Recently, Yangyang Cheng wrote a fantastic article on Wired Magazine titled The All American Myth of the Tiktok Spy. In this article, Cheng talks about how espionage is a racially coded crime that goes way back in history. The idea that Chinese people are spies is nothing new. It’s been part of Yellow Peril and has recently been ramped up because of tension between the United States and China and because of a wider paranoia induced by American tech companies spying on Americans.
There’s actually a ton of very popular Chinese movies about spies. Tony Leung has starred in two big ones. He recently starred in Hidden Blade alongside Wang Yibo. The movie is about Communist spies living under Japanese rule during World War II. He also starred in Lust Caution which also took placed in Japanese occupied China. It’s a love story between a spy and the man she’s supposed to kill, a man who sold himself out to the Japanese. In the story, the spy falls for the man even though he rapes her and even sacrifices her life for him.
If buddy police stories are a staple of the American entertainment industry, then spy narratives are a staple of the Chinese entertainment industry. Infernal Affairs is a Hong Kong production but spoke across borders. It’s about the entanglement between a Triad member who lives as a cop and a cop who lives as a Triad member. Now that I think about it, Tony Leung is also in that one. Why is Tony Leung in so many spy movies? I would expect someone like Andy Lau who looks sophisticated and refined to play a spy but Tony? Tony has such a warm sex appeal. It’s unexpected to see him play a spy.
The Disguiser is about a spy. Thin Ice is about spies. Sparrow is about spies. Lost in 1949 is about a spy. The Spy Hunter, The Message, and Yes I am a Spy are all dramas about spies. I remember my grandpa just keeping a drama on TV while doing other things and it would all be about spies. There was one that was a romantic comedy about a Communist who was pretending to be a Nationalist and a Nationalist who was pretending to be a Communist stuck in a labor camp together who fall in love. The comedy was Chaplinesque. Even the drama Nirvana in Fire is about a man who is pretending to be someone else after his face was changed because of a curse.
You can’t really make movies about crime in mainland China since the CCP says that China has no crime. As an alternative, people make a lot of movies about spies. While most of these dramas and movies are not strictly propaganda, they all need to get past the censorship departments so they’ll usually have either a party line message or completely political indifference.
Most of the spies in Chinese movies and dramas are romantic heroes. They are people who live for but hide some ideal. They are people who are helpless to love. They are people who sacrifice for a larger cause. Spies are heroes who suffer because their inner hearts cannot be understood, because they have to hide their truth.
This is actually a very typical narrative in Chinese media. I’m talking about the trope of the good guy who only suffers. The good guy who suffers is the quintessential Chinese hero. He might suffer because of bad luck, because of historical events, or because he’s in love with a bad woman. Most of the time, there’s no reason for his suffering. The good guy who suffers doesn’t suffer because he’s good but he’s good in spite of his suffering. The audience really relates to the good guy who suffers because the audience is also suffering without knowing why.
Xu Fugui in Zhang Yimou’s To Live is a good guy who suffers. Fang Zhendong in A Beautiful Life is a good guy who suffers. Even Wang Bo from A World Without Thieves, who is an evil thief eventually becomes a good guy who suffers when his girlfriend tells him about her pregnancy and he decides he wants to be a good father. There are so many good guys who suffer in Chinese media that I actually haven’t been able to find a single story that doesn’t include one in its plot. It’s such a cornerstone of Chinese masculinity.
So, spies are also suffering. They are heroes who suffer and not only do they suffer but they must hide their tears because they are spies. This makes the spy a really cool guy. He’s relatable because he suffers but he doesn’t show his pain so he’s cool. The spy also can’t show his or her real romantic feelings because of their disguise and that makes them really cool, especially to people like middle schoolers who also feel that they cannot express their romantic feelings for people in any way.
Why are there so many movies and shows about spies in mainland China? I have a theory. My theory is that most filmmakers do not get interested in making film because they want to make propaganda. People get interested in film and storytelling for all kinds of reasons. They want to breathe life into a story after story, they have a single story that they need to tell, they want to help people tell our stories. No one gets into filmmaking because they want to tell accepted stories. Filmmakers in China have to go through a lot of bureaucracy to become filmmakers. I believe that they tell a lot of stories about spies because they, in having to become alternative versions of themselves to survive in the industry, filmmakers become spy-like themselves.
By telling stories about spies in pain, it’s almost as though Chinese filmmakers are trying to tell audiences about their own pain.
This creates a really funny dilemma. The American media is obsessed with Chinese spies because Americans have a paranoid political style. We project suspicion on outsiders but it’s really American tech companies that are doing the most spying. The Chinese media is also obsessed with Chinese spies because frustrated filmmakers who cannot express themselves authentically try to capture their own pain and longing by describing the spy as a romantic hero.
Surveillance capitalism, xenophobia, regular old racism, machismo heroism, and state censorship—all of these things collide and the collision forms the Chinese spy, an almost mythic figure.
If I had a drag persona, I think it would be a Chinese spy. I’m not sure how I would express this character since spies have to be inscrutable. Maybe the spy would have silent tears in his eyes because he can’t tell his crush that he likes her. Maybe this matters less than he thinks because his crush doesn’t actually like him back. Part of the character’s backstory would be that he stopped being a spy not because of any ideological change but because it was just too much work. At the end of the day, spying was just a job. As a job, it just got too tedious. There was too much bureaucracy involved. The effort required just wasn’t motivating since, nowaday, you can mostly find whatever information you want online anyways.
