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Abstract

Through policy analysis and close reading of two films, this article reveals films’ increasing role in China's geopolitical plan, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The co-production film Xuanzang shows that the Silk Road past is used to illustrate BRI's pledge for a beneficial future. Even though Xuanzang's story alludes to history, it was selected for its significance in popular culture, thereby reflecting ‘hyperreality’. In any event, the Silk Road is insufficient for connecting a region characterized by complex histories and societies. As shown in The Composer, the Silk Road is a convenient metaphor used to portray any friendly history.

Keywords

Belt and Road Initiative China's media go global Chinese film policy Silk Road memory co-production films

Introduction

On 31 May 2021, the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party held a collective study session (PCSS) on strengthening and improving international communication. As a venue for policy signalling, the session suggested the Chinese state's continuing and increasing efforts to, as President Xi Jinping (2021) stated, ‘tell Chinese stories, disseminate Chinese voices, and present a real, multidimensional, and comprehensive China.’ Studies, including this Special Issue, have indicated that for around a decade, China has heavily invested in its ‘media going global’ strategy (Madrid-Morales and Wasserman, 2018; Madrid-Morales, 2021; Marsh, 2016, 2018; Thussu et al., 2018). Films are an important part of ‘media going global’, as noted, for example, by Voci and Hui (2017) in their volume on films’ role in China's bid for soft power. China's increasing influence on Hollywood has also raised interest in academia and beyond (Zhu, 2020; PEN, 2020). President Xi also stressed the role of films in improving international communication, remarking that they ‘create a positive public opinion environment for China's steady reform and development and contribute to building a community of shared future’ (Xi, 2021). Xi's remarks suggested that China's official discourse increasingly emphasizes films’ role in internal and external political communication.

Alongside the importation of the concept of ‘cultural and creative industries’ and under the pressure of joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), around 2000, the Chinese state started to commercialize and industrialize its previously state-owned film sector (Yao, 2005). By opening filmmaking, distribution, and screening to private companies and foreign investors, the Chinese film industry enjoyed rapid expansion. China's film sector experienced a golden period between 2000 and 2010 that led to economic benefits; however, around 2010 the state started to tighten its control over the sector again. In recent years, political importance has outweighed the economic value of film, as China claims ‘films should insist on taking the social benefit as a priority and reconciling the social benefit and economic benefit’ (PDCCP, 2021).

Although a ‘neo-liberal’ ideology underpins the original concept of creative and cultural industries, the role of films in China's internal and external communication shows that the analysis of film in this industry should consider the Chinese context. Following De Beukelaer and Spence’s (2018: 12) approach to studying the cultural economy, this article adopted a reflexive perspective, which ‘explores the contemporary conditions of cultural production and consumption, and the policy settings that shape them, through the cultural and creative industries.’ It offers an empirical exploration of the Chinese state's cultural policies and changing attitudes to its film sector. Specifically, it shows how China has increasingly made films a tool for boosting China's soft power and presents an example of how films are strategically supported by the state for one of China's most important foreign policies, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Named after the Silk Roads, the network of Eurasian trade routes that connected the Asian, European, and African continents, the BRI consists of the Silk Road Economic Belt (the belt) and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road (the road) that promote regional connectivity. In combination with close readings of films, this article also reveals how films are produced to promote a geopolitical plan.

The BRI and Silk Road memory

Although BRI is China's ‘all-dimensional’ foreign policy, it has seldom been examined from a cultural perspective. Since BRI was proposed in 2013, the English-language literature has extensively addressed it from the perspective of geopolitics and geoeconomics, due to the initiative's purpose to increase intracontinental connectivity via infrastructural investments (Callahan, 2017; Huang, 2016). Despite this proliferation of studies, few have touched upon BRI's cultural aspects and China's soft-power ambition.

Tim Winter was among the first scholars to devote attention to the initiative's cultural implications. Winter (2016) examined BRI's possible impact on Silk Road heritages such as UNESCO's initiative to identify and preserve sites and monuments along the Silk Roads. He conceptualized the Silk Road as a geo-cultural construct brought out on different occasions to advance the contemporary initiative's strategic goals (Winter, 2021). Following Winters’ call to look at the BRI through a cultural lens, this article looks at how the geopolitical plan facilitated the ‘media going global’ project. In terms of BRI-facilitated media representations, several studies have evidenced media content as an indispensable part of promoting understanding and building support for BRI (Chen and Lau, 2021; van Noort, 2020). Moreover, the state not only supported content production in external communication about the initiative but also supported the customization of content for export to BRI countries. According to The vision and actions on jointly building Belt and Road, ‘we [BRI countries] should hold culture years, art festivals, film festivals, TV weeks and book fairs in each other's countries; cooperate on the production and translation of fine films, radio and TV programs’ (National Development and Reform Commission et al., 2015). Hence, the initiative has transcended a public relations role and become part of China's strategic support for globalizing Chinese media.

