Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance

4. State Intervention in the Imagining of Orientals in China Films of the 1930s and 1940s

4 STATE INTERVENTION IN THE IMAGINING OF ORIENTALS IN CHINA FILMS OF THE 1930S AND 1940S A S OBSERVED IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, among the various social, cultural, and historical determinants responsible for the rise of Hollywood’s first sound-era Asian American romantic couple in Paramount’s Daughter of Shanghai (1937) was the industry’s conservative, self-regulatory code, which prohibited racial mixing between whites and nonwhites (a provision that would be relaxed during the 1950s, an era that witnessed the rise of the “Japanese War Bride” cycle). We now turn our attention from internal to external forces of censorship that screened, modified, and disciplined studio-era motion pictures in accordance with American foreign policy. Despite the self-regulation principle of American motion picture censorship , which precluded the need for any federal-level censorship laws throughout its history, a cycle of “China films” (films set in China or Chinatown) popular during the 1930s and 1940s nevertheless fell under the careful scrutiny of the controlling nation-state for the sake of international relations. During the prewar era, Hollywood’s China films were censored many times by the Production Code Administration (PCA)— the industry’s centralized self-regulation agency responsible for enforcing the administration of the Production Code of 1930 under the auspices of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. (MPPDA)—as well as by Chinese and Japanese governments, partly because of political sensitivity regarding the Sino-Japanese conflict. No direct reference or allusion to Japanese military aggression against China could be made in pre-Pearl Harbor Hollywood films because of America’s isolation policy toward East Asian conflicts and Hollywood’s interest in gaining a foothold in both the Chinese and Japanese markets. Whenever conflicts between the Chinese government and Hollywood studios arose, the U.S. State Department (through the Nanking office of the American Legation) intervened as a diplomatic mediator and negotiated on behalf of American producers and distributors. After the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor and the subsequent entrance of the United States into World War II, Hollywood became openly anti-Japanese and pro-Chinese. Along with the PCA, whose preemptive, pro-industry censorship mainly targeted the issues of sex and morality that might provoke local censors or religious boycotts, the Bureau of Motion Pictures of the Office of War Information (OWI)—the Roosevelt administration’s propaganda agency—regulated the political content of wartime Hollywood films, directly influencing representations of Asian allies and enemies. This chapter investigates how the interaction between the industry and the state affected the construction of racial, political, and ideological others; moreover, it considers how Philip Ahn’s multiple onscreen personifications in a variety of China film texts both underscore and undermine the officially mandated, governmentally sanctioned narratives. The first part of the chapter focuses on diplomatic difficulties involving the Chinese government, the State Department, and the studios in regard to the production and distribution of 1930s Hollywood films set in China. I use, as a case study, the 1937 motion picture The Good Earth, which was produced under a formal contract between the Chinese authorities and MGM studios. MGM’s successful negotiations with the Nanking censors through the American Legation sharply contrast the harsh repercussions suffered by Paramount, whose own Chinathemed films (including Shanghai Express [1932] and The General Died at Dawn [1936]) seriously agitated the Chinese government and its citizens. During the wartime era, the U.S. government’s hypersensitivity toward cinematic images of allies and enemies was expressed in the OWI’s close monitoring and revision of Hollywood productions. The latter part of this chapter examines specific textual examples from RKO’s China Sky (1945), which features the first Korean role (played by Philip Ahn) in the history of Hollywood—an anti-American collaborator whose ethnicity was changed from Chinese in Pearl S. Buck’s novel to conform to the wartime policy prohibiting negative representations of Chinese allies. chapter 4 88 | CONTRASTING CASES OF SINO-U.S. CENSORSHIP DEBATES: MGM’S THE GOOD EARTH AND PARAMOUNT’S THE GENERAL DIED AT DAWN China was certainly neither the first nor the only country whose government imposed sustained pressures on the U.S. State Department and Hollywood studios in protest against unflattering stereotypes of their nation and people. Ruth Vasey’s 1997 study, The World according to Hollywood, 1918–1939, reveals that Mexican, French, and Italian governments likewise attempted to influence Hollywood representations of their countries and nationals...