China’s latest blockbuster film, to be released nationwide on Thursday, focuses on the hypersensitive topic of famine – but not the mass starvation that Mao Zedong presided over, which remains strictly taboo.
Back to 1942 tells of a largely forgotten disaster that left three million dead, seven years before Mao’s Communists took over and almost two decades before his Great Leap Forward led to the deaths of tens of millions.
It has drawn wide local attention with Chinese stars Zhang Guoli and Chen Daoming and Hollywood figures Adrien Brody and Tim Robbins among director Feng Xiaogang’s cast, and a 210 million yuan (US$34 million) budget.
The famine struck the central province of Henan, which had been torn by fighting between Chinese and Japanese forces while also suffering a drought, locust attacks and government mismanagement.
The area was still recovering from deliberate breaches in dams along the Yellow River that caused massive flooding four years previously, in a desperate attempt to check the Japanese advance.
The film is presented as “one of the most sombre moments in recent Chinese history”.
Yet neither the filmmaker, actors nor the local press have made any mention of the far larger famine of 1958-62 under the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s failed economic overhaul.