Scholar Dai Jinhua: I Don't Want to Surrender to the Younger Generation's Era | Interviews

"When I'm with the younger generation, it's usually I who come across as naive and they who seem mature. The naivety and the maturity show up in our different attitudes toward existing reality, toward the existing order. They think, of course it's like this — what's there to make a fuss about? Or they think it can't be changed, so what's the point of discussing change?"

Dai Jinhua, 58, speaks fast and speaks well, and she fills a room. The night before our second interview she slept about four hours, staying up to finish a novel. To this day she still reads at least one novel a day. Without novels, she says, she couldn't live.

"This is the thing I'm proudest of when I face the younger generation: I've kept a broad curiosity all along. I still read all kinds of novels, I still dip into the popular culture that elites write off as 'trash.' I'm still getting something out of it today," Dai Jinhua said.

But she is also stubborn. "I choose to stay in the era that belongs to me. I don't want to change, I want to hold my ground. If it's possible, I'd rather the younger generation came to share my experience, or my era, than go over to theirs," Dai Jinhua told QDaily.

Born in 1959, Dai Jinhua is a professor at Peking University's Institute of Comparative Literature and Comparative Culture and director of its Center for Film and Cultural Studies. She made her name in academia and in the film world long ago, and her books and lectures have carried real weight in nearly every period of her career — from film studies in the 1980s, to cultural studies in the 1990s, to an attempted turn toward political economy after 2000, and now back to her three main fields: film, culture, and gender.

She is also one of the university's most popular and most distinctive teachers, an "idol" to many, respectfully nicknamed "Master Dai." Harvard professor David Der-wei Wang calls her "spontaneous and sharp"; Liu Kin-chi, associate professor at Hong Kong's Lingnan University, says "she is a person of deep feeling, with a strong sense of justice".

Dai Jinhua belongs to the second cohort to enter university after the Cultural Revolution ended and the college entrance exam was restored. In 1982, after graduating from Peking University's Chinese Department, she went to teach at the Beijing Film Academy's Department of Film Literature, then still being set up, and so entered film studies "by a twist of fate." Luckily, this was also "the global golden age of film theory." But in 1993 she left the Beijing Film Academy for Peking University, and her research changed along with Chinese society.

"When Chinese society began to be shaken in the 1990s, and especially when the great social divide opened up in 1995, I suddenly saw the leftist intellectual resources and intellectual force that those theoretical resources carried within them. My so-called turn to the left came more from inside than from outside. So it's a direct line of inheritance. The other direct connection: leaving the Film Academy was an act of sheer helplessness... The film industry was the first to be hit by commercialization, the old order was gone, and I could no longer find any way to confirm who I was. That's why I wanted to flee to Peking University," Dai Jinhua said in a 2016 conversation at Peking University's Boya Lecture Hall.

By 1999, "the changes across Chinese society" had made Dai Jinhua "doubt the meaning of academic work very deeply," and left her in "a huge spiritual crisis." She hoped reading would turn up new intellectual and theoretical resources. To her disappointment, she found that "those people said to be the world's great thinkers had all kinds of things to say, but what they said never touched, never really solved, the problem we all faced together. Or my conclusion at the time was that the place they couldn't break through was exactly the place I had fallen into," Dai Jinhua recalled to QDaily.

In the end she pinned her hopes on the "Third World." That began more than a decade of travel to at least 20 "Third World" countries, during which she "came into contact with many different social movements and social demands." She also came to "understand what globalization means" and to see that "there is simply no East that stands outside the West." These trips, she says, made "my own life feel more real, more grounded — my thinking itself gained a worldwide footing." She never completed the turn toward political economy, but this became the "inner logic" of her scholarship.

So in 2006 Dai Jinhua led the translation of a collection of writings by Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista movement of Mexico's indigenous people, published as The Masked Knight (《蒙面骑士》) — a new way for Chinese readers to see the world. Subcomandante Marcos is a man of many overlapping identities, who from behind a pseudonym openly opposed globalization, capitalism, and neoliberalism, which earned him the nickname "the second Che Guevara."

