Branding History: Literature-to-Screen Adaptation and the Cultural Memory of China’s Second World War

This dissertation focuses on the adaptation of literature about China’s experiences of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) into various media, including films, TV series, video games, and museums. It explores how these different media influence and adapt from each other, shaping China’s cultural memory of the war. Covering screen-based cultural representations of the war that have been produced since 1946, this dissertation is divided into five core chapters, with the first chapter offering a systematic overview of Chinese literature-to-screen adaptation theory. The following four chapters use cases including the film *Spy Number One* (1946), the novel *Railway Guerrillas* (1954), the novel *Red Sorghum* (1986), and the video game *The Invisible Guardian* (2019) to discuss common tropes in Chinese war stories. These tropes, including female spies, train narratives, and rural landscapes, are constructed, repeated, and adapted to the extent that they become “historical brands.” This dissertation coins the term “branding history” to probe the ways that historical memory is constructed in China by the combined forces of the government, capitals companies, and even audiences. In contemporary China, historical trauma is commercialised and politicised, working as a symbol of personal suffering as well as contributing to the formation of national identity. This dissertation proposes four elements that constitute the branding of war history through adaptation: repeating memory, feeling memory, locating memory, and playing memory. Repeating memory refers to the constant repetition of stories, driven by political or commercial forces. It encompasses not only the propaganda of socialist China but also how today’s film and television companies make choices under the censorship system. Feeling memory indicates the audience’s emotional attachment to specific stories about the Second Sino-Japanese War, including nostalgic feelings for the past, the audience’s reminiscence of childhood experiences with these repeated stories, the pleasure derived from the screen adaptation of war literature, and the satisfaction created from the cinematic portrayal of female figures. Locating memory refers to the “local-national-global” contradictions embedded in China’s collective war memory. The war memory of the Second Sino-Japanese War in China has been closely linked to China’s self-image on the global stage and under the “Western gaze,” politically, diplomatically, and culturally. However, within China, some depictions of and reflections on the war have been viewed by the public as hurting national feelings and pandering to Western culture. Locating memory signifies that war memory has been associated with a specific geographic location that has been built by mass media, and it also means positioning memory at an individual level in new ways, such as through Red Tourism. Playing memory starts with the popularity of video games that has led young players to stay indoors for gameplay, obtaining extraordinary emotional experiences through the interactivity of gaming. Playing memory indicates that games, as an emerging medium not yet as tightly regulated as other cultural forms, bear the potential to foster historical narratives that diverge from mainstream history. From the perspective of literature-to-screen adaptation, this dissertation seeks to illustrate not only what the cultural memory of the Second Sino-Japanese War looks like in contemporary China, but also how such war memory has been interactively constructed between collective and personal memories in relation to particular cultural works. Beginning by summarising adaptation theories in China across different historical periods, this dissertation also outlines the role that adaptation has played in modern China’s nation-building and revolution. I argue that literature-to-screen adaptation, as a way of branding history, negotiates the tensions between political demands and economic interests, collectivity and individuality, as well as historical events and current realities in contemporary China. By leveraging medium specificity, literature-to-screen adaptation embeds mainstream war narratives in the cognitions and emotions of audiences across different generations in a nuanced and accessible way. Although the process of adaptation shows the potential to transcend a homogeneous historical narrative, it still reconciles various contradictions and ultimately confirms and consolidates mainstream ideology, making the cultural memory of the Second Sino-Japanese War both clear and vague. By saying “clear and vague,” I mean the cultural memory of the Second Sino-Japanese War has been turned into something that satisfies all parties, is consumable, filled with labels, yet lacking in historical substance.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Shi, Bingbing

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Inwood, Heather

• contemporary Chinese literature
• literature-to-screen adaptation
• the Second Sino-Japanese War

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/247cedaf-7aa4-4cc3-9129-de54614a6c1c/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.112585

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/374550