Realist

Posted By on December 28, 2012

 

Everything about Deng suggests energy, an urgency to slough off the nonsense of recent years and get China moving again. In part it may be his age—he is 75, an old man in a hurry. But he has also long been known for his prag­matic bent. During the Cultural Revolution, he was accused of argu­ing that “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white ; as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat.”

Last year, he enunciated China’s new political doctrine—that every­thing the Chinese do should be based on the simple scientific premise of “seeking truth from facts.” As a corollary, Deng added another pro­position : “Practice,” not Mao’s sayings, “is the sole criterion for truth.”

To and Fro. Deng and his policies are enormously popular with the people, a welcome relief after the political turmoil and economic chaos of the last decade. But some Chinese, with their strong sense of history, recall that the struggle be­tween native-culture-first conserva­tives like Mao and reform-minded modernizers like Deng has swung back and forth almost like a biologi­cal rhythm of China.

Today, Deng is clearly in power; Mao is dead and his most fervent supporters, the radical Gang of Four, languish somewhere under arrest. But there are still officials either hesitant to implement the new policies or opposed to them.

China is suffering from a lack of cheap cigarettes. Cynicism, apathy and amorality have replaced much of the earlier enthusiasm for the Communist Revolution. Mao him­self helped to foster this demoral­ization by purges of rival party lead­ers and by flouting regular party procedures. The result of all the swings in Peking was to traumatize many Chinese officials. “It is diffi­cult to distinguish between the cor­rect and erroneous lines,” the party chief of Heilongjiang Province said recently. “Being misled is al­most unavoidable.”

Only in retrospect is it becoming clear how widespread were the purges of the last ten years. In re­cent months, the Chinese Press has disclosed a shattering number of political persecutions. In Shanghai, for instance, a 67-year-old former mayor was tortured to death in T976 at the hands of the radicals. In one county of Jilin Province, 2,860 local officials were mistakenly imprison­ed after being accused of being members of a spy ring on the basis of forced confessions. Since the win­ter of 1977, 110,000 people who had been held in gaol as rightists for two decades have been released.

The key to China’s success in achieving its modernization plans may be whether the country’s lead­ers can preserve unity in Peking. Many Chinese, in fact, share a strong desire for stability, almost a never-again mentality. One indica­tion is that the removal of senior officials is now being handled less brutally, thus minimizing the political repercussions. Moreover, Deng says he has no plans for any major reshuffling of the party’s ranking leaders.

But, at the same time, the bitter­ness generated by the past decade will not go away. The theme of ven­geance runs through Peking’s poli­tical life like an endless Shake­spearean tragedy. The very make-up of the party hierarchy reflects the problem. Deng was a victim of the Cultural Revolution; Hua Guo­feng, Chairman of the Communist Party and Premier—and Mao’s chosen successor—rose to power during those years.

Publicly, Deng insists there are no disagreements between him and Hua. The Chairman is reportedly only 58 years old, so their partner­ship would be in the best interest of China’s long-term stability. Hua has also shown an ability to swing to­wards Deng’s view of things.

Second Thoughts.

If they differ, it will probably be over the most sensitive issue facing the country —how far Peking should go in downgrading Mao. The campaign Deng has been orchestrating to nudge Mao off his pedestal began gingerly last spring when the Chin­ese Press stopped printing Mao’s oracular savings in bold-face type. Then, in July, the party paper carried a previously unpublished speech of Mao’s from 1962 in which he assumed responsibility “for the shortcomings and mistakes in our work” during the disastrous Great Leap Forward.

In October the party paper moved to debunk the famous Little Red Book of Mao’s sayings, charging that “the Chinese people have paid a very high price” for their worship of the Chairman. Finally, the Press even criticized the Cultural Revo­lution, asserting it had been a period of “counter-revolutionary fascist dictatorship.”

Has Deng opened a Pandora’s box? When Mao invited the masses to participate in politics in the Hun­dred Flowers Campaign and then again in the Cultural Revolution, things rapidly went beyond his expectation.

