Martyrdom in Chinese films of the Korean War: Shifting representations of martyrdom in Heroic Sons and Daughters (1964) and The Battle at Lake Changjin (2021)

This article investigates shifts in the representational politics of heroic death in Chinese films of the Korean War, taking Heroic Sons and Daughters (dir. Wu Zhaodi, 1964) and The Battle at Lake Changjin (dir. Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark and Dante Lam, 2021) as case studies. The author argues that, while Chinese cinema of the Mao era contributed to a broader culture of martyrdom, wherein heroic death was mobilized through art on behalf of revolutionary political struggle, contemporary Korean War films evacuate political concerns from their depictions of heroic death. The article draws on what Pang Laikwan (see Creativity and Its Discontents , 2012) and Wang Hui (see China’s Twentieth Century , 2016) have called, in the context of the postsocialist People’s Republic of China (PRC), depoliticization and the post-political, to account for this process, as well as on recent work by Ban Wang on the politics of 1960s Korean War films (see China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision , 2022). Films from the current cycle emphasize the grave human costs of war, while at the same time making direct reference to the Mao era culture of martyrdom.