Beyond Authenticity: the Spectre of Han Hegemony

No article about Mulan (2020) can open without mentioning the cultural genocide happening in China right now. The Chinese and Asian diaspora’s yearning to see people like ourselves on the big screen has coalesced into Disney’s live-action offering, a choppy regurgitation of orientalist tropes filmed a stone’s throw away from concentration camps.

When the diaspora begins to critique Mulan, it is easy for us to go back to talking about the importance of representation and historical accuracy as though the film happened in a vacuum. It is our usual approach when it comes to critiquing orientalist art. We talk about the ways in which it fails, and make our comparisons to how factually inaccurate this or that detail is and how the filmmakers obviously didn’t do any research. If we are very daring, we might start addressing who is behind the camera and talk of the whiteness of the writers or directors.

But for this iteration of Mulan, we need to do better.

Mulan is an incredibly easy film to mock. It is consistently joyless as it lurches from plot point to plot point, occasionally summoning up a familiar musical refrain before pushing onwards. It is at once too fast in its pacing and yet deeply tedious. Nothing feels intentional even as shots look stilted and over-composed. Simple actions that should be clean and impactful take over a dozen cuts to dramatise.

But mockery and failures of authenticity cannot be the entirety of our conversation about representation.

Especially not when the greatest problems of Mulan are the Han Hegemony and Chinese Nationalism baked into it.

In Mulan, “Northwest China” is an inalienable part of China, not even given its own name beyond “the Silk Road”. Mulan never spares a thought to where she is being deployed or the reasons for the war. She faces off against black-clad Islamic-coded invaders and summarily executes Böri Khan. The contrast between the idyllic terraced fields of Mulan’s childhood to the golden dunes of “Northwest China” cannot be more stark.

This was present in the animated Mulan, of course, and almost every modern version where monstrous invaders look to cross the Great Wall and claim its riches as their own. This dichotomy between Chinese civilisation and the barbarians that besiege them is a cornerstone of the Chinese telling of history. It informs modern Han hegemony in the same way a white supremacist draws glory from Western Civilisation and the Roman Empire. As tropes, these things linger in our stories, even if we don’t intend them to retain those meanings.

There were periods of time when East Turkestan (also known as Xinjiang) was conquered and colonised by the Chinese Empire. Böri Khan’s single line about his conquered land and murdered father, and the desire for “revenge” among his followers all alludes to a colonial past for “Northwest China”. But in Mulan, no thought is spared to this. When the emperor declares that he must defend the Silk Road for the economic prosperity of his empire, the narrative treats this as fact.

It is hard not to see the Emperor’s protectiveness of the Silk Road in Mulan as an echo of China’s Belt and Road scheme, often termed a New Silk Road to build their economic prosperity. The violence of Islamic-coded barbarians echoes modern Chinese propaganda about Islamic terrorism in Xinjiang, which is being used to justify the existence of concentration camps.

Of course, none of this is unique to China. Hollywood has long made villains of America’s current enemies. Stories reflect the cultures that tell them.

But in the rush of the diaspora to disown Mulan, to call it out as being written and directed by white people, as ignorant of “real” Chinese culture and history, we are failing to see and call out how it is feeding those nationalist and imperialist myths.

Modern China is built on the idea that the Han people should be and are the inheritors of the Qing empire. These colonial possessions, like Tibet, East Turkestan (aka Xinjiang) and Southern Mongolia, are argued to share with the Han people a “common historical destiny” (Chiang Kai-shek, 1947). Other empires may have attempted (however ineptly and inadequately) some form of de-colonisation in the 20th Century, but China’s successive regimes very much did not.

The cultural genocide happening in Xinjiang today is part of a larger project by the Chinese government to force assimilation and cultural “harmony” across their empire. It can be seen the policies mandating the use Mandarin in schools, a policy that has sparked protests in Southern Mongolia.

Hero (2002), Zhang Yimou’s sumptuous martial arts epic, is a film that people are recommending in all seriousness as an antidote to Mulan. It may be more beautiful and eloquent, and more authentically Chinese, but its advocacy of empire is no less ugly. It justifies authoritarianism and brutal suppression of indigenous culture in the name of “harmony.”

And for all that it has its subversive themes of struggling against societal hierarchies and rejecting unjust authority, the genre of wuxia can still very much be entrenched in ideas of Han hegemony and Chinese nationalism. This isn’t to say that the genre is irredeemable or that it has nothing to offer its readers, but it is irresponsible to ignore its problematic aspects, especially in the context of giving recommendations in the aftermath of Mulan.