And what happens when Deng dies? He is, after all, Peking’s leaders, in their search for new sources of trade and technol­ogy to carry out the modernization programme, have rapidly realigned old friends and enemies. In Asia, China became embroiled in a con­flict with Vietnam, which only three years ago it was supporting against the United States. Albania, once Peking’s only ally in Europe, has been discarded in favour of its arch-enemy, Yugoslavia, a more valuable partner.

On the other hand, Japan, the country that ravaged China in the Second World War, has emerged as China’s most intimate friend in the non-communist world. Japan will probably supply the largest share of the new technology China’s factories need. And Moscow suspects Peking is trying to draw Tokyo into a triple alliance of China, Japan and the United States against the Soviet Union.

With all these changes, what will China look like in 15 years’ time? Last September, the Peking paper Guangming Ri Bao indulg­ed in a flight of science fiction, the first the Chinese Press has ever carried.

“It was May 4, 1994, when the plane landed in Peking,” the author began. “Here everything was dif­ferent. My attention was caught by the clothes of the people—they have changed a lot since the 1970s and are no longer all standardized.”

The author came across a 1000 foot steel tower packed with res­taurants and shops. Peking’s streets were paved with conveyor belts carrying pedestrians automatically. “I also saw a hyperbola-shaped building—it was a supermarket controlled by computer, without any shopkeepers.”

 

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China Turns to the Good Life

Posted By on November 30, 2012

 

While Chinese foreign policy realigns old friends and enemies, the story on China’s home front is of a people eagerly embracing change, seeking to modernize their country and catch up with the West

 

In a workshop of the Foshan pottery factory, near Canton, women are skilfully applying finishing touches to clay figurines. Above them on a wall is an illu­strated poster ticking off what are evidently the workers’ important accomplishments. Of the 156 peo­ple in the room, the poster boasts, 121 have bicycles or sewing-mach­ines, 84 have wrist-watches and 29 have radios or electric fans.

Three years ago, before the death of Mao Tse-tung, such a blatant appeal to workers’ material self-interest would have been damned as “taking the capitalist road.” To­day even Mao himself, for more than three decades China’s infallible Great Helmsman, is openly criti­cized. And posters have appeared on the walls of Peking demanding a greater say for the people.

“We want now to make a good life for ourselves,” said a young woman factory worker who ap­proached me last winter in a Canton park. “We don’t want to have to work as hard as our parents did. We want machines to help us.” Even as recently as last summer, such a con­versation with a foreigner would have been dangerous for a Chinese. But the woman was taking advan­tage of the newly relaxed restric­tions to practise her English, now something of a national craze.

On politics, she confided that China needs to put an end to the factional fights of the past decade. “We have had our political revo­lution. Now we need an economic revolution to catch up with the West.”

With a speed that has stunned many Chinese, Peking’s leaders have been introducing policies de­signed to do what she wants—mod­ernize China’s economy by the turn of the century and give nearly 1,000 million Chinese a better, more open life. Peking is thinking of buying Harrier fighter planes from Britain, steel mills from Germany, railway equipment and expertise from Japan, and nuclear power plants and military hardware from France.

The largest deal eventually may be the joint development of China’s vast off-shore oil resources by sev­eral US oil companies. The world’s leading bankers have been virtually tripping over one another to help finance these enormous purchases, which could amount to 30,000 million.

Moving On.

To overcome what its officials admit is a terrible prob­lem of backwardness, Peking has begun to sign contracts with foreign firms to set up joint-venture factor­ies in China. They will use Western machinery and know-how and cheap Chinese labour. Ironically, that is the happy combination that has fuelled rapid growth in South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Along with these new economic policies—constituting a virtual re­pudiation of Mao’s insistence on prideful self-reliance—have come cautious hints of change in person­al life. A few Chinese women have begun to curl their hair or wear skirts and dresses again, fashions banned as decadent since the Cul­tural Revolution. Readers now reg­ularly write to the party paper, People’s Daily, asking for such re­forms as the showing of foreign films or the opening of China’s restricted libraries. Other letters report shortages of meat and vege­tables, or complaints against incom­petent party officials, or cases of prolonged separation of husbands and wives who had been assigned to different cities for work.

