ISSUES OF CLASS AND GENDER
Characterizations such as good and evil, strong and weak, selfless and selfish had definite class and gender dimensions in these popular family narratives. In terms of social class, intellectuals (with the important exception of Professor Xiao), artists, factory workers, and peasants are cast in an exceedingly positive light in all three films. The urban bourgeoisie, however, is treated very harshly in all three narratives. It is to this class that Professor Xiao is assigned. In Far Away Love he is cast as a self-centered, petty bourgeois snob. In Eight Thousand Miles, Jiarong, his parents, and friends are revealed as wartime and postwar profiteers who have no patriotic inclinations whatsoever. In A Spring River, the factory owner who is upset by Zhongliang's patriotic speech on National Day, the businessman Pang Hao-gong, and, finally, Zhang Zhongliang himself are portrayed as greedy and heartless opportunists who prey on the poor and defenseless. None of the films offers even one example of a patriotic capitalist. Most interesting of all, the bourgeoisie is indicted as a class not because it is incompetent in professional terms, but rather because of its moral failings. In the end, the problem of the bourgeoisie in Chinese society is treated more as a moral problem than as an economic or political problem. The individualism of businessmen and petty bourgeois professors prevents them from behaving patriotically. These sorts of representations of class are, of course, quite familiar. Prewar films and fiction were filled with similar images of upright working people, patriotic students, and selfish bourgeois elements.
A far more provocative aspect of these grand narratives is their treatment of gender issues. Indeed, the characterizations of men, and particularly men in the prime of life, are highly critical. The narratives seem to hold men responsible for China's plight: men were not able to prevent the Japanese invasion and, after the war, were not able to reunite the nation. The failings of China, in this controversial reading, are the failings of its men. Some men, like Jiarong, the young businessman, are greedy and corrupt. Some, like Pang Haogong, are crude bullies. Some, like Professor Xiao, are shameless hypocrites. Others, like Zhang Zhongliang
According to patriarchal norms, men are ultimately responsible for the well-being of the family, and by extension, the nation. But in these family narratives most of the males who are central to the stories are not seen in such time-honored roles. Very little information is supplied about their family life: nothing is known about Professor Xiao's background, Jiarong has no wife or children, nothing is known about Pan Haogong's family, and Zhang Zhongliang's relations with women are motivated primarily by lust once he leaves his family. In short, the viewer is led to believe that wartime conditions brought out the worst in China's men. There are positive portrayals of men in these narratives, including the characterizations of Libin in Eight Thousand Miles and Zhang Zhongmin in A Spring River, but in both films these attractive male figures are of secondary importance.
If war brought out the worst in men, it appears to have brought out the best in Chinese women, at least according to these popular postwar visualizations. On the whole, women seem stronger and more capable than men under wartime circumstances. In Far Away Love, Yu Zhen, a rural servant "trained" to be a middle-class housewife, sacrifices everything for the resistance while her cowardly husband runs away. In Eight Thousand Miles the entire story of the holocaust and its social consequences is seen from the perspective of a remarkably resilient and persistent young intellectual woman, Jiang Lingyu. In A Spring River, the most important women, Sufen and her mother-in-law, are not at all like the modern and progressive-thinking Lingyu, but, like Lingyu, they have a remarkable ability to endure hardship and survive without the help of their husbands and adult sons. These images of strong, independent, and patriotic women are among the most intriguing aspects of postwar cinema. Characters like Yu Zhen, Lingyu, and Sufen stand in sharp contrast to the negative and threatening images of the femme fatale that were so prevalent in prewar cinema.
Even the negative female figures, the bourgeois women, are not exactly a recycled version of the 1930s screen vamp. They too seem stunningly independent and resourceful in the harsh wartime environment. Confused and weak, Zhang Zhongliang is no match for the tough-minded Wang Lizhen. Similarly, He Wenyan proves to be unusually capable of adjusting and adapting to a wartime and postwar world in which relations with men are fleeting and unreliable.
Given the highly patriarchal norms of Chinese society in the mid-twentieth century, it is striking to see the extent to which cultural decency, wartime strength, and anticolonialism are gendered female in these films, all of which were written and directed by men. Similarly, it is surprising to see the extent to which cultural degeneration, weakness under wartime conditions, and the failure to resist colonialism are gendered male. This picture of wartime China shows patriarchal norms and the family institution itself to be in serious disarray. With a couple of important exceptions (Libin and Zhang Zhongmin), men are irresponsible and unpredictable, while women are strong and capable.