To center authenticity or accuracy, or even “representation”, when talking about Mulan overlooks the larger issues at stake. Issues we need to confront.

Overly fixating on the fact that Mulan was made by white people obfuscates all the ways it is peddling China’s own toxic nationalist myths. That Mulan fights to defend what is now Xinjiang, filmed in Xinjiang, from Islamic-coded invaders who have been invited in by a conquered colonial subject is not a neutral story. Whether or not the half dozen white scribes of the film intended it or not, they have written something that fits very neatly in with current propaganda.

Liu Yifei incurred the wrath of Chinese netizens who threatened to boycott Mulan when she described herself as “Asian” instead “Chinese” in an interview. The accusation was that she has forgotten her roots, but more than that it is about the ownership of the Mulan story as wholly and uniquely Chinese.

The very idea that this is a uniquely and exclusively Han Chinese story is part of the problem.

That is just something we should not lose sight of.

As diaspora, we rarely unite to talk about our culture except when we are angrily tearing apart something. It is rare (for me at least) to see these conversations happen in the positive. In part, this is because it is simply easier to rally around hating something. We don’t have to agree on anything beyond the hate. It can unite us.

But implicit in a nitpick, a dunk over the “facts” is that there is such a thing as simple “facts”. We keep saying Chinese culture isn’t a monolith, that Asian culture isn’t a monolith, but still we keep utilising these sweeping generalisations in our criticisms.

We are effectively filtering our culture through this act of mockery. We are flattening our own culture just so we can take pleasure in dunking on a hot mess of a film.

And it is a pleasure. I’ve hate-read things before. I know this feeling.

But it is a dangerous one. Not because it’ll hurt the feelings of whoever made Mulan. I’m not here to defend it or its artistic choices. I’m talking about the way in which we discuss it and dissect it. I’m talking about the version of our culture that we are using as a rhetorical tool when dismantling it.

In order for Mulan to be “wrong” about something, we are implicitly agreeing there is a “right” way.

For example, a lot of people have criticised how Mulan is good at fighting at the beginning of the film instead of learning how to fight in boot camp. And indeed, this change has given her far less space for character growth. It’s a bad storytelling decision.

But it’s quite another to then take that and argue that all Chinese (or Asian) narratives are about the triumph of hard work and cultivation. That all our stories are about characters being basically born equal and achieving greatness through hard work. That Gong Li’s witch character being born with suspect magical powers is fundamentally a western trope and could never happen in Asian storytelling.

It’s ludicrous, and inaccurate. The Mulan of almost all non-Disney versions starts the story already very good at fighting. (Being taught by her father and “raised as a son” is very common theme). 2009’s Mulan: Rise of a Warrior, Tough Side of A Lady (Hong Kong TVB, 1998) and Hua Mu Lan (Taiwan CTV, 1999) all follow this pattern. Mulan is already good at fighting and this justification for why she goes to war.

There’s a Qing dynasty novel of Mulan where she has an abundance of magical powers, taught to her by her grandfather, who in turn was taught by the goddess of smallpox. She has a sidekick who is a camel with the soul of a snake and a nemesis that is a thousand-year fox spirit.

As for Gong Li, it is easy enough to find stories of women born with supernatural beauty and power, persecuted and outcast as a result of prophecies or omens. Female shapeshifters with deviant designs on power are a dime a dozen. Not to mention characters like Monkey who have absorbed all the essences of the universe before even being born.

I don’t bring any of this up to justify or defend the narrative choices made by Disney’s Mulan. They are bad, but what is wrong with them isn’t that they are fundamentally un-Chinese. They are not inherently anathema to the multitudes contained within “Chinese” culture and storytelling.

There is no single, unified “Chinese”-ness and to imply there is only one Acceptable Cultural Narrative for All Chinese People is itself part of the problem.

Due to the long history of Chinese colonialism, imperialism and cultural exchange, a lot of these things we accidentally (or explicitly) suggest are uniquely Chinese simply aren’t. Many other cultures (especially Asian ones) have ghost festivals, shapeshifting foxes and moon rabbits. We see this in annual conversations about calling the Lunar New Year “Chinese New Year”.

To claim sole authority and ownership of these units of cultures reinforces Han hegemony.

We should not reduce this conversation to simply “authenticity”.

Hiring writers and artists of the Asian diaspora shouldn’t be just about getting “facts” right. Our value isn’t solely in the “authenticity” we bring. Our stories, our voices, our experiences are beautiful and valuable in and of themselves, not as a gateway to our sourceland cultures.

