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151 From Shangri-La to Dharma-La In terms of twentieth-century screen representations of China, films of the cold war era act as a kind of historical fulcrum. Looking back, they endow ancient stereotypes like that of Fu Manchu with a new—and sometimes not-so-new— guise. Looking forward, in their Manichean view of the world they set the stage for the spate of intensely negative cinematic images of China found in several films of the 1990s. I am thinking of works such as Little Buddha (Bernardo Bertolucci , 1994), Red Corner, Seven Years in Tibet (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1997), and especially of the film that is explored at some length in this chapter—Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997). Like films of the cold war era, those of the 1990s came after a period of détente between America and China. In the decades following President Nixon’s 1972 meeting with Chairman Mao, Americans were full of admiration for the achievements and seeming social harmony of modern China. China’s “social discipline ,” wrote an idealistic Arthur Miller, “is unquestionably profound and in contrast to the anarchistic selfishness, corruption and crime that everyone laments in America and the West.”1 But the moment of friendship and goodwill reflected in Miller’s remarks was followed by still another dramatic swing of the pendulum—this one sparked by the massacre that occurred at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Even before that watershed date, in fact, reports of the excesses and hysteria of the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976 had begun to leak out to the West. But it was the sight of Chinese troops firing on peaceful student protestors that gave the pendulum governing images of China a violent push. Broadcast around the world, the sight of helpless protestors mowed down by Chinese soldiers evoked images of Oriental despots, of Chinese barbarism and cruelty, of an age-old indifference to human life. If the events at Tiananmen Square brought America’s “infatuation” with China to a sudden and brutal end, they also ushered in a period marked by rising C H A P T E R 5 The World Splits in Two 152 Chapter 5 tensions between America and China. “A decade that began,” writes Warren Cohen , “with the United States breaking off high-level contacts for the brutal suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations ends with the Chinese canceling military and political dialogues to punish the United States for killing Chinese in Belgrade.”2 Along with tensions between the two countries went anxieties concerning the fate of Hong Kong once the former British colony reverted to Chinese rule. Indeed, Kenneth Chan argues that it was the fate of Hong Kong that, more than any other single factor, prompted the intensely anti-Chinese stance of the films released in the late 1990s. In his view, these films represent a “strategically timed reaction to the return of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China. Though these films do not directly depict the handover per se, they do address its political implications through their portraiture of Chinese ideological and military aggression and its disregard for human rights, a not-too-subtle index of what the West conjures as the terrifying political fate awaiting Hong Kong.”3 I am not sure that these films were as haunted by the fate of Hong Kong as Chan suggests. Not only do they make no mention of Hong Kong (as Chan acknowledges ) but, also, they bear directly on a country that has become a virtual flashpoint for fears of China: Tibet. Indeed, while the memory of Tiananmen Square is fading into the past, and few Westerners remain anxious about Hong Kong, China’s virtual annexation of Tibet in 1949 continues to raise passions and controversies. This issue was very much on display, for example, in the course of the 2008 Summer Olympics, hosted by China. Months before the games began, protests in favor of Free Tibet erupted in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital city; later, when the Olympic torch began its so-called Journey of Harmony around the globe, it encountered demonstrations in Paris and India; and, finally , the games themselves were marred by protests.4 Since that time, scarcely a day goes by that we are not reminded of the consequences of Tibet’s sad fate: we read of Chinese violations of human rights in Tibet, of protestors jailed and monks “re-educated,” or, worse still, of monks who immolate themselves in protest against Chinese rule...

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