The closing of the Chinese mind

I was born in Nanjing five years after the Tiananmen Square protests. By then, records of the demonstrations and the Communist party’s brutal suppression had been scrubbed clean. So Tiananmen was not part of the national conversation when I was growing up. I only fully grasped what had happened when I visited Hong Kong in my early twenties (that would be harder now under the city’s new national security law). Tiananmen isn’t just absent from history books; the Chinese authorities keep an eye on literature and film, so anything that’s politically subversive is censored or driven underground and abroad.

One film that fell victim to this regime is Lan Yu, which I recently saw for the first time at a screening in Soho. It’s a gay love story between a poor university student and an older Beijing businessman set in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In one scene, injured young people from the Tiananmen protests are rushed away on carts and bicycles by their friends, gunshots ringing in the distance.

The film was released in 2001 (though not in mainland China), and it is enjoying an international revival thanks to a recent remastering. I met its producer, Zhang Yongning, through a friend last year. Introducing the film on stage, Yongning said he knew he needed to find a Hong Kong or Taiwanese director who wouldn’t be as limited by mainland China’s censorship. He settled on Stanley Kwan. Kwan, who is from Hong Kong, had seen much more reporting of the 4 June crackdown than any director from the mainland. No wonder the Tiananmen scene reminded me of documentary footage.

Yongning tells me that he thinks the film’s gay romance is more likely to have affronted the censors than its reference to the protests (homosexuality was only declassified as a mental illness in 2001, and gay references are often cut from Chinese releases of western films).