Farewell My Concubine and Its Censorship Saga
Essay by Rocio Guay '25 for Queer Media Course
Farewell My Concubine (Chen 1993) made waves abroad when it became the first Chinese film to win the Palme d’Or, but its release in mainland China was far more troubled. Although the Chinese government had been loosening restrictions across the media spectrum, Farewell My Concubine struck a nerve. Reportedly, the Politburo personally viewed the film and decided to ban it indefinitely, demanding severe cuts. This ban was not absolute, however—the government allowed the two weeks of showings in Shanghai for which tickets had already been sold out (Kristof). Then, Deng Xiaoping watched the film and intervened, successfully pushing for its re-release with only three cuts (Lim 30–31). But just because the CPC (Communist Party of China) permitted Farewell My Concubine’s mostly-whole mainland China release didn’t mean that its members had to be happy about it. Some grumbled about how China’s bid for the 2000 Olympics forced them to relent in order to appear less authoritarian (Tyler “Warning”), others took to Qiushi, a party journal, to criticize the film’s homosexuality as “perverted” and designate homosexuality a pre-1949 artifact. Nevertheless, Farewell My Concubine was a hit in mainland China, both at the box office and on pirated videotapes (Lim 31). Narratives regarding artistic freedom vs. censorship are often reduced to either the glorious triumph of the great thinker or totalitarian oppressors crushing freedom, but the Farewell My Concubine’s release in mainland fits neither mold. Rather, it is a carousel-esque tribulation caused by the interplay between a myriad of contradicting forces ranging from the need to display power, reform efforts, international relations, and nation-building.
Importantly, both the events of and the discourse surrounding the censorship of Farewell My Concubine (which heavily overlap) exist within the discourse of human rights and freedom within post-Tiananmen China. Yingjin Zhang writes in Screening China that academia and media discussions of Chinese cinema in the West disproportionately revolve around censorship issues—by corollary, no censorship, no attention. He supports his argument with examples of exposé-style reports about censored Chinese films and filmmakers from major American newspapers, including the New York Times (27–28). The New York Times cites an anonymous Chinese official as blaming the international attention showered upon the film for their decision to re-release with few cuts (Tyler “Warning”), but the international attention exploded more so because of the censorship than the film itself. The perfect Chinese film for a Western audience would be zero percent celluloid, one hundred percent cuts, as that would confirm the West’s supremacy of freedom, yet the act of censorship inevitably provokes righteous indignation, for that violates the West’s ideas of freedom. This orientalist catch-22 forced the Chinese government to make difficult decisions about how and to what extent to censor Farewell My Concubine, decisions with tradeoffs in all directions.
One of the most glaring elements of the censorship of Farewell My Concubine in China is how consistently ineffective it was. First, Farewell My Concubine screened at the Cannes Film Festival unhindered. Then, its distributors sold tickets for Shanghai showings without receiving approval, and even when the government nixed a wider release, it still permitted two weeks of sold-out screenings (Kristof). China had a publicly-known and thriving economy of pirated VCDs (video compact discs) in the 1990s (Zhang Chinese National Cinema 282); two weeks of sold-out screenings meant two weeks to generate enough word-of-mouth to keep Farewell My Concubine circulating outside of sanctioned channels (and two weeks to create camrips to circulate). When the censors approved modifications, the new version was less a compromise than a capitulation, with only three cuts in a film nearly three hours long (Lim 30). The government did its best to salvage the situation, warning filmmakers to cease any future “attitude problems” (Tyler “Warning”) and denouncing the film in Qiushi, but Farewell My Concubine remained successful both at the box office and on VCD. If anything, the overt attempts at censorship gave the film an edge, boosting the film’s popularity in China via the Streisand effect—dissident Wang Dan noted significant distribution via videotape after the Qiushi piece (Lim 31). With enough brashness to rile up curious audiences, yet a loose enough grip to allow mass-proliferation, it’s hard to imagine a less adequate attempt at censorship.
This raises the question, why would the Chinese government take such a route? There are a few possibilities. One is that the censors were dead-set on shelving Farewell My Concubine, only for 92-year-old Deng Xiaoping to show up and demand that they release the gay movie. This seems unlikely. Another is that the censors were simply too stupid to anticipate the international backlash to the government restricting freedom of expression in a post-Tiananmen China. Again, unlikely. A third possibility is that the censors were secretly playing 4-D chess by using the Streisand effect to get people excited for the first Chinese movie to win the Palme d’Or. Considering that, based on the early Shanghai screenings, people were already really excited for the film, not to mention that the government could have simply used its power within the domestic media to promote Farewell My Concubine in a far easier, more normal way, such trickery seems unnecessary. Rather, the most likely possibility is that the censors flexed their power for the sake of doing so. Chen may have said that the film was not meant as a judgment of the Chinese government (Kristof), but it still contained plenty of objectionable content. Although international discourse regarding human rights in China put pressure on the censors to be lenient, they had to balance that with the need to prove that they still had sovereignty. Thus, a ban delayed to placate customers, a big show of relenting under pressure over human rights and freedom (Kristof), and an epilogue with a vague threat to filmmakers (Tyler). The censorship of Farewell My Concubine in China did a terrible job of actually censoring the film, but it did allow the censors to demonstrate their ability and intent to clamp down on future objectionable content while keeping as friendly a face as could be expected of government censors.