BRI's support of ‘Chinese cinema going global’ has gathered momentum as an area of inquiry in Chinese-language research. Since 2013, four out of six volumes of the annual report on the global impact of Chinese cinema have been dedicated to Chinese films in BRI regions (Huang et al., 2016, 2017, 2019, 2021). However, outside China, the initiative has not translated into a lens through which to study cinema as an aspect of Chinese media globalization. This article explores the possibility of employing BRI from a geographic perspective for studying the international spread of Chinese media via cinema. First, the author uses policy analysis to ask how, and whether, the promotion of ‘Chinese cinema going global’ in BRI countries has become a priority in enhancing China's soft power. Using policy research to establish the foundations of examining two co-production projects, Xuanzang (dir. Huo Jianqi, 2016) and The Composer (dir. Silzati Yakov 2019), I investigate how those films have been utilized as a geopolitical strategy for targeted countries.

Official speeches, documents, and introductory videos have evidenced how the Silk Road was used in the BRI to symbolize the promise of a prosperous future (Benabdallah, 2021; Qian, 2022). The discourse has linked the latter to peace, inclusiveness, development, and win-win cooperation, and portrayed it as an alternative model of globalization (Callahan, 2016). I also examined how films were created as a geopolitical strategy for target countries by deploying the Silk Road narrative.

This article uses ‘memory’ as a metaphor to understand how the Silk Road is utilized in Xuanzang and The Composer because they invoke individual perspectives of the past. Memories can be broadly divided into two categories: the collective level, which refers to ‘symbols, media, social institutions, and practices; and the individual level, which refers to individual remembrance on the cognitive level’ (Erll, 2011: 98–99). Collective memories need to be actualized on the individual level. This emphasis on the ‘actualizing memory’ foregrounds that the purpose of constructing Silk Roads in films such as Xuanzang is to create people-to-people bonds, which means to gain audiences’ ‘trust and understanding of cooperation; common interests and the appreciation of other countries’ (Cpcnews, 2019). Therefore, to utilize the Silk Road in those films is to construct memory by relating the knowledge of the Silk Road past to an actual and contemporary situation (Assmann and Czaplicka, 1995).

An equally important question of what is remembered is how this past is remembered; in other words, the modes of memories (Erll, 2008). To understand China's BRI co-production films’ preference for biographical films which present the past through personal experiences, this article references arguments that mediated memories can be adopted by their viewers through empathy. As early as the 1920s, Aby Warburg experimented with empathy as a way of actualizing materialized memories in his exhibition Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Sülek, 2021). Landsberg (2004) further explored the role of empathy through cinematic technologies and practices in her book Prosthetic Memory, and argued that it ‘brings us into intellectual and emotional contact with circumstances that lie well beyond our own lived experiences, and in the process can force us to confront and enter into a relationship of responsibility and commitment toward “others”’ (Landsberg, 2009: 225). This article argues that films presenting the past through personal experiences show that Chinese officials wanted the audience to embrace the Silk Road past.

While memory is useful to understand how the Silk Road past is utilized in the BRI, it should also be noted that memory's allusion to the existence of an ‘authentic past’ might be problematic for understanding how the Silk Road is constructed in co-production films. Do co-production films really build on the authentic Silk Road past? This article will show that Baudrillard's concept of ‘hyperreality’ became an important strategy for the state to make its films more influential. The state wove its Silk Road narrative into films about the past as well as into popular symbols that are already familiar to audiences. While Baudrillard believed the importance of films lay in ‘retrac[ing], through the image the insignificance of the world – that is to say, ultimately, its innocence – and to contribute to that insignificance with their images’ (Baudrillard, 1998: 110), what he might have denounced as cinema's ‘effort toward an absolute correspondence with the real, [in which] cinema also approaches an absolute correspondence with itself’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 47) works as a narration strategy for state-facilitated co-production films.

