Background

1986 was the year of Sun Yat-sens 120iest birthday. This was taken as the occasion to make a movie about his life. Involved was the historian Zhang Lei 張磊, who published at least two monographs about Sun Yat-sen until 1986, the Zhujiang film-studio as well as the party committee of the Guangdong Province and the ministry of propaganda. There was also substantial Japanese support (three agencies are named in the credits and the film is, by the way, available with Japanese subtitles; furthermore the Japanese are played by Japanese actors) which helps explain the focus on Sino-Japanese friendship. The movie "Sun Yat-sen" was the first big production for the stage-director Ding Yinnan 丁蔭楠, who continued to make big "official" movies after "Sun Yat-sen", e.g. in 1992 on Zhou Enlai 周恩來. End of June 2006 there even was a Ding Yinnan-movie week in Beijing. Ding Yinnan is a so-called fourth-generation stage director, i.e. the last generation to graduate before the Cultural Revolution and the one before the famous fifth generation, which broke away from the socialist tradition of film production of the early PRC (e.g. Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige). This movie tries to meet the challenge of positioning Sun Yat-sen into the ideological order of the time, i.e. the 1980s.

The whole plot is an ideological construct. Some aspects of Sun's life are focused upon, others are down-played. For example (in contrast to Western or Christian influences) the Japanese connections are strongly pointed at, which makes for a rather "Asian" Sun. During the mid-1980's Japan was getting important as an economic partner for China. In Sun's life as described by the movie, the West only plays a marginal role and hardly appears at all. Sun's whole youth is simply left out and the foreigners from Western countries seem to bring nothing but hardship to the Chinese people (but for the Hardoons). For Sun's life this picture does not fit, since he attended a Western school, learned English, became a Christian and raised a lot of funds in the US. Even his time in London after his first insurrection in 1895 is not shown at all, although the kidnapping in London, for example, played a quite important role in his political life and helped him win sympathies and money in the West – and would have made for a thrilling scene, too. The Japanese, on the other hand, by and large appear very positively as friends of the revolution, whereas other sides of Japanese interactions with China and Sun at the time could well be presented also differently.

Since the whole story is constructed from an ideological point of view, it has the task to make Sun fit into the course of history as defined by the PRC; the ideological arrangement of the plot makes it rather boring to watch today but was well received by the Chinese public when released, not the least because it experimented with some "modern" technical devices – supposedly stimulated by fifth generation films[1] – and at least dared to present some "bad" historical figures. Still, there seems to be no red line in the plot which also could make for some tension in the film. If one does not consider the ideological impetus behind the whole project, the scenes appear to be arranged in a rather unconnected way (though roughly sticking to chronology), jumping from one scene to the next.
There was some effort to style this movie also officially as an epoch-making movie, for example by seven Golden Rooster-awards alone in 1987[2] (and some further awards), by publishing a book about the film and its production in 1991[3] or – most recently – by a movie-week for the stage-director Ding Yinnan in 2006. The movie is still officially recommended for use in middle-school history classes.

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