As China and the world have changed in recent years, so has Dai Jinhua's academic focus. From the financial crisis to the Arab Spring to ISIS to artificial intelligence, she carries a deep worry about humanity's future. As she sees it, we are arriving at the moment when modern civilization's climb to the summit (digital transformation and the biological revolution) meets the moment it tops out (energy crisis and environmental catastrophe), and more and more people may end up as a discarded population.

In 2017, Dong Xiuyu, founder of Huozi Culture, and Li Xuejun, its general manager, suggested that Dai Jinhua join the rush into paid knowledge products. She finally agreed, and launched a paid audio program on Douban, 52x Life — Dai Jinhua's Master Class on Film (《52 倍人生——戴锦华大师电影课》), discussing 52 classic films.

In her interview with QDaily, Dai Jinhua said that Douban had suggested including certain films and she turned some of them down — The Intouchables (《触不可及》), for instance. "One reason [for refusing] is that at the level of artistic expression the whole thing is pure pandering, either to the vulgar or to the refined — a very contrived performance, a very contrived act of flattery. The other reason I'll flatly refuse a film is that I can't accept its direct or implied social demands or values at all," she said.

Her criteria for the films she did discuss: "First, a basic judgment of its artistic value. Second, its place in film history. Third, whether I have something to say about its film language, its artistic expression, the way its images are put together. I've seen things in these films that are not only worth saying but worth sharing. Take Hou Hsiao-hsien. My favorite of his films is The Boys from Fengkuei (《风柜来的人》), not The Assassin (《刺客聂隐娘》), but I think the imagery and the narrative method of The Assassin are more discussable. What's wonderful in Hou Hsiao-hsien's films often can't be put into words, while a film like The Assassin can."

During the interview she also said, as expected, "I'm going out for a cigarette." Her admirers love this about her too. She is a heavy smoker, and once described her habit as "two and a half packs a day." The writer Yu Hua's line on the subject has traveled widely: "Dai Jinhua smokes ferociously, one after another, as if she never stops."

Because the interview covered so much ground, this article publishes only the parts of the conversation with Professor Dai about film, travel, and personal matters. The rest, on history and current affairs, will appear in another form. Please take note.

Q = QDaily

D = Dai Jinhua

The Film Wolf Warrior 2 Is More Than a Rise of Chinese Nationalism

Q: Looking back at Chinese-language film and TV from 2017, was there anything that made a strong impression on you, or that you've been following? I'd say there are two works with no artistic value to speak of that are still worth discussing as cultural phenomena: the film Wolf Warrior 2 and the TV series In the Name of the People. Both feel very strange to me.

D: They're not strange. Why would they be strange? As you said yourself, aren't these two works good mirrors of how the shape of society is changing? You can see that as China's economic position has changed, the whole social mood, social demand, and machinery of cultural production have started to change. So there are plenty of angles and topics in these two works, if you use the methods of cultural studies rather than film studies.

Q: Could you say more concretely what you make of Wolf Warrior 2 or In the Name of the People?

D: So far I've refused to comment on either. There's far too much to say, and it takes a patient method, cross-referencing several angles. Any simple statement is wrong the moment you make it. Because it's extremely complicated — and, of course, extremely sensitive. I'm not afraid of sensitive questions, but I think sensitive questions have to be handled with care.

Q: Can you hint at what that complexity involves?

D: All popular texts are alike in this: every popular text cuts both ways. If you look only at a work's surface composition, or at the values it states outright, and conclude that its popularity or its box office expresses simple agreement, you'll have a serious blind spot. Every popular text is received and used differently by people at different levels, with different demands, in different positions. That's exactly why this kind of work matters as an object of cultural study — it produces a result that reflects in several dimensions at once.

Take Wolf Warrior 2. If you simply see it as the rise of a new nationalism, you're right, but you're incomplete, or imprecise. The people who embrace it and the people who reject it are both arguing over that one point — nationalism. That way you never touch what actually made it popular.

