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Tim Cawkwell

~ currently publishing my poetry and verse. Blog entries on film and painting going back to 2014. My main website is www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Tim Cawkwell

Tag Archives: China-Taiwan

EMPIRE – WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS

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Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Tim's poems 2020

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China, China-Taiwan, Empire, Tibet

I was ridin’ a plane to where the East is dark,

and found myself sinking, into a brown study:

China, all its works, all its days, its eclipse,

I found myself sweating at all that’s bloody.

*

False negative. China has a yen for imperial power

like all empires till now: take conquistadorēs,

take merchant venturers, proconsuls and caliphs,

history is stuffed with colonial glories.

*

Glories, you say! More like confusion and subjection.

Stir in as well exploitation and oppression.

The desert makes peace, so peace is a desert.

Cruelty and hardship are imperialism’s mission.

“We princelings are plotting to be strategic

by careful unveiling of naked power.

Our big plan’s backed by choicest tactic,

now is the time to open the door

since this new century is the new Han hour.

Who cares for Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan?

They’re lose-lose; we’re win-win.

*

“Take up a pen, you only need nine dashes,

to hoover up large supermarine charts,

Drawing a line will provoke sharp clashes,

it won’t be long before peace starts

to snap, breaking and crushing all hostile hearts.

Push it, pour it, concrete out of sand,

put down the flag since it’s now our land.”

*

Emperor, stop! Allow me to mention

one special person – I mean the Dalai

Lama, embodiment of his nation,

you can’t unperson the world’s key ally

who’s a non-violent rebuke to all our folly.

We won’t turn a blind eye to travails in Tibet;

even our blank minds cannot forget.

  • *

It’s not just exercising nerveless hard power,

China deploys too Confucian thrift.

The Far East’s all bamboo but its roots are Chinese:

like an earthquake, China’s making power plates shift.

*

Sy Clan, Riady Clan, all those huaren,

poultry to property, protein bars to sweat pants.

We find them unpronounceably exotic and foreign,

yet we also like stocks in noodles to finance.

*

They don’t want, they won’t have, their boat being rocked,

especially by young pups aiming to be uppity.

Soft power, money power, hard power are combining.

“It’s our rules for fraternity, and that don’t mean liberty.”

*

So – all hail to the Xi, the joint is Jinping’s.

Does the helmsman seem wobbly? No way, he is rising.

What’s in his mind? Friendship? Domination?

He does look inscrutable, but is that so surprising?

*

Yet pause there, and ask, what’s the end beyond the endgame?

Chinaman, he say, “Tall trees attract wind.”

Out there, somewhere, some upstart’s stirring;

there’s a post-China endgame, an era beyond.

*

Tim Cawkwell / August 2020

[huaren are people of Chinese ethnicity living outside China]

THE ASSASSIN

18 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in costume narratives

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China-Taiwan, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, The Assassin

This extraordinary film reached the cinemas in 2015, and even reached Norwich in February of this year. Unlike a blockbuster, it has taken its time to make an impact.

Assassin

I have read some reviews, although I am far from having seen lots of them, but the ones I did see have been silent on one aspect. If it is an aesthetic law that a work of art set in the past always tells you as much about the period in which it was made (i.e. now) as the period in which it is set (i.e. then), what does The Assassin tell us about the present? It is made by a Taiwanese, and is a Taiwan-China co-production, and what it tells us is that for a large country, e.g. China, to destabilise a small country, e.g. Taiwan, is a mistake, morally but also politically. The status quo is disrupted at peril.

The story of the film is the dispatch of the assassin, Nie Yinniang, by Princess Jiaching to Weìbó province in order to murder Tian Ji’an, the jiedushi (military governor) of Hamdan prefecture within Hebei province. This is a move by the Tang Dynasty to increase its power. The film tells how Nie Yinniang then rebels against this order. Why? Ostensibly because her heart tells her to spare Tian Ji’an who it turns out was once betrothed to her as a peace move between the Court and Weibo. But there is a strand of political expediency in her thinking too. Her puppetmaster has tried to instil in her the idea that ‘the way of the sword is pitiless’, but Nie Yinniang argues that since Tian Ji’an’s son is so young, to kill Tian Ji’an would bring chaos to Weibo.

The historical source is a story by Pie Xing called ‘Nie Yinniang’, written in 9th-century China, and covering recent events since Tian Ji’an was jiedushi from 796 to 812. But the film works at several levels, and strict historicity is probably the most marginal.

  • It is a martial arts film.
  • It is a ‘love story’ about the complex relationship between Nie Yinninag and Tian Ji’an.
  • It is a story with a moral: don’t destabilise, be prepared to stand up to power.
  • It is a contemporary fable: ‘China, hands off Taiwan.’ Keep the status quo.

Interestingly, on this last point, Wikipedia tells us the film cost the equivalent of US$14.9 million. By 2010, the director Hou Hsiao-Hsien had assembled a budget but in the end over half of the film’s final budget came from China. This is intriguing: were the Chinese producers of the view that China-Taiwan relations should not be destabilised, or was it more Machiavellian still, that this is a propaganda film through which the Chinese Communist Party supported the film’s message as a cover for the fact that it sought, if not to destabilise Taiwan, then to act in an overbearing manner towards it? After all, the situation between China and Taiwan is a bomb waiting to explode.

A final inscrutable, perplexing thought: Weibo is the brand name for the Chinese micro-blogging website, that is to say the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. So ‘Don’t destabilise Weibo’ (the province) means ‘Don’t interfere in Weibo’ (the microblog). No doubt all parties readily deny such a connection, but if you believe in the secret life of cinema, then you can relish this thought.

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  • EMPIRE – WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS
  • yearning for the sixties
  • FILM PORTRAITURE 4: Bob Fleischner Dying

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Sarah Cawkwell on FILM PORTRAITS 2: TACITA …
Antonioni: more De C… on Antonioni’s Metaphysical…
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  • artists' film
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  • biopics
  • Brakhage
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  • British cinema
  • cinema and culture
  • cinema of hyperbole
  • costume narratives
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  • Creation
  • crucifixion films
  • crucifixion on film
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