'Killing Japs is also a Business': memory of the Anti-Japanese War in Chinese TV Dramas

Abstract

The paper examines the proliferation of TV drama series featuring the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) in contemporary China and probes into the reasons for the Chinese obsession with a war that ended nearly seventy years ago. Images of evil Japanese soldiers, popularly known as the “Japanese devils” (Riben guizi), glut the channels whenever one turns on TV in China. With demonization of the Japanese “Other” and legitimatization of Communist rule as its central ideology, anti-Japanese TV drama has become an important form of media narrative of history, carrying on and reinforcing the collective memory of the national disaster and humiliation in the past. Because of the popularity of anti-Japanese dramas in China, playing Japanese soldiers and officers has become a career for a group of Japanese actors known as “professional devils.” By critical readings of some popular anti-Japanese TV drama series in recent years, especially the images of the Japanese in these dramas, the paper argues that televisual narratives of the Anti-Japanese War has become a politically safe form of entertainment and profit-making industry, in which various popular tastes and desires are wrapped under the overcoat of “nationalism.” Through this government-sponsored and market-oriented “consumerist nationalism,” Chineseness is defined, imagined and constructed. Television thus represents a “happy marriage” between state agendas and popular social desire through the imagination of the Other and the past.