From another angle you'd find it's a reappearance of one form of Hong Kong cinema at its height...

Or look at it another way: it performs the function of an action film very successfully. What most people get from it is muscular satisfaction, not satisfaction of the mind, the spirit, or of identity.

These are just quick examples. Describing the real situation is far more complicated.

Q: This may be a slightly stupid question, but I'll ask anyway: compared with before, is there anything to sum up about China's 2017 film market, any change worth paying attention to?

D: Any attempt to sum up China's film market and find its rules is a fool's errand. There is no precedent for it in world film history. In such a short time we exploded into a film industry, a cinema system, and an audience this enormous — that fact alone has no precedent to follow. The whole logic of China's film market is changing too, fairly randomly, with no precedent to guide it.

I just feel that, on the whole, the changes this year [2017] give me more to be excited about than to be discouraged by. Some things I'd waited a long time for have started to appear: art-house films getting screen time, private film companies joining forces to show art films, treating the film market with a logic that isn't purely capital's. Wolf Warrior 2 has shown us, whatever its intentions, how huge China's potential film market is. Given China's population, the box-office spectacles China had seen before don't really count as a model. So once it showed us the size of this market, it also told us there isn't only one kind of moviegoer. "Making films for the post-90s generation" is a stupid idea, because viewers of every age can become moviegoers, and moviegoers in cities below the third tier are an enormous potential market. The success of Wolf Warrior 2 is what brought that part of the audience into view. So that's also a main thing to weigh when we think about Wolf Warrior 2 — the region, the class, the social identity of its audience. In that sense I find it exciting.

In 100 Years, Film Has Proved It Can Do Anything

Q: At a forum called "Making Chinese Film with Craftsman Spirit" at the 2017 Shanghai International Film Festival, you said: "It really is a strange phenomenon that 21st-century Chinese films get 'watched more the more they're panned, and panned more the more they're watched,' and that 'if it isn't rotten it doesn't sell.'" How do you think this strange phenomenon can best be solved? Or is it a dead knot? You just mentioned there are some fairly positive factors at work.

D: Right, I don't think it's a dead knot. Because new viewers mature — new viewers become old hands. Once someone starts going to the cinema, starts watching films, all kinds of chances will come along to make them fall in love with film. Once they love film, they won't be hemmed in by a market whose shape is entirely controlled by capital; they'll form their own taste, their own choices. And then they'll act back on the film market and on film production as a positive force.

The saddest thing about China's film market from last year [2016] into this year [2017] has been watching capital assert itself over and over. Capital asserts itself, sets the rules, sets the shape of things, as if to demonstrate who the master is and who decides. I've always said film isn't pure — film does of course dance with capital. But most of the problems in Chinese film come from capital dancing alone. I deliberately didn't say cultural capital, or cultural commodity, because I want to stress film's difference: it can't be explained away by the properties of a commodity or of capital. And I think many of the production ideas in Chinese film today are themselves anti-capital. "Making films for the post-90s generation" is an anti-capital idea. Capital seeks maximum profit. Of course you should try to net every viewer — how can you aim at one narrow slice of the audience?

So I feel there's the problem of capital asserting itself on one side, and on the other, capital's extreme stupidity and immaturity when it faces a cultural market. Which is why I keep my hope that as more and more viewers mature — no longer just fed by the market, but starting to turn around and shape it — they will come to exert some check on capital.

Q: So you're putting your hope of resisting capital in the audience — is that fair?

D: At the level of the film market, at least, the audience is an important element with social agency. The other elements I don't dare count on.

Q: What role should film play in society, in your view? Between capital, politics, and art, where exactly should it sit? How should we look at film?

D: In 100 years of film history, I think film itself has proved that film can do anything. So any attempt to fix its role is bound to fall short.

At its height, Hollywood staged a political tale of two cities with Washington, D.C. From that you can see how political it is. You could also say Hollywood film as a whole shaped America's national imagination, America's national mythology, America's national spirit — from which you can see how enormous that agency can be. But at the same time, film from the 1950s onward proved to the whole world that it can be philosophy, it can be art, it can be anything.

