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