Most surprising was the sudden outburst of wall posters demand­ing greater freedom of speech and the right to choose officials in elections. On November 27, 1978, there was an unprecedented march through central Peking in which five to six thousand young Chinese chanted, “Long live democracy !” A soldier of the People’s Liberation Army told a diplomat that while these rights were guaranteed in China’s Constitution, “in practice they don’t exist. For years no one has dared to speak how to buy cigarettes.”

Mao had despised intellectuals and sought to break them of the tra­ditional Chinese conviction that those who work with their minds are superior to those who labour with their hands. But now profes­sors and scientists are to be freed from the obligation Mao had im­posed on them to spend much of their time in manual labour. Along with recently restored university en­trance exams, special schools for gifted children have been establish­ed to train an educated elite as rapidly as possible.

Changes are also under way in industrial organization. Peking has begun to move towards a limited market economy. Factories will deal directly with each other, and the wages of managers and workers alike will be tied to their plants’ pro­fitability. Even the people’s com­munities are under review. In an experimental programme, peasants are being offered greater use of their private plots and more say over what they plant on communally owned land. In the process, real de­cision-making power may devolve back into the hands of the old extended family.

The architect of these new poli­cies is Deng Xiaoping, the brusque Vice-Premier. Purged by Mao in the Cultural Revolution as a rightist, Deng was rehabilitated, then toppled again in 1976—only to be resurrected a second time in 1977, almost a year after Mao’s death. From his enforced exile, Deng watched all the mistakes of Mao’s last years. Rejected by the system, he returned determined to reject that system, driven by a grand vision of China’s future.

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KING KONG RAMPAGES ON AND ON pt.2

Posted By on September 11, 2012

 

Rick enjoyed it, too—most of the time. “I guess disappearing into my gorilla suit and thumping my chest has something to do with a trans­ference of power. You really do feel pretty powerful in there.”

Of course, it was not all mangoes and bananas for him. The tempera­ture soared inside his latex and bear­skin outfit, and he sweated off five pounds every working day. Then, too, he was not responsible for his own facial expressions. He had five different masks to wear, depending on Kong’s basic mood in the shot. The masks could be made to change expression—but not by Baker. Hy­draulic facial “muscles,” all con­trolled by a technician, tug the features into smiles, frowns and full-scale rage.

Hydraulics were used to manipu­late the huge fingers, and there was great concern that they might lack fine motor skills and accidentally crush Lange. She, however, had only a couple of mishaps while caught in Kong’s grip. Once the pursuing hand came down too hard on her, crushing her painfully

against the jungle floor. In another sequence, when Kong is in a play­fully amorous mood and is stroking Lange’s face and shoulders, he is supposed to tap her lightly on the head. One of the technicians mis­calculated and landed a blow that caused the actress to see stars.

The effect of these sequences is as awesome as the trouble they caused, especially in the fussy business of seamlessly melding ape and human footage—mainly by using sophisti­cated double-exposure techniques.

IJnlike Fay Wray in the original Kong, who was mostly called upon to scream and faint, Lange plays a modern film starlet who drifts into the picture as a castaway from a wrecked yacht. Once she gets over the shock of Kong’s first spectacular pick-up, she treats him like all the ape-like film moguls she has had to fend off. She tries helplessness (“I can’t stand heights”), anger (“Chau­vinist-pig ape !”), some impromptu analysis after striking out at her captor (“It’s a sign of insecurity, like when you knock over trees”), even guileful seduction (“I’m a Libra, what are you ?”).

Eventually she and Kong actually begin to build a . . . well, a relation­ship, something that was never made explicit between Wray and her big boy. Considering that Lange played most of these big scenes with a thing, not an actor, and that some­times she worked to no more than a mark on the wall where the ape would be in the finished picture, her accomplishment is considerable.

Kong, too, has greater charm than he did 43 years ago. He no lon­ger gnaws distractedly on human beings as he did when he got anxious in the original. One of his best moments occurs when Lange, trying to escape him, falls in a mud puddle. Tenderly he picks her up and trots her off to a waterfall for a shower, dunks her in the pool below to rinse off and then, still cupping her in his paws, blows her dry with several mighty breaths.

