{"id":6783,"date":"2017-06-04T11:59:57","date_gmt":"2017-06-04T01:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/?p=6783"},"modified":"2018-09-01T03:57:16","modified_gmt":"2018-08-31T17:57:16","slug":"the-gate-of-darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/journal\/the-gate-of-darkness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gate of Darkness"},"content":{"rendered":"

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As the legend goes, the reign of Sui Yang-ti [r<\/em>. 604-618 CE] was a great heroic age. The heroes were destined to fight either on the side of or against the great emperor to come, T’ang T’ai-tsung. Before the fall of Sui, however, Sui Yang-ti summoned all the rebels to Yangchow for a tournament. The champion was to win the title of the Supreme Rebel, to whom would be accorded the honors due a king. The plot was to let the rebels kill each other with their own hands, and the survivors would then be killed by mines set off soon after the contest was over. If there were still some survivors left, a gate which weighed one thousand chin<\/i> would be lowered into the city wall to block their retreat so that a massacre might be carried out by the imperial troops.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\u9580, ‘gate’, ‘door’.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But since Sui Yang-ti was to lose the Mandate of Heaven, his plot did not work. An insufficient number of rebels were killed in the arena, and the mines did not explode as planned, thanks to the happy intervention of an ancient fox who had to save the life of the true dragon, T’ang T’ai-tsung, among all the rebels. When the gate was lowered, it was caught by a Herculean bandit who supported it long enough to let the eighteen princes and the lesser rebels from all over China escape to safety. But the gate proved too great a burden even for such a giant, and he was crushed to death.<\/p>\n

The heroic episode of the bandit who supported the lowering gate had a special significance for Lu Hs\u00fcn, who had loved this sort of legend as a child, long before he took a scholarly interest in the history of Chinese fiction. When he wrote the following passages in an essay in 1919, five months after the Fourth of May, I strongly suggest that he had this legend in mind:<\/p>\n

Let the awakened man burden himself with the weight of tradition and shoulder up the the gate of darkness. Let him give unimpeded passage to the children so that they may rush to the bright, wide-open spaces and lead happy lives henceforward as rational human beings. \u53ea\u80fd\u5148\u5f9e\u89ba\u9192\u7684\u4eba\u958b\u624b\uff0c\u5404\u81ea\u89e3\u653e\u4e86\u81ea\u5df1\u7684\u5b69\u5b50\u3002\u81ea\u5df1\u80cc\u8457\u56e0\u8972\u7684\u91cd\u64d4\uff0c\u80a9\u4f4f\u4e86\u9ed1\u6697\u7684\u9598\u9580\uff0c\u653e\u4ed6\u5011\u5230\u5bec\u95ca\u5149\u660e\u7684\u5730\u65b9\u53bb\uff1b\u6b64\u5f8c\u5e78\u798f\u7684\u5ea6\u65e5\uff0c\u5408\u7406\u7684\u505a\u4eba\u3002<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014 From Tsi-an Hsia,<\/i> The Gate of Darkness, 1968,
\nquoting Lu Xun’s October 1919 essay
\n‘What is Required of Us as Fathers Today’ <\/i>
\n\u6211\u5011\u73fe\u5728\u600e\u6a23\u505a\u7236\u89aa.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In the early 1990s, I worked on a\u00a0documentary film about the events in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing during the fateful\u00a0spring and early summer of 1989. Lu Xun’s ‘What is Required of Us as Fathers Today’ came to mind, as did the posthumous work of T.A. Hsia \u590f\u6fdf\u5b89, both quoted above.\u00a0At one stage,\u00a0I even suggested to my colleagues at the Long Bow Group in Boston that we consider calling our\u00a0film, for which I was the lead academic consultant and writer,\u00a0The Gate of Darkness<\/i>. In the end, however, wiser heads prevailed, and a more neutral name, The Gate of Heavenly Peace <\/em>\u5929\u5b89\u9580<\/a>, was settled upon. Even such an anodyne title did not, however, spare the film hysterical controversy:\u00a0upon its release in 1995 it was immediately\u00a0denounced by the Chinese authorities and for years thereafter it was excoriated by exiled dissidents. Sympathisers of the party-state and its crude and shrill opponents still decry the film (and website), one that rejects crude black and white interpretations of those heart-rending events.<\/p>\n

The Gate of Heavenly Peace<\/em><\/a>\u00a0remains\u00a0contentious. After years of slander, and impotent litigation, Gate<\/i>\u00a0remains yet a powerful record, and interpretive vehicle, of the events of 1989. It follows the fate of a mass protest movement during which rhetorical violence on either side sees moderate voices silenced and compromise frustrated, allowing the Chinese authorities an excuse to crush the protests and wipe out a nascent independent media, an early environmental lobby, workers’ unions, student activists and a generation of sober\u00a0thinkers (see 1989, 1999, 2009: Totalitarian Nostalgia<\/a>). The Gate of Darkness descended and murder was unleashed in the streets of Beijing on the night of the 3rd of June and thereafter, as well as\u00a0throughout the country. The executioner’s shadow still lies heavy over contemporary China.<\/p>\n

The events of 1989 are a watershed in Chinese history. They mark in dramatic fashion the global bifurcation of the understanding of China’s trajectory as a modern nation. Elsewhere<\/a>, I have called those events\u00a0the first in a series of ‘disconnects’ that have completely untethered the People’s Republic from a consensual view of that country’s evolution and maturation. Even with the passage of time, and despite the sophistry applied by hacks to excusing mass murder in the streets of the Chinese capital, the Fourth of June, the Tiananmen Square Incident, or as I have always called it, the Beijing Massacre, shames China as well as the fellow travellers of the Chinese Communist Party. No matter how the barbarism is justified, it\u00a0beclouds that country’s collective conscience.<\/p>\n

China Heritage<\/i>\u00a0marks this mournful day with an excerpt from the film M<\/em>orning Sun<\/i>\u00a0\u516b\u4e5d\u9ede\u9418\u7684\u592a\u967d<\/a>\u00a0(this video is slow to load), the 2003 ‘prequel’ to The Gate of Heavenly Peace<\/i>; an excerpt from the conclusion\u00a0of Gate<\/em> featuring Ding Zilin (also slow to load);\u00a0a poem by the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi (for her other work in China\u00a0Heritage<\/em>, see here<\/a>); a YouTube video of the Communist Young Pioneers song interpreted by\u00a0a popular mainland boy band; a\u00a0painting by Feng Zikai followed by Huang Yongyu’s ‘A Lament for Ying’. We conclude with an Editorial Note about the four interconnected commemorative essays published in China\u00a0Heritage <\/em>over the last week:<\/p>\n