JAPAN’S wartime depredations in China in the 1930s and 1940s have long been good business for Chinese television producers. Political tensions between the two nations have only increased their popularity. Now China’s television regulator has ordered that provincial stations send all such programmes back to Beijing for more vetting before transmission. The move follows a prominent news story on national television criticising “crude and shoddily produced” anti-Japanese dramas. It suggests official concerns about the quality of the shows though not necessarily about their politics.
In 2004 just 15 such shows were approved for distribution. In 2011 and 2012 at least 177 featuring anti-Japan “resistance” were approved, almost one in five of all dramas so authorised.
Their popularity has turned China’s largest television-studio compound, Hengdian World Studios, into what the Chinese media call a huge “anti-Japan revolutionary base”. Thousands of extras play Japanese soldiers, earning about $15 a day to die in numerous ways. “We die every day,” says Ge Honglei, an extra hired for the second series of “Smoke Signals Everywhere”. A marketing trailer features the bullets of Chinese marksmen flying in slow motion to hit their villainous Japanese targets. Liu Zhijiang, a producer, says the anti-Japan shows are “the most popular” in part because they reflect “recorded history”.
From 2002 to 2004 modern crime-investigation dramas dominated prime time. Then the regulator stepped in. Officials have also placed restrictions on programmes involving time travel, some of which use historical settings to criticise current politics. As the diplomatic heat rises, reining in anti-Japanese dramas may prove more difficult.