At this point, it is important to state the research questions. This article looks into China's cultural policies for its film sector and asks how the state's attitude to its film sector has changed. What is films’ role in boosting China's ‘soft power’? How do films strategically support the BRI? How is the Silk Road past remembered in co-production films that promote the BRI? Is this remembrance built on the ‘original past’ or on existing popular cultural symbols? What are the constraints of deploying the BRI's historical perspective?

Methods

This article adopts a two-layer analytical approach. It starts with policy analysis to show that China stresses the role of films in domestic and international political communication, and strategically supports film-related cooperation with BRI countries. I collected 97 regulatory documents and laws published since 2001 from the China Film Administration's website to investigate the official discourse around film. As Chinese policy documents are considerably vague and unwieldy, I took the hermeneutic approach to understand Chinese official policies by including official news reports, city-level film industries plans and academic works in my analysis. A qualitative inductive approach was adopted to identify and discuss the dominant salient themes (Terry et al., 2017). After becoming familiar with those documents, I coded the expressions emphasizing ‘marketization (shichanghua) and industrialization (chanyehua)’ and ‘correcting films’ role in politics’ (zhengquefangxiang). After reviewing codes, the coded body of text was re-coded under ‘films as cultural products’ and ‘as tools for political communication.’ Reflexive coding revealed that ‘insisting on taking the social benefit as a priority and reconciling the social benefit and economic benefit’ was an important theme for Chinese film policy in recent years. In order to explore whether the promotion of ‘Chinese cinema going global’ in BRI countries has become a soft power priority, I also coded the state's support for film-sector cooperation with BRI and linked those policies with recent developments in film sector cooperation with BRI countries.

After presenting the official discourse, this article narrows to Xuanzang and The Composer. Both films were chosen because they received state support. The state-owned China Film Group's Xuanzang was among the three flagship China–India co-production films announced a day before the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's official visit to China in 2015. The Composer, a China–Kazakhstan co-production, is also a high-profile film that received support from the two countries’ leaderships. An assessment of both films reveals that the Silk Road's past is a key narrative in films promoting the BRI. By adopting ‘memory’ as a metaphor for mediated past, this article uses close reading to show how the past has been utilized to promote BRI objectives.

Insisting on taking the social benefit as a priority

The Film Industry Promotion Law of the People's Republic of China was enacted in 2016.¹ The law illustrates cinema's increasing significance as a propaganda medium rather than only a cultural product. It ‘is enacted to promote the sound and thriving development of the film industry, advocating for core socialist values, regulating the film market order, and enriching the spiritual and cultural life of the people’ (NPC, 2016). In 2018, the jurisdiction of film regulation moved from the former State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) to that of its supervising body, the Publicity Department of the CCP (PDCCP), confirming films’ growing role as the voice of the Party. The 14^th Five-Year Plan of Making Shanghai the High-Tech Film Industry Hub commented on this new arrangement as follows:

‘the central committee led by comrade Xi Jinping attaches great importance and loving care to film, which will bring prosperity. At the same time, [it] levelled up the requirements for film creation, required [the dominance of] mainstream themes in content making and screening, and enhanced ideological guidance’ (Songjiang Gov, 2022).

The early 2000s saw the industrialization and marketization of China's state-controlled film sector, and the enactment of the law and the jurisdiction change in recent years further emphasized films’ role in political communication. In the early 2000s, the state announced its recognition of films’ economic importance as cultural products (Yao, 2005; Yin, 2001) and the most commonly mentioned themes vitalizing film's economic value in public debates were marketization and industrialization. For instance, in 2001, Yin (2001) began publishing an annual report on the Chinese film industry. Furthermore, among the 26 official documents from 2001 to 2006, 18 focus on marketization and industrialization by opening up the previously state-owned film sector. While films’ role in political communication is always important in China, emphasizing film's economic impact was the focus of the state policy in those years.

The turning point was in 2010 when Guiding Opinions Concerning Stimulating Flourishing and Development of the Film Industry (DNC, 2010) was published. The document stressed that the film industry should ‘insist on taking the social benefit as a priority and reconciling the social benefit and economic benefit’. In 2021, the 14^th Five-Year Plan for the Film Industry (PDCCP, 2021), which guides the country's film industry over a five-year period repeated the same statement. Furthermore, it bluntly identified films as an ‘important front of propaganda and ideological work, an art form loved by the people, a sign of the country's soft power.’ The plan shows that Chinese officials believed films were not only important for internal ideological education but also for external communication.

