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Strident nationalism is particularly pervasive among Chinese urban youth. Even as they sip Starbucks lattes or line up at the U.S. embassy for student visas, theybridle at what they view as an attempt by the rest of the world to suppress a budding superpower. "America wants to keep China down," Kang says. "We should all be friends. But America must accept China as a friend on an equal footing." --By Hannah Beech/Beijing
HOT NEW FILMMAKER
Exhaling smoke with a particular world-weariness only a beautiful woman can conjure, Xu Jinglei announces she's tired of Oriental mystique, all the brocade and bamboo and aerial kung-fu artistry. That's ironic, given that the movie director, 31, with her chopstick physique and brushstroke features, would fit quite nicely into an epic about a woman named, say, Plum Blossom.
But Xu, a film starlet who has matured into a multitalented cinematic force--she won the Best Director award at the San Sebastián Film Festival in Spain last year--has grander ambitions than playing to type. "I want to show people that Chinese are just like everyone else," she says. "There's a myth that Eastern people are conservative and mysterious, but we sing and dance and feel the same emotions as anyone else."
Xu's outlook could be a mantra for today's postideological China. What is in some ways most striking about the country, as new middle-class consumers flock to shopping malls, is how normal it feels. Although billboards celebrating the glory of the Communist Party can still be found in Beijing, they tend to elicit derision instead of deference--and even Chairman Mao's visage has morphed into a Pop-art commodity in the capital's avant-garde galleries.
The current darling of a new generation of Chinese filmmakers, Xu may one day take on the mantle worn by venerable directors like Zhang Yimou (House of Flying Daggers, Raise the Red Lantern). Zhang helped introduce Chinese cinema to global audiences, first with finely rendered political allegories and then with more muscular martial-arts epics. On the other hand, Xu--a factory owner's daughter who grew up in go-go China--focuses on what she knows and feels. In her 2002 directorial debut, My Father and I, she explored the upended Confucian hierarchy of contemporary urban Chinese society. That effort, in which she also played the leading role, was followed last year by A Letter from an Unknown Woman, which takes an Austrian novel, places it in war-torn China and contemplates the universality of unrequited love. "My generation is more focused on internal feelings," she says. "The bigger issues like politics are for the older generation."
In truth, overtly political films, like some of Zhang's work, still have no chance of being screened in China without undergoing major cuts by the censorship board. But Xu's avoidance of political fare doesn't mean she is content to churn out the clichéd boy-meets-girl comedies that are the mainstay of Chinese cinema. Her next two projects will tackle serious topics. One is a Tang-dynasty drama that she says will demonstrate that "court life is no different from street life." The other is an examination of post-9/11 America.