A Time to Remember: The Reinvention of the Communist Hero in Post-Communist China

Abstract

The paper provides a critical perspective on the ideological and cultural transformation of post-communist China through a close reading of a recent Chinese film. “A Time to Remember,” directed by the son of a famous war-time communist general and premiered in Beijing in 1998, is set in Shanghai of the 1930s and has as its protagonists a communist leader, his female assistant, and an American doctor, who also serves as narrator. The paper analyzes the film’s revisionist reading of the communist revolution and shows how the film reinvents the traditional war-time communist hero in keeping with the ideological and cultural agenda of China’s current market reforms.

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