Promotion of ‘Chinese cinema going global’ in BRI countries

The 14^th Five-Year Plan also pledged that by 2025, ‘in service of external communication, film exchange and cooperation should be deepened, and film's role as a “national name card” should be stressed’ (PDCCP, 2021). The importance of film in China's external communication has also been written into the local 14^th Five-Year Plans for the film industry. Beijing and Shanghai both issued special notes on films’ central role in serving China's international policies and communications (Beijing Film Administration, 2022; Songjiang Gov, 2022). Similarly, according to the deputy director-general of the PDCCP, the emphasis of film's role in international policy was a response to Xi's request for ‘servicing the important strategic decision of rejuvenating glorious Chinese culture, and for the great mission of rejuvenating the great China dream of the Chinese nation’ (Wang, 2018).

Consequently, the BRI, an important Chinese foreign policy, acquired even greater importance amid its support of Chinese cinema going global. For instance, Beijing made the BRI's ‘international film culture exchange’ its major funding project. Zhang Weiwei, a PCSS lecturer who briefed top Chinese officials on improving international communication, noted that ‘carrying out BRI is an example of a Chinese narrative, we need to effectively disseminate BRI stories’ (CCDI News, 2021). His summary suggests that BRI is an important narrative for the Chinese state's international communication and that BRI countries represent an important sphere for action and cooperation.

Since then, a series of projects have been launched with state support. To promote film exchange, the Silk Road International Film Festival was established as China's third official international film festival. To boost infrastructural development, at the Fourth Forum on China–Africa Media Cooperation, the BRI theatre alliance was launched ‘to share the expertise in movie-theatre-building, including providing design and equipment to developing countries and [including] Africa [-n countries], in exchange for shares in theatres and for screening time slots [for Chinese films]’ (Sohu, 2018).

In terms of content-making, China has signed 22 bilateral film co-production agreements in the past two decades, 19 of which were signed with BRI countries after 2013. Furthermore, while China has become the largest film market and a major film production country, the role of co-productions in facilitating the development of its film sector (see Zhan, 2013) has changed. The turning point was in 2014, when SAPPRFT disqualified several co-produced films for their insufficient presentation of Chinese elements. The administrative body restated its requirements for official co-produced films: first, Chinese investment must exceed one-third of the total budget; second, a co-production must include leading Chinese characters; third, such a film must involve shots presenting China. Re-emphasizing those three requirements made it clear that the Chinese film administration's attitudes to Chinese-foreign co-productions have also leaned more towards increasing China's cultural impact rather than facilitating the film industry's development.

However, it is difficult to identify how the state encourages and supports specific productions. For the film Xuanzang, the financial support is clear, because the project was mainly funded by the state-owned China Film Group. The Composer is comparatively enigmatic. While The Composer's production company, Shinework Pictures, is technically privately owned, it has had close ties with state media as it is a long-time content provider and partner of CCTV-6, the movie channel of China's state broadcaster. Shinework Pictures claims that ‘it focuses on international co-production and works closely with the Chinese film authorities and the Belt and Road countries’ (Shinework Pictures, n.d.). However, it is difficult to determine how much support Shinework Pictures receives from the state and in what format. Both films show that China's support for co-productions with BRI countries is offered through different channels and in different forms. As a result, in 2019, the number of pre-approved co-production projects reached a historical high of 94 (China Film News, 2020). Although co-productions were suspended due to COVID-19, we are bound to see more films co-produced with BRI countries under Chinese auspices in the future. The following part of the article investigates how these co-productions are constructed to communicate a geopolitical plan.

Experiencing the past to promise a future

Named after the ancient trading routes, the BRI alludes to the idea of the past Silk Road. Previous studies have shown that the Silk Road has been incorporated into media content to promote Chinese promises of peaceful, inclusive, win-win cooperation through BRI (Benabdallah, 2021; Qian, 2022). Xuanzang is an example of a co-production project developed because of BRI and which made use of the Silk Road past. A monk, Xinhai, initiated the project in 2006, but failed to attract any investors until 2013, when the BRI was launched and Xuanzang's story formed part of the official Silk Road narrative. During Xi Jinping's visit to India in 2014, the story of Xuanzang was adopted as a symbol of friendship between the two BRI countries. Later that year, the Chinese Film Administration sent the film project to Xi for approval; it then became a special project overseen by top officials. The state-owned China Film Group was commissioned to lead and fund the co-production, with a budget of 150 million CNY.

