The reinvention of Hollywood's classic white saviour tale in contemporary Chinese cinema: Pavilion of Women and The Flowers of War

Abstract

Hollywood's classic white saviour narrative used to tell the tale of a white man's chivalrous rescue of a Chinese woman during his adventure in the exotic East. Prescribed by the West's Orientalist discourse about China, the cinematic tale establishes the cultural, hierarchical and gendered relationship of the East–West encounter, and the often-submissive Chinese woman character satisfies popular Western imagination of a primitive China. The classic paradigm is reinvented in Pavilion of Women (2001) and The Flowers of War (2011), two controversial Chinese films made around and after China's entry into World Trade Organisation in 2001. Embedded within a network of capitalist exchange, transnational flows of talents and aesthetic appropriations, both films utilise Hollywood's white saviour formula in respective ways to bring Chinese stories to global audiences. Nonetheless, the conventional storyline of the white hero's rescue of Chinese women is constantly intertwined with, or interrupted by, the description of charismatic Chinese women characters amidst warfare and revolution, purporting to a feminist-nationalist potentiality that might counter the Hollywood construction. Conscientious Chinese efforts to intervene in Western cinematic discourses have led to narrative ambiguities and obscure the distinction between the local and the global, the individual and the collective, interracial romance and national allegory. By situating Pavilion of Women and The Flowers of War within the framework of constructing a 'new' image of China for global audiences, this article argues that the ambivalent reinvention of Hollywood's white saviour tale in contemporary Chinese cinema is emblematic of a cultural anxiety to assimilate China's nationalist discourses into an all-embracing global consumerism.