It is the innocence of Kong that involves the viewer in his strangely touching fate, his last stand atop—this time New York’s World Trade Centre. “I got here a great adventure, a great love story,” De Laurentiis said recently. “No one cry when Jaws die. When the monkey die, people gonna cry.”

 

 

 

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KING KONG RAMPAGES ON AND ON pt.1

Posted By on September 11, 2012

Behind the scenes with the biggest monkey business in cinema history

Nothing, on the face of it, could be more preposterous than the story of a love affair between the oddest couple in popular culture : a beautiful blonde and an ape who is 4o feet tall, fierce of mien and manner, yet at heart just a big adolescent, bumbling spec­tacularly through his first crush.

But somehow it worked, 43 years ago, when the first King Kong film was produced. And darned if it doesn’t seem that it is going to work again, in this supposedly more sophisticated age, in the new 16-million poundversion released in December.

Is it the ultimate triumph of special effects over common sense? A weird sexual charge, heavy in portent, reassuringly innocent in presentation? Or is it just an act of primal, Barnum-like show­manship?

Those questions are probably un­answerable. But no one ever doubt­ed the strength of the material, however silly it sounds when out­lined on the printed page. Kong was the invention of a pioneer aviator and film-maker named Merian Cooper. He knew instinctively that what the “Beauty and the Beast” legend might lose in subtlety by con­verting the beast into a gigantic ape it would gain in raw power : such a creature is capable of killing his human bride should he accidentally lose control of his basically good and innocent nature.

Monster Hit. How right Cooper was. The original Kong opened in America just after President Roose­velt closed the banks in r933. Even so, it grossed 90,00o dollars during the first four days’ run in New York and has sustained its popularity through an infinite succession of re-releases. More important, the house-high monkey has become a pop-culture favourite in every­thing from cartoons to advertising campaigns.

Special effects, of course, lie at the heart of the film’s appeal. In­deed, it is fair to say that if there is something like a common denomin­ator in the big pictures that gross millions—films as diverse as The Exorcist, Earthquake and Jaws—it is their special effects, the sheer cin­ema magic they feature. From the start of the new Kong, it was gen­erally and, to some degree, falsely understood that the film would stand or fall on how realistic the big ape would seem on screen.

A late start and a self-imposed December 1976 release date, how­ever, forced British director John Guillermin to start shooting before anyone had a clear conception of how Kong should look and how he should be made to work.

Although the . new Kong’s tech­nicians correctly hold the first Kong’s special effects—magnificent for their time—in high esteem, no one wanted to duplicate what had been done then (as well as in hun­dreds of inexpensive monster pic­tures since): build a miniature model of the ape, place him in scaled-down sets, animate him through the use of stop-motion photography, and then blend this footage with that employing live actors. From the first, producer Dino De Laurentils leaned towards the colossal. When he was talking Guillermin into signing on for the project, he had cried, “For you, John, I make 100-foot monster.”

Well, almost. On Stage 17 at Metro, there rests a creature 40 feet tall when fully assembled, support­ed by a three-and-a-half-ton alu­minium frame, his flesh made of latex and covered by nearly half a ton of horsehair, every hank of which was sewn into place individu­ally. His innards consist of 3,100 feet of hydraulic hose and 4,50o feet of electrical wiring. He is animated by a team of 20 operators, each working a lever that controls a single movement. The cost : more than 1 million pounds.

Worth His Weight. Although this mighty construction was used extensively in only one sequence, he was worth every penny. It is impos­sible to tell in the finished product where his work ends and that of more mobile and manageable representations of Kong take over.

Most of the action sequences, in which audiences see Kong rampag­ing around his jungle habitat or tearing around New York, were done by a man in a monkey cos­tume. He is Rick Baker, a make-up man “slightly dippy about goril­las,” who began making great-ape costumes as a hobby long before he signed on to create Kong’s face and form for De Laurentiis.

Baker slipped into one of his own creations and began playing Kong on sets scaled so that the medium-height Baker would look like a 40-foot ape against them. His intensive study of these creatures paid off. Says Guillermin : “I spent long weeks at various zoos studying gorillas, especially how they move. 1 was stunned when Rick put on that suit. He was a gorilla in every move and gesture.”

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