How was the image of the past Silk Road utilized for a film brought to life by the BRI? The concept of ‘memory’ may be helpful in understanding the revival of the Silk Road in films such as Xuanzang, as the metaphor emphasizes the actualization of the past on an individual level (Erll, 2011: 98–99), and the personal-experience aspect of history corresponds to why and how the state has utilized the Silk Road for its objectives. First, the ultimate goal of adopting the Silk Road in films such as Xuanzang is to gain audiences’ trust in and understanding of BRI cooperation. Second, the preference for presenting the past through personal experiences in BRI films points to the ‘experience’ aspect of remembrance, i.e., that the mediated past can be adopted (experienced) by audiences.

Xuanzang builds on its protagonist's remembrance of his experiences bringing back Indian Buddhist texts to China. The opening sequence shows how experiences of the past are transferred from Xuanzang to the British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham and then to an Indian college student. It starts by inviting the audience to join an Indian student looking for Cunningham's book The Ancient Geography of India (1963) at the University of Mumbai's library in 2016. When this book is opened, the camera zooms into a picture of Cunningham in 1870 which then comes to life. He remembers how his discoveries of the ancient ruins in India perfectly matched the description in Xuanzang's A Journey to the West (646). From his black-and-white pictures of ruins, the temple's statues are coloured and revived, and Xuanzang walks into the frame with his stories.

With this opening, Xuanzang invites audiences to share in the monk's memories of the inclusive, peaceful exchanges of the past, to remember with him. Memory studies maintain that mediated memories can be adopted through empathy. Landsberg argued that empathy ‘brings us into intellectual and emotional contact with circumstances that lie well beyond our own lived experiences, and in the process can force us to confront and enter into a relationship of responsibility and commitment toward “others”’ (Landsberg, 2009: 225). The structure of the memories in the opening sequence also inherits the beliefs and wishes of officials that ‘we’ as the audiences, especially Indian audiences, might identify with the college student and possibly adopt the memories of Xuanzang.

The monk's memories of peace, inclusiveness, development, and win-win cooperation along the Silk Road serve as confirmation of a comparable future. Presenting this past through Xuanzang's lived past, embodied by the Silk Road, has been emphasized as ‘proof’ of the promise of a future. The film is designed to help audiences grasp the benefits connectivity brought to the countries involved. In contrast to other depictions of Xuanzang's journey, this film eliminates almost all villains. While the essence of other stories, including Xuanzang's own A Journey to the West, lay in the monk's adventures facing human-made obstacles, the film beautifies Xuanzang's encounters with others. Here it is nature, such as ‘never-ending dunes’, which is blamed, while all the people the monk meets show great kindness. They let him pass through their lands and bring him food, horses, and water. Reconstructing Xuanzang's experiences in this way is meant to make audiences believe that past connections with China have paved the way for a better future. One of the merchants’ leaders in the film imagines that with the help of a beautiful Chinese wife, he could master silk-weaving techniques and thus live a better life.

While memory is so far a useful concept for our understanding of Xuanzang, it unavoidably alludes to the imagination of an existing, authentic past. My research here has shown me that the construction of the past builds on the original past as much as it diminishes it. It could be argued that the Xuanzang story was chosen for its importance in popular culture as a ‘hyperreality’, becoming more ‘real’ than the historical reality.

‘Hyperreality’, according to Baudrillard (1994), pertains to describing mediated experiences and reality based on their simulation. Baudrillard (1994: 2) claimed that ‘the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referential’ in which reality is lost. Some film reviews compared the film to a fantasy work, suggesting that the original past was liquidated in Xuanzang. Those reviews linked Shipantuo, a film character, to the popular character of the Monkey in different reimaginations of Xuanzang's story, showing that the members of the audience experienced the memory through a mediated, ‘hyperreal’ past. As such hyperreality is adopted in films such as Xuanzang, ‘correspondence with itself’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 47) becomes a strategy to increase the impact of propaganda. For instance, an official media release about the character Shipantuo played by Pu Bajia was deliberately titled ‘Pu Bajia played the prototype of Sun Wukong’ (Sina.cn, 2016) to encourage the above-mentioned comments linking the film to popular stories on the journey. The film intentionally rejuvenates the Silk Road past inherited from Xuanzang's experiences by referring to cultural products of the monk's journey already popular in neighbouring countries.

