I Want to Be Human

A Story of China and the Human

TRANSLATED BY SHUANG SHEN

In 2009, a Chinese blockbuster, City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing! [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], dir. Lu Chuan), unexpectedly managed to become a symptomatic representation of contemporary Chinese society. It did so by constructing an allegory of China and the human.

The movie represents the horrendous tragedy of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, the mass murder of 300,000 Chinese within a matter of six weeks. It has a distinct visual style: wide screen, black and white with a brownish hue, shallow focus throughout. It transposes human figures in near and medium shots onto an expansive and depthless canvas, exposing the traces of some unselfconscious allegorical construction. The human is projected against the historical backdrop of China, but exactly where the human is located in relation to history lacks clarity or depth. Considering the fact that the film was a state-sponsored project through and through (approved directly by the central government, funded entirely by the China Film Corporation) and its main objective, according to Lu Chuan, the director, was to present a "Chinese style of resistance," the choice of narrative (the Nanjing Massacre) as well as the film's style of narration appear to be at once nonsensical and thought provoking.

The discourse of China and the human presented in this movie reflects the historical entanglement and tension of those two key terms in twentieth-century Chinese cultural criticism. The movie also directly engages with issues of historical trauma (the Nanjing Massacre in particular), the politics of memory, and the recuperation of humanity in the Chinese context. What is unique and important about the Nanjing Massacre is that this historical incident, along with its existing representations, positions the China and the human problematic not just along the China-West axis but also in an intra-Asian regional context. The Nanjing Massacre narrated by this movie and other narratives (The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe and The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, for instance) testifies to the intricate power relations revolving around the human as a concept with a history of unequal and nonequivalent distribution regionally and globally. In this essay, I analyze City of Life and Death as a text that illustrates this nexus of power, which has shaped the narration of China in history and the contemporary moment. I also argue that the movie articulates the desire for the universal human among the emerging new Chinese middle class, which has proved itself to be a formidable force in cultural and ideological production in contemporary China.

Discourses of the Human in Modern China

First, I would like to discuss the historical discourses of the human in Chinese intellectual and cultural histories of the twentieth century. The narrative trajectory of China and the human in City of Life and Death is neither new nor original. It resonates in a belated and anachronistic fashion as the leitmotif of twentieth-century Chinese social criticism. At the turn of the twentieth century, the discourses of modernity and social criticism were constructed upon an alignment between the human and a modern China and an opposition between the human and the real China. The genesis of the modern human is coterminous with the birth of modern China, but the historical and real China represents everything that is inhuman or antihuman.

This is why Lu Xun wrote in "A Madman's Diary" (1918), "I tried to look this up, but my history has no chronology, and scrawled all over each page are the words: 'Confucian Virtue and Morality.' Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night, until I began to see words between the lines. The whole book was filled with the two words —'Eat people.'" Alternatively, we can think of the often-cited incident that has virtually gained the status of a representative case in modern Chinese history: "Lu Xun and the Slide Show." A slide show at a Japanese university where Lu Xun was studying medicine depicted the beheading of some Chinese spies, along with expressionless Chinese spectators looking from the sidelines. Lu Xun's Japanese classmates, who frame the incident, cheered as they watched the propaganda film in the classroom. This is what led Lu Xun, the most important Chinese thinker of the twentieth century, to make up his mind to give up a career in medicine, return to China, and pursue literature instead as a way to save the spirit of the Chinese.

In most discussions of this widely known event, it is conventionally understood that the killer references the Japanese as the forerunners of Asian modernity, and the spectators symbolize the real China (the imperial China of the Qing dynasty) at the time. However, the true objects of violence at the center of the picture — the beheaded spies — seldom get much attention. In a way, it is this silent center that exposes the hidden connection between this incident and some important characteristics of the self-narration of twentieth-century China. That is, much noise surrounds and reinforces a silent center, a silent object, and this is the location of China and the human.

The subject that is dead — slaughtered and silenced — identifies a site of hopelessness but also a site where hope resides. In the intellectual tradition of the early twentieth century, the human is thus figured both as a bloody corpse and as a fetus waiting to be born. These narratives position the human and a new China against the horizon of the future. The discourse of the human in China is thus a utopian discourse that articulates both the desperation about our condition of existence and the desperate need to resist this sense of desperation.

Even though it is a shared characteristic among many belatedly modern societies and third-world nations to engage in self-criticism and self-negation as a way of jump-starting their entry into modernity, the fact that Chinese intellectuals relied on a deeply felt sense of trauma to define their...