and help students prepare for class discussion.My experience shows that requiring students to post questions and responses online both before and after class not only makes them step up their leadership role in class and take ownership of their own education, but also reinforces knowledge and skills learned in class, and trains them in writing and critical thinking.Needless to say, it also provides a safe and communal space for students who may be too shy to speak up in class.
The effects of my pedagogical explorations in this course were obvious and gratifying.Not only have students become more engaged and proactive in their learning in this course, many of them also decided to take more Chinese culture courses and undertake China-related research projects in the future.But perhaps most important, I have also learned that to provide students with a "different mirror" through my course is only the first step.Far more significant is that they also learn how to utilize and even construct their own mirror for life-long learning and development through the experience of studying Chinese film and literature.