Thus, deploying stories familiar to the target audiences represents a strategic move by the state to increase the impact of propaganda; in choosing a story to embody the past, what matters to the state is the popularity of that story in the target countries. Other examples include the famous Japanese media franchise Dragon Ball, inspired by Xuanzang's journey to the west, and the popular Korean variety show New Journey to the West, which was aired in 2015.

Xuanzang's reliance on those popular symbols shows that the state, within the BRI context, may tend to support projects which present not only a friendly Silk Road past, but also symbols already familiar to the audiences in the BRI countries. A retelling of Xuanzang's story through the film thus becomes a question of substituting ‘the signs of real for the real’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 2), ‘the process with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra’(Baudrillard, 1994: 2). One may conclude here that in practical terms, memory for BRI films is built on cultural symbols that audiences automatically recognize.

Silk Road: Over-coded or plastic?

In creating remembrance narratives of inclusiveness, peace, and win-win cooperation, memory generates particularity and unity (Assmann and Czaplicka, 1995), and is equally excluding. Those not deemed ‘peaceful’ in Xuanzang's journey are purposely forgotten by the film. Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari's (1987: 41) concept of ‘over-coding’ as the ‘phenomena of centring, unification, totalisation, integration, hierarchisation, and finalization,’ De Kloet (2022) observed generalization in the Chinese film Wandering the Land, which over-coded the nation in the singular form, representing the people as united. He argued that over-coding was bound to be constantly ‘betrayed’. Hence, if over-coded films serve as a grand past narrative, the Silk Road in Xuanzang is also bound to be betrayed, and memories are bound to become disorientated.

While the Silk Road in the official narrative celebrates collaboration, friendships, and connectivity, a dilemma for the state is that it generalizes and excludes ‘the others’ at the same time. Central Asia was not united by Buddhism as the film presented. Ji (1985: 67–87) remarked on Buddhism's declining influence at the time Xuanzang travelled across the region. Ji noted that in some places other religions were more influential, which made Xuanzang's journey quite challenging. The ‘new Silk Road’ is not as peaceful as the film portrayed, either. Scholars have noted the challenges of the post-Soviet central region that connects the West with the East: it is endowed with oil and gas but faces complex transitional ethnic ties and religious histories (Haghayeghi, 1995; Walsh, 1993). The region's complexity makes it difficult to promote an overall Silk Road narrative to all countries. Nevertheless, this film focuses on a Buddhist India and intentionally leaves out the religious complexities Xuanzang encountered in central Asia (Ji, 1985: 67–87). This could be problematic for an initiative aiming to connect Asia, Europe, and Africa and inviting the participation of all countries.

Despite the official discourse on the past Silk Road in cinema, the state has never officially published a map to outline the geographic scope of BRI. Furthermore, none of the existing maps (unofficial illustrations) of BRI are recognized by China. The official website yidaiyilu.gov.cn stated the publishing of this sort of map inappropriate:

‘BRI is an important international cooperation platform and the international public good; all countries recognizing BRI's vision are welcomed; there is no geographic scope for BRI. The core is to use the “Silk Road” culture to build an open, inclusive international economic cooperation platform; the Chinese government never limited the geographic scope of BRI. Making lists and maps is improper.’ (yidaiyilu.gov.cn, n.d.)

In 2017, the ‘One Belt and One Road’ initiative, carrying the historical burden of ‘Silk Roads’ in Eurasia and Africa, was rebranded as the ‘Belt and Road Initiative.’ Various responses made by the government show official attempts at minimizing the impacts of the initiative's historical aspect.

In co-producing with Kazakhstan, a country neighbouring China's Xinjiang region, with large Islamic and Christian communities and a country through which the monk travelled but did not feature in Xuanzang, the state itself has betrayed the over-coded Silk Road past. The Composer, a co-production project between the two countries, provides another example. Despite being directed by the Xinjiang-born Uyghur director Silzati Yakov, the film shows no interest in unpacking the complexity of the Silk Road past and the region. It used the Silk Road as a vague metaphor for past inclusiveness, peace, and win-win cooperation. This film reimagines the past in a similar vein to Xuanzang using the personal memories of the Chinese composer Xian Xinghai during World War II. The penniless Chinese composer flees to Almaty from Russia, and Kazakh musician Bakhytzhan Baikadamov takes him in despite his own struggles due to war and poverty. As the film's introduction says,

‘Xian's music bonds them together. Amangeldy [a symphony in honour of the Kazakh national hero] resulted from such cultural exchange and inclusiveness. The symphony has a profound impact on people in those two countries. This past [their friendship] is the firm foundation for further friendships between the two countries.’ (Douban, n.d.)