So with a film market this big, a population this large, internal cultural differences this vast, I think Chinese film can be — and should be — anything at all. Of course I still hope it can be at least two things. First, that it can truly become a calling card for China's image.

I always give this example: at the time of the London Olympics, the BBC remade three of Shakespeare's history plays. The BBC has always done this. A calling card of this kind doesn't have to be celebratory, or superficial and illustrative. On the contrary, it could be artistic, historical, critical, exposing. It only has to reach a certain artistic height. That's the basic precondition — not a ceiling, a floor. If it can reach that level, then through the window of film it becomes a calling card for China's image. I still long for Chinese film to be equal to that.

The other thing: even commercial film has always cut both ways. It is of course a social balm, and it does heal society as a whole. But it has also always been a sharp instrument of criticism. Or rather, its power to soothe society can only be achieved through being sensitive and accurate about social questions. First of all it is a public medium that faces social problems head-on.

Compared with the media of today's digital age, film's public character is beyond doubt. That's why I keep saying that the sudden, explosive expansion of China's film market, surging against the trend, has been almost a shot in the arm for the global film market, even for Hollywood. Hollywood had already gone through more than 20, nearly 30, years of net capital outflow. With China's huge market appearing, Hollywood immediately showed signs of a last flare of life.

In that sense I'm very glad, or rather I still hold deep hopes for China's film market. Because in the end film is a public art, an art of environment. It may be the last space where flesh-and-blood, non-virtual people gather together, where bodies unlike one another can meet.

So in that sense my hopes for the cinema as a space are as strong as my hopes for the film as a text.

International Travel Has Made My Own Life Feel More Real and Grounded

Q: You traveled abroad a lot this year. Where did you go?

D: Germany, the United States, Israel, Cuba, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Hungary. Mostly academic trips, and some for social research.

Q: Any new discoveries, observations, feelings?

D: There's too much to share. Do you mean my observations of each country?

Q: Yes. Cuba, for instance?

D: That's the one I'm least willing to talk about. I need to think about it more. It's certainly sensitive, and you've picked exactly the question I can't answer. It's not that I can't say it, it's that I don't want to. Cuba has always sat heavily on me.

Q: The Czech Republic or Hungary, then?

D: I found the Czech Republic more interesting. Several so-called "post-revolutionary" or "post-socialist" marks of the era are very clear there. For one thing, Czech artists all use the word "post-revolutionary," but what they mean by it is "post-Velvet Revolution." And the whole society takes a very strong reflective attitude toward that revolution — and a doubled critical attitude, toward both the so-called socialist era of the past and the heavily capitalized present. I found that very interesting.

And comparing Czech and Hungarian society, the big difference is this: political and party change has happened in both, but the Czech Republic kept a good deal of the old social welfare system, so the vitality and the stability of the whole society are still there. Hungary's change went further, or its capitalization went deeper. As a result it was smashed to pieces in the 2008 financial tsunami, and many people's daily lives were destroyed. And you can see that Hungarian society's vitality is nowhere near the Czech Republic's.

But another observation about the Czech Republic is very interesting. We all know that when the Cold War ended, Eastern European countries broke free of Soviet control and gained a degree of independence or autonomy. But from another angle: for those of us who work in film, there's a small town we feel very close to, called Karlovy Vary. Back in the day The White-Haired Girl (《白毛女》) won the top prize there, so it's a town that feels dear to us.

When I actually got into that town, I found that on one hand, as you'd expect, it had been turned into tourism — made into a spectacle, like places we all know, Xidi or Hongcun or Wuzhen. What I hadn't known was that outside the tourist zones it had almost become a piece of Russian territory. Russian is spoken; there are newly built Orthodox churches. In the sense of capital, in the sense of money, it has become a Russian resort, a Russian paradise.

In that sense you feel very strongly the several meanings of the so-called "post-revolutionary," or "post-socialist," condition. Once the coat of socialist brother nations was stripped off — and the power relations inside the socialist camp really were dissolved along with it — another, quite real layer of power took its place.

