THERE HAS never been a propaganda movie quite like The Founding of a Great Republic, which documents the time six decades ago when Chairman Mao Zedong's raggle-taggle band of farmer revolutionaries overcame Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist KMT to establish their communist revolution.
The film includes a phalanx of top movie stars, including action heroes Jackie Chan and Jet Li, actors Leon Lai and Donnie Yen, actresses Zhang Ziyi and Zhao Wei, plus a host of directors, comedy stars and even journalists.
The movie will form a central part of the celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. By peppering the picture with stars, producers hope to update the propaganda genre for a new generation of viewers. An audience at an early screening cheered and chuckled when their favourite actors or pop stars appeared on screen.
Anyone visiting China who wonders why the face of founding father, Chairman Mao Zedong, is still to be found on all the bank-notes after the disasters of the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s and the vicious excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), need only watch this movie.
Mao is played by Tang Guoqiang, who emphasises his “Great Helmsman” side, a hagiography of the provincial Hunanese turned international revolutionary hero. The movie stops short of having him speak in the difficult-to-understand Hunan accent – this Mao speaks Mandarin.
He is an avuncular father figure, a hero who cares deeply for his troops and the people, devoid of the ruthlessness described by some biographers, most notably Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their 2005 book Mao: The Unknown Story.
Co-directed by Han Sanping, head of the state film agency China Film, and Huang Jianxin, the movie blends propaganda and often sophisticated drama.
There are lots of policy debates and unadorned party politics, which make for rather dull viewing as characters outline the formation of committees in advance of a seemingly endless series of party congresses.
Some scenes are gripping. When Mao arrives in Beijing, then known as Beiping, he is unable to buy cigarettes. The shopkeepers have all fled in fear, and Mao makes a brief speech – as he cadges a cigarette from one of the politburo – on how it’s important not to chase out the capitalists, or production will suffer – a sentiment familiar to a generation reared in New China, but hardly doctrinaire Marxist-Leninism.
Chiang Kai-shek, Mao’s arch-rival, is sensitively portrayed by Zhang Guoli as a troubled man, a lonely figure on the wrong side of history. The KMT are depicted as gangsters, but there is no effort to demonise Chiang himself.
This may have a lot to do with the thawing of relations with Taiwan, now under the leadership of Chiang’s inheritor at the KMT helm, Ma Ying-jeou.
The prospect of the eventual return of Taiwan to the fold is extended in the way the film stresses the bonds between the KMT and the Communists, who came from the same Soviet-funded roots and were wartime allies against the Japanese.
Liu Jin as Zhou Enlai makes great use of the premier’s famous bushy eyebrows to show scepticism and concern. When the Communists finally succeeded in clearing the KMT from north of the Yangtze river, a crucial moment in the civil war, Zhou, Mao and Liu Shaoqi – later purged by Mao in the Cultural Revolution – and Mao’s ever-loyal general Zhu De get rip-roaring drunk together and sing a Chinese version of the Communist International.
Even those founding a great republic needed to blow off some steam now and then.