While the past Silk Road is important for the BRI, it is insufficient for building an inclusive geopolitical project for a region of such complex histories and societies. Therefore, the grand Silk Road narrative becomes ‘plastic’, which describes the ‘ways it shifts shape to accommodate diverse human and nonhuman vitalities’ (Ren, 2021). While the Silk Road narrative is designed by the state as a geological plan, it must be deformed and reformed. Making silk roads a metaphor for a so-called ‘silk road culture’ therefore opens space for disorientated and customized remembering. Like The Composer, while it is branded as a Silk Road film, it did not touch upon the Silk Road past; instead, it presents the musician's friendships that celebrate the historical friendship and are familiar to audiences in both countries. Co-production projects currently in development also adopt plastic ‘Silk Road’ stories. Shinework's Hong Qu is another BRI co-production project based on the widely promoted story of Chinese doctors bringing over medicines to treat Ebola at Ghana's urgent request. For the state, now any past presenting inclusiveness, peace, and win-win connectivity is, in a sense, a ‘Silk Road’. In supporting co-productions with BRI countries, themes have therefore been expanded and the Silk Road past is deformed and becoming plastic.

Conclusion

Films are undoubtedly important in China's media going global strategy, helping it to build soft power. BRI has encouraged content-making for and in cooperation with BRI countries. The policy analysis shows that the state has increasingly exploited cinema as a tool for internal and external communications. Consequently, BRI, as China's most important foreign policy, has become a key part of international cooperation projects that promote China's cinema going global.

However, the term soft power seems inappropriate for a foreign policy aiming for inclusiveness. As ‘the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments’ (Nye, 2005: 11), soft power pertains to one's cultural influence over others. The co-produced films discussed in this article demonstrate that cultural influence is not merely gained by the promotion of a country's culture, political values, and foreign policies to others, but also of ‘our’ shared past (in this case, by the symbol of the Silk Road). The film Xuanzang constitutes an example of Silk Road past revival as a means of promising a shared future, through the construction of individualized experiences of a shared past. However, the impact of any past is not built on the original past. In contrast to the ‘memory’ concept's implied originality, I contend that such a past is built on already-popular cultural symbols; co-produced films tend to choose well-known stories to win audiences over more easily. Thus, remembrance becomes ‘hyper-remembrance’.

Moreover, remembering the Silk Road past is as inclusive as it is exclusive; the ‘peaceful’ narrative was unable to include all countries in the region. Officials have had to reshape the Silk Road as a plastic metaphor only including ‘friendly’ histories, as in the film The Composer. The related grand memories are bound to be disorientating as the Silk Road becomes a plastic metaphor, and state-supported co-productions come to include any personally-lived past of friendship in hopes of making the BRI attractive to various target audiences.

Is the state the only actor that deformed the Silk Road past and showed the plasticity of its narratives? How do various actors such as investors and creators negotiate their economic goals and artistic expression with the demands of the state? What are the possibilities and challenges for Chinese and foreign filmmakers? The plasticity makes ‘“a sculpture of futurity” [which] allows us “to see [what is] coming,” both to anticipate and to be surprised by the unexpected’ (Ren, 2021). With a modest goal to reveal how the Chinese government's attitude to films has changed and to call for scholarly attention of China's media going global to the film sector, this question is yet to be answered.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to supervisors Professor Jeroen de Kloet and Professor Patricia Pisters for their guidance. I am also grateful to the special issue editors and reviewers who made invaluable comments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This work was supported by the China Scholarship Council under Grant [202008310158].

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Belt and Road Initiative-supported co-production films: Film policy and disoriented remembrance of the Silk Road past

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The BRI and Silk Road memory

Methods

Insisting on taking the social benefit as a priority

Promotion of ‘Chinese cinema going global’ in BRI countries

Experiencing the past to promise a future

Silk Road: Over-coded or plastic?

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

References