For "small countries" like these, politics is not the whole of the inequality in international relations. Today inequality has changed its face: in the name of capital, capital no longer needs any fig leaf at all. You could call this a "global coloniality" that comes after the "post-Cold War."

I felt something similar in Cuba. Along the Cuban coast, the sight that struck me as very strange was one giant American luxury cruise ship after another. At the point of entry you see special express lanes set aside for cruise passengers. I was very curious: these passengers from Miami, from every state in America, what did they come to Cuba to see? What are they looking for? What are they trying to find? The relation between socialism and post-socialism inside all that also becomes very interesting.

You ask what I took from the travels. I happened to be at the Munich International Film Festival at a very interesting moment: the German parliament was debating whether to pass the law legalizing same-sex marriage. The German friends around me were waiting eagerly for the result. There wasn't really any suspense, of course — everyone knew it would pass. The current German chancellor is said to be enlightened, a so-called left-wing chancellor. That's also why she has been attacked so heavily over refugees. On Friday the bill passed, with no surprises.

When my German friends translated the text of the law for me, we were all delighted. Because the plain wording of the law was: "everyone can marry everyone." Afterward we used that phrase as a template for all kinds of jokes — and, of course, all kinds of discussion.

To me it was a very interesting moment, or a very important and interesting phenomenon. Because I also happened to be in the United States at the moment same-sex marriage was legalized there. The day after the law passed, one street away from me, in an area with a lot of gay bars, a far-right man shot a gay man — or someone who looked gay — dead on the spot. I once read an old headline, too: on the day France passed its same-sex marriage law, a right-wing military man (should read "right-wing historian") shot himself dead in front of Notre-Dame in protest.

Now, if you looked at the world purely through that one event [the legalization of same-sex marriage], people would probably read it as society becoming more open, more progressive.

But in Munich, far more prominent than this exciting news confirming progress was the refugee question, which was everywhere. Taking in refugees has already hit every corner of German daily life. So I kept hearing a kind of discussion about it that left me cold. Nearly everyone who talked it over with me used a similar formula — "We strongly supported the chancellor's proposal to take in refugees at first, because..." — and it's very interesting, even the rhetoric was alike — "because we thought, when Hitler came to power, if some countries had opened their doors to German Jews, maybe history would have been completely different. So we think we have an obligation to open our doors now."

Then people used a "but." "My life is being disturbed, my space is being squeezed, I feel threatened. Why should it be us who bears the world's disasters?" People kept reminding me: "It's not only Syrian refugees. People from Africa, from Europe, from every place where there's conflict, are all pouring toward us."

They said: "Our city has a hundred-odd thousand people, and we have to take 10,000 refugees into it every day. How can we possibly bear that?" So all kinds of malicious, hostile, even violent acts against refugees are already happening.

So for me the two things were showing their meaning at the same time. Talking it over with people, I felt this could be an interesting parable about the world today, about Europe today.

I Choose to Stay in My Own Era — I Don't Want to Surrender to the Younger Generation's Era

Q: What's the biggest change you feel has happened in you lately?

D: I've grown old.

Q: A strong feeling?

D: Actually, no. The strong feeling is in how I've come to recognize the "generation gap." I've started to really feel that I have to put in special effort just to understand what popular culture contains. I can't take the pulse of popular culture and youth culture naturally anymore. Because the difference in emotional structure between us creates a thing we can call, for now, a "generation gap."

Q: But it seems to me you know a lot of new slang, and you understand a lot of popular culture.

D: That's exactly the problem. Sensitivity to popular culture, or taking part in some form of it, has never been a problem for me. I used to think that as long as I had the will, it was something I could do — that the generation gap could be crossed. The question is why I've only now started using the word "generation gap." Because I've truly come to see, first, that it's hard to cross, but the bigger problem is that I'm starting to lose the will to cross it. So you could call this my experience of growing old.

