Author Archive for: ‘Julian Ward’
Serving the People in the twenty-first century: Zhang Side and the revival of the Yan’an Spirit
In September 2004, Zhang Side, a black and white biopic about the life and death of a soldier stationed in the Communist base camp in Yan’an during World War Two, was premiered at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The premiere was held on the sixtieth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s famous “Serve the People” speech, given three days after …
Read More“The One and the Eight” and cultural production in modern China: how a poem about the Anti-Japanese War written in the 1950s was transformed as a film in the 1980s and for television in 2015.
一个和八个 Guo Xiaochuan’s (1919-1976) poem “The One and the Eight”, written in 1957, has subsequently been adapted as a film that was released in 1984, and a thirty nine episode series first broadcast on Chinese television in 2015. The storyline is simple. Set in northern China in 1941 at the height of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), Guo’s poem tells the …
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