Unlike those songs in typical official category, “Blood-Stained
Dignity” keeps a gentle and calm tone to narrate the mood of its
military subject. More conventionally in revolutionary films and songs,
such themes are treated affirmatively and forcibly through vigorous
sound and exaggerated images, suggesting that heroic triumph is about to
unfold from concerted action. Yet China has a long history of describing
a wider set of heroic archetypes and valuing the spiritual qualities of
a real hero. In 96 BCE, for instance, the historian Sima Qian wrote in
the “Biographies of Assassins” (Cike liezhuan ) section
of the Record of the Historian (Shiji ): “The desolate
gale freezes River Yi. The doomed hero has made his death wish” (1989:
895). This death wish is expressed in a very calm and elegant way in
“Blood-Stained Dignity”, as its lyrist Chen Zhe explained:
I thought, don’t be so stupid, don’t be so false, people are not so
noble. They just do what they have to do. It [going to the
battlefield] was for our home [nation], for everyone.… In
such a moment, the strong power which belongs to a man is revealed, very
plain, but very determined. After the Tiananmen demonstrations, I
realized that it was a kind of high, lofty human nature which the
Chinese people pursued at that time..13
If many soldiers in the front line of the war thought this song
expressed the real feeling and meaning they experienced when they faced
death, the song’s combination of authentic-seeming human expression and
message of lofty beliefs in fighting for justice endowed it with a
blurred patriotic meaning that extended beyond its original propaganda
function in the Sino-Vietnamese war and allowed singers and listeners
alike to draw new meanings overtime from the second section of its
lyrics: “If it happens, do not be sorrowful, the flag of the republic
shows our blood-stained dignity.” For instance, in the 1989 Tiananmen
demonstration, when soldiers and students fought one another, both
groups sang this song, each believing that they were sacrificing
themselves for the greater benefit of the nation.14
In the social background of the mid- and late 1980s, using a
grief-stricken tone to express patriotism, not only brought the memory
of Chinese audiences to the suffering they had endured during the
Cultural Revolution, but also functioned as a way for them to question
the unacceptable realities of the present. Feeling sorrow for the
decline of the nation rather than for individual suffering is obviously
based on traditional Chinese literati ideology and values. The
intellectual groups were worried by both the backward economy, as
compared to the Western world, and by the decline in culture, as
compared to China’s previous history. The highly controversial TV
documentary series River
Elegy (He shang , Su and Wang, 1988) explains why they conceived
this pessimistic and sorrowful mood.
Nowadays, the intellectuals are finally getting rid of the stigma of the
“Stinking Ninth”15 (chou laojiu). Their
social status seems much higher than before. But poor economic
conditions and spiritual depression and distortion still accompany them.
Did spiritual depression result from the turbulent modern history or the
poverty and backwardness during recent decades? They may not be the only
causes. Behind them, it is the spiritual pain of the nation. The whole
pain is for the decline of civilization (Episode 3 “Ling guang”
(Spiritual light) in River Elegy.16