The not-so-successful film “Volunteer Army: Heroes Attack” is being used to indoctrinate future Taoist clergy on the evil of U.S. “aggressions.”
by He Yuyan
Let’ face it. “The Battle at Lake Changjin,” produced on behalf of the Central Propaganda Department for the 100th anniversary of the CCP in 2021, was a propaganda film on the Korean War heavily criticized abroad but genuinely popular in China. It was both the most expensive and the most watched film in Chinese history. Even critics admitted that, while the propaganda was disturbing, the battle scenes were well-filmed and breathtaking.
The problem is that “The Battle at Lake Changjin” generated a cottage industry of derivative products, all repeating the same propaganda but without the redeeming value of the technical quality of the 2021 film. One is “Volunteer Army: Heroes Attack,” launched with much fanfare in September 2023 but much less successful than “The Battle at Lake Changjin.”
The propaganda theme is the same. Chinese are told in movies, as they are at school, that in 1950 the United States and their allies started a war of aggression against North Korea, which failed mostly due to the intervention of Chinese volunteers. Dissidents in China who question this narrative go to jail. However, they are right. In fact, after World War II, the Soviet Union and the U.S. cut Korea in two along the 38th parallel, much as they did with Germany, with a pro-Soviet northern zone and a pro-American one in the South. It was North Korea, supported by Stalin and Mao, that invaded South Korea. The United Nations, not the United States alone, put together a coalition that stopped the North Korean invasion, notwithstanding the massive support of North Korea by Chinese troops that went under the cosmetic name of “volunteers.” After three years of war, the borders between North and South Korea remained substantially the same of 1950. Nothing was achieved by Mao and Stalin, except that three million military and civilians died. It was an unnecessary and inconclusive bloodshed, to add to the list of crimes of Stalin and Chairman Mao.
Propaganda about Korean War through novels, comics, and films has become fashionable after the Chinese relationship with the U.S. deteriorated and even more after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Chinese are told that the U.S. and NATO were the aggressors in Ukraine and Russia had to defend itself, just as they are told that the U.S. aggressed North Korea in 1950 while the opposite was true.
As one student at the country’s main Taoist academic institution, Beijing’s China Taoist College, jokingly told “Bitter Winter,” “if a movie is not so successful, in China you can always recruit captive audiences.” China Taoist College (which even boasted about it in a press release) was the first Taoist institutions in a campaign started last month compelling Taoist students to go see “Volunteer Army: Heroes Attack.”
Students are lectured on the evil of U.S. “aggressions.” They are told that the so-called Chinese volunteers in the Korean War embodied “the finest Taoist traditions.” But what exactly supporting North Korean’s brutal war of invasion of 1950 had to do with Taoism and its values is not clear.
Uses a pseudonym for security reasons.
