Amid trade tensions with America, China is showing old war films

THERE IS A lot for Americans to dislike in the Chinese propaganda film “Shangganling”. It is based on a real battle in late 1952, during which American and South Korean forces failed to take a mountain ridge from more lightly armed Chinese troops, who suffered terrible casualties. The weeks-long campaign came near the end of the Korean war of 1950-53, which began when the Stalinist regime of Kim Il Sung invaded the pro-American south and which eventually drew in millions of Chinese and UN forces. Chinese schools teach that China joined the war in self-defence and was victorious. Pupils are told their countrymen showed solidarity with communist brethren in Korea while standing up to American imperialists who were bent on attacking China’s heartland. Official histories avoid the awkward question of who started the “War to Resist America and Aid Korea”, as it is known. China’s internal estimates put the Chinese death toll at 400,000. The public is told that only 152,000 Chinese were killed.

Newspapers have begun to cite the Korean war in editorials, as they brace the public for prolonged trade conflict with America. Filmed in 1956, “Shangganling” is one of several Korean war films shown on national television in recent days. Sporting crude, prosthetic hooked noses beneath their steel helmets, the “Americans” in that film cackle with laughter as they incinerate Chinese troops with a flame-thrower. In their foxholes they ogle photographs of pin-up girls. They fairly swagger as they advance with support from tanks and bomb-dropping US Air Force jets. But their bullies’ bravado vanishes in hand-to-hand combat, depicted in a close-up frenzy of wrestling and stabbing. Soon the Yanks are running away, hands raised in panic, only to meet a murderous American officer, who is shown coldly ordering the fatal machine-gunning of his own troops to frighten the rest back into action.