NOT SINCE THE glory days of Kremlinology has there been an event quite comparable to the publication, last week, of The Tiananmen Papers -- material revealing the conflict within the Chinese Communist Party during the weeks before the crackdown in June 1989. Beijing is not amused. The documents were fabricated to embarrass China, goes the official response; and besides, the absolute correctness of the party's handling of Tiananmen has been reaffirmed at numerous cadre meetings (why it takes so many meetings to reaffirm an aboslutely correct decision is a mystery). By now, somebody, perhaps Bush, Sr., must have explained to Dubya that China will soon be undergoing a major leadership succession. It could be messy -- like Miami-Dade, with a billion people. But in grappling with the shape of things to come, CNN footage from a dozen years ago is not necessarily the best source for a book-averse president. To understand post-Tiananmen China, Bush might do best to arrange a screening of Titanic.
This isn't a matter of tired clichés about rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. For a while in the late 1990s, the unofficial theme music of open-air markets throughout China was Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" -- as performed by vendors selling bamboo flutes. Under the economic reform and cultural liberalization initiated by Deng in the 1970s, films from abroad were acquired for Chinese consumption. But until recently, the influx from Hollywood was sporadic, and limited to movies that had already been out for a while, such as Love Story, Superman, or (strange to imagine) Taxi Driver. A turning point came in 1994, with the adoption of a policy mandating that ten "excellent films" be imported each year, to acquaint the public with the finest works of contemporary cinematic art. Somehow, "excellent film" (hao dianying) quickly morphed into "great film" (dapian) -- a term without the same overtones of high culture. Dapian, as China scholar Jonathan Noble explains, "is a market concept that clearly signifies a film whose budget and ticket sales are high." By any measure, Titanic is the biggest piece of dapian ever to hit the screen.
Released in China during the spring of 1998, James Cameron's film saturated post-Maoist society to a degree uncannily familiar to residents of late-capitalist America. As Jonathan Noble writes in a recent issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Titanic-mania included the full compliment of promotional tie-ins: posters, trivia contests, photo spreads in major newspapers, even advertisements on the sides of buses in Beijing and other cities (a first). You could buy Titanic beer, cosmetics, and bath accessories. A new expression had to be coined, shishang xiaofei kuangchao, meaning "crazy frenzy of fashionable consumerism." As one Chinese intellectual wrote, with evident dismay: "The shrewd and detestable part of this type of commercial calculation is that it endows all expressions of criticism and sharp denunciation inevitably with an advertising effect." Or as we say stateside, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
All of which sounds like a major victory by the "capitalist roaders" over the "hard liners," right? Well, not so fast. Consider the remarks of President Jiang Zemin at the Ninth People's Congress in 1998 -- just a few weeks before Titanic opened. Jiang stressed that top government leaders should attend this particular dapian. "We must not take it for granted that capitalism is something that lacks ideological didacticism," Jiang said. "This film vividly depicts the relationship of money and love, the destitute and the prosperous, and the emotions of people confronted by disaster." It was good propaganda: the sort people would want (indeed, pay) to see. Some commentators tried to emphasize the egalitarian gestures in Titanic. The ship's fate is, after all, a lesson in the ultimate futility of extravagant wealth.
Even those who didn't quite embrace Leonardo DiCaprio's proletarian hero as the new embodiment of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought were impressed that a film could be uplifting and engrossing. And make a fortune. One party functionary, Zhang Dejiang, hailed Titanic as "a special kind of cultural product" that China must be able to produce for itself. Such "product," Zhang wrote, "must be economically and socially profitable. However, economic profit is primary, as without it, there can be no benefit to society."
Such odd blendings of state ideology and market mentality suggest a cultural mutation far beyond anything comprehensible from those familiar images of a dozen years ago. The dramatic broadcasts from Tiananmen Square in 1989 showed young idealists being crushed by the lords of a command economy. But as Jiang's succession looms over the next couple of years, it is by no means clear that the conflict can be reduced to a factional algebra of "reformers" versus "traditionalists." The men who ordered the crackdown had taken to heart Chairman Mao's basic dictum: "Political power grows out the barrel of a gun." In the meantime, without abandoning that principle, they have developed a new appreciation for the role of the film projector. Last year, the government modified its 1994 policy allowing ten "excellent films" to enter China annually. Today the quota is twenty.

Scott McLemee is a writer living in Washington, D.C.

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