But in my experience that's not really how it is, because when I'm with the younger generation, it's usually I who come across as naive and they who seem mature. The naivety and the maturity show up in our different attitudes toward existing reality, toward the existing order. They think, of course it's like this — what's there to make a fuss about? Or they think it can't be changed, so what's the point of discussing change? Many young people submit to existing reality, to the existing order, and I don't want to go over to their logic. That feels to me like a strong and enormous divide.

Q: You're still very much an idealist.

D: My problem isn't whether I hold ideals — it's whether I have the will to practice them. I've announced it publicly many times: I choose to stay in the era that belongs to me. I don't want to change, I want to hold my ground. If it's possible, I'd rather the younger generation came to share my experience, or my era, than go over to theirs.

Q: Anything you've read lately that's especially worth sharing?

D: I'd probably still recommend Roberto Bolaño's 2666. To my mind Bolaño is probably the last great writer of the 20th century, and I hope he becomes the first great writer of the 21st. I hope a work like 2666 can be a bridge between the two centuries — and, of course, possibly a bridge between two generations, or more. I'd also recommend the American science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who has just died.

Q: What questions have you been thinking about most lately?

D: After a decade or two, I now want to take up the question of gender again as a whole — to put gender inside a larger, whole set of questions and discuss it there.

Because I think on one hand, in this so-called posthuman sense — when online nobody knows you're a dog, when online nobody cares whether you're a man or a woman — gender and the body are being changed. But to what extent are they really changed? Amid all of society's banishment and deconstruction, in what sense is gender still the single most important variable?

I didn't have this awareness [of the question] at first, but I've found that when I turn back to it, it echoes across a range — from the RYB kindergarten scandal to the film Angels Wear White (《嘉年华》), to Judith Butler — moving away once more from questions of sexual orientation or sexual minorities and into the question of the harm done to women as a whole, and thinking through the unexpected or logical interactions among them.

...What I find fascinating is that when we reflect on class or on gender, we also point out at the same time that these are themselves grand narratives. Because they are total; they concern the majority.

But what we face today is a very contradictory state. On one side, more and more countries around the world are passing same-sex marriage laws, and sexual minorities are starting to be accepted by mainstream society. On the other side, worldwide, women's social standing is falling across the board. That has become an entirely new question. When homoerotic fan service becomes a selling point of global popular culture, are we more liberated? Or the opposite? We can see clearly that most people are losing freedom, losing rights.

Q: Who do you think has influenced you the most?

D: That's hard for me to answer. Because I'm a "wild fox" of Chan Buddhism, self-taught and outside any orthodox lineage, gaining things and losing things all the way. The people, works, and ideas that have influenced me are probably an enormous jumble, and I take pride in that. And I'd advise everyone not to stick to one school, one place, one discipline.

Q: Are there any common misunderstandings about you?

D: There seem to be so many misunderstandings that I've stopped caring. Some may once have made me very angry, or hurt me badly, but now, "everything that has passed becomes dear."

Q: Generally speaking, what awakens your curiosity?

D: This is the thing I'm proudest of when I face the younger generation: I've kept a broad curiosity all along. Anything I don't know, I'm curious about. Anywhere I haven't been, I long to go.

I've really had this conversation with more than one or two young scholars. When I have some Third World travel plan, say, I hope they'll come along. What I get back is "What does this have to do with my discipline?" or "What connection does this have to my scholarship?" And in the end I can't help saying, "Aren't you curious?" Some of the answers express confusion, as if they don't understand what curiosity means. Some tell me straight out that life and energy are both very limited, so they can't waste them.

Compared with them, then, I've been "wasting" my life all along. I still read all kinds of novels, I still dip into the popular culture that elites write off as "trash." I'm still getting something out of it today. At the start of every trip I don't know what I'll gain from it. But I gain from traveling.

Q: Do you have any advice for young people?

D: The tragedy of humankind is that nobody wants to listen to the advice of those who've gone before, so I won't give any.

The cover image and banner are stills from the film Once Upon a Time in America (《美国往事》); the long cover image is a still from the film The Godfather (《教父》). All images via: Douban.