Or to put it another way, the point of hiring Asian artists shouldn’t be that they’ll correct your “chi” metaphysics.

The purpose of art isn’t to be a simple recitation of facts and more than that, it is very possible to string together false narratives out of true facts. This isn’t to say getting the right script for a sword’s inscription or period-accurate hair and makeup don’t matter at all, but I would argue they matter far less than the story itself. The themes and the intention.

If I were to write a story in which the emperor’s favourite food was basically my grandmother’s cooking, a critique of it based on historical accuracy (ie. this cannot be the emperor’s favourite food) would completely miss the point. I wrote the emperor loving my gran’s cooking in order to canonise her cooking in the story. It’s a lie to reveal a truth, an emotion. Something that is real to me and that matters to me.

My point isn’t that every single deviation from “accuracy” needs to be justified by a rhetorical grandmother. My point is that as artists we should allow ourselves artistic freedom. I shouldn’t have to be a model minority within my own fiction. I am not here to tell your story, I am here simply to tell mine, in all its messy, silly, stupid glory.

Demanding that I only write to factually document my own culture would deny me all the artistic tools of metaphor, allegory, symbolism and good old making shit up.

Many will say that scholars place the 6th century ballad of Mulan as being set during the Northern Wei (365–533), but omit that given how she serves a khagan, and she is herself Turkic and not Han.

In general the framing of there being a singular “real” Mulan makes me intensely uncomfortable. It ignores the centuries of retellings and reinterpretations. It is true that the 6th century ballad doesn’t have a love interest, but almost every single subsequent one from the Ming plays to Qing novels to modern tv serials add a romance plot. It’s true that there’s no phoenix in the ballad, but supernatural occurrences, such as visions of Guanyin, or a camel with the soul of a snake, have appeared.

The codification of her story as being about filial piety, or that her surname is 花 (“flower”, it’s a play on words as the characters of her name mean magnolia) took centuries. Over time, she became Han, but as late as the Qing dynasty there are versions where she has a Turkic father and a Han mother. These commonly accepted pieces of her story are just as much late additions as an animal sidekick or a romantic subplot.

Even the intended meaning of Mulan shifts with the centuries. Wei Yuanfu’s reworking of the terse ballad spells out an explicit moral: that if this mere woman could be this loyal and this brave, men should find it easy to be half as good. Later versions revisit this theme, with Mulan being motivated not primarily by filial piety but to shame men for not joining in the righteous war. A Qing novel has her kill herself at her father’s grave out of loyalty to him after the emperor demanded her in marriage. Hers is a story that was used by the literati to examine ideals of loyalty, not just to a father, but also to fallen dynasties and conquering powers.

As ideas of the nation state developed in the 20th Century, Mulan is refashioned into a patriot. She fights not simply out of loyalty to her father, to protect him from conscription, but out of a patriotic fervour for her own county. Her story served a thinly veiled allegory for the resistance during Japanese occupation. She scolds and mocks her fellow soldiers for their lack of unity and strength, as well as ferreting out collaborators and traitors among their ranks.

And in a strange sort of way, Mulan (2020) fits right in with these nationalist versions.

In the wake of this film, we are having all those long overdue conversations about representation. For too long, we have been so starved that we have allowed the issue to be reduced to simply a matter of more. But now we are now digging deeper into the substance of how we would like to see ourselves in that media, rather than just to see ourselves at all.

And I really don’t want that conversation to be dominated by the rejection of a truly terrible film only for its ultimately superficial failings.

We need to understand it in the context of Han hegemony, of Chinese imperialism and ongoing cultural genocide. It’s not enough to simply see it as an crumb of representation or try to balance its “girl power” anthem against the genocide it was complicit in. Nor is it enough to talk about Chinese culture and history as though it stands apart and innocent from all that.

As diaspora, we often feel powerless. As the minority in our adopted nations, we are subjected to all sorts of xenophobia and racism. It is frustrating to always be found wanting, to be less “authentic” when measured against those of the sourceland. Our experiences and complaints get dismissed and our desires all too often overwritten. If you do derive joy from this film, I honestly don’t want to take that away from you. Bad people can make good art and bad art can absolutely inspire. This isn’t about trying to conflate art and activism.

But we cannot allow the rhetorical use of little Asian girls waiting to be inspired by Mulan to silence this conversation about actual genocide. It is not enough to hide behind their supposed cultural helplessness and use it to defend the indefensible.

At some point, we need to recognise that the selfsame thing that gives us strength can also poison us.