A criticism of Farewell My Concubine from outside of China reveals another element behind the government’s tolerance of the film. Song Hwee Lim writes that the film caught flak for “the erasure of Hong Kong” and being “mainland-centric” since it relocated the fateful reunion of Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) and Xialou (Zhang Fengyi) out of Hong Kong (where it was in the novel that the film is adapted from) (31). Setting the reunion in Hong Kong would not only remind audiences that Hong Kong exists outside of mainland China, it would portray the territory as above mainland China. While between the portrayals of the Japanese, the Chinese Civil War, and the Cultural Revolution, the government in mainland China throughout the film was anything but picture-perfect, those events are easier to locate within the past. Requiring that the two leads, post-Cultural Revolution, go to Hong Kong (that is, leave mainland China) to resolve the plot would be a clear blow to CPC’s ability to project the image of a unified China, especially in light of the imminent handover of Hong Kong. Farewell My Concubine may have been objectionable with how it portrayed the Cultural Revolution and homosexuality, but it was also a Palme d’Or-winning international blockbuster that disacknowledged the existence of Hong Kong as a separate polity, a propaganda boon.
Another criticism of Farewell My Concubine from outside of China concerned Dieyi acting out the fantasy of a “hysterical faggot” (Lim 31). Regardless of the truth of such a statement, it is significant in that it labels Dieyi as a strictly “bad” gay. However, Dieyi is played by leading man Leslie Cheung, he’s a Peking opera superstar, and dies with as much glory as is reasonably possible in suicide. Dieyi might be a hysterical faggot, but reducing him to being a homophobic fantasy incarnate (Lim 31) strips away everything else about him. This not only makes him an easy target, it sets China up too. 1993 America might be treating its gay population atrociously, but in Communist China, they don’t even have gay people—only faggots. While whether or not white people would deem Dieyi problematic likely had zero bearing on the decisions of China’s censors, the presence of Western homonationalist discourse surrounding Farewell My Concubine does factor heavily into the saga.
In his article for the New York Times, “China Bans One of Its Own Films; Cannes Festival Gave It Top Prize,” human rights journalist Nicholas D. Kristof lists Farewell My Concubine’s portrayal of homosexuality as the Politburo’s first problem with the film, before the Cultural Revolution and Dieyi’s suicide. At the end, he quotes a statement from Harvey and Bob Weinstein decrying the “blatant suppression of artistic freedom in China.” However, when the Weinstein’s distribution company, Miramax, cut fourteen minutes for the North American release, fellow New York Times writer Patrick E. Tyler only alluded to the deletions parenthetically, and as merely making the film “more accessible to American audiences.” Tyler also mentions Farewell My Concubine’s temporary ban in Taiwan, but only in passing, and prefaces Taiwan as “democratic” (“Rules”). In her 2007 book, Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar argues that the recent legalizations of gay marriage in Europe were not about gay rights, rather, “Gay marriage reform thus indexes the racial and civilizational disjunctures between Europeans and Muslims” (20). Or, in Lee Atwater terms (Perlstein), when saying “White people are better than Muslims” becomes too uncouth, you instead say, “We [white people] are tolerant, but Arabs hate the homosexuals.” Farewell My Concubine may be a 1993 film from China, but the same principles still apply. The denizens of the Free World might hate gay people, but there is no one (explicitly) telling Hollywood that all on-screen homosexuality is verboten; in China, there (apparently) is. Thus, criticism of China for censoring Farewell My Concubine can be weaponized to “[index] the racial and civilization disjunctures between Europeans and Muslims [here, the Chinese]” (Puar 20). The material reality of the HIV/AIDS epidemic being very bad for gay people in the West is besides the point; Puar writes that “national love is a form of waiting,” creating an anticipatory dynamic that, in the case of gay people, allows the state (and the market) to project boundless benevolence no matter how committed it may be to homophobic policies and institutions. “Thus the nation-state maintains its homophobic and xenophobic stances while capitalizing on its untarnished image of inclusion, diversity, and tolerance” (26). The problem for China is that this dynamic advances the “ascendancy of whiteness,” a term Puar borrowed from Rey Chow (3) and relates to “the production of terrorist and citizen bodies” (2). The “terrorist” label may not directly map onto China, but the dichotomy does. The homonationalist discourse regarding China’s censorship of Farewell My Concubine produces progressive citizen bodies in the West and backwards oriental bodies in China. Thus, the Chinese government’s choices of how to censor Farewell My Concubine become choices of how to construct the Chinese nation in relation to other nations.
However, this analysis would be woefully lacking without a consideration of what made Farewell My Concubine objectionable to the censors in the first place. The categories “homosexuality” and “Cultural Revolution” are vague at best, but there was one specific scene that the censors specifically and successfully demanded be softened: Dieyi’s suicide. Officials described the ending as “pessimistic,” specifically because it occurred after the end of the Cultural Revolution, so “‘why would he [Dieyi] want to commit suicide?’” (Lim 30, 191). The obvious implication of this complaint is that criticizing the actions of the government from during the Cultural Revolution is acceptable; criticizing the government after the Cultural Revolution, which has taken steps to distance itself from those years, is not. But beneath that routine censorship, their skepticism relates to another question: “Why would Dieyi commit suicide just because he’s gay?” This in turn has two implications, both interesting. One is that the suicide was illogical because homosexuality isn’t a thing that truly existed in 1977 China, so Dieyi’s unrequited love for Xialou wasn’t worth dying over. Lim translates the aforementioned Qiushi piece denouncing Farewell My Concubine as claiming that in China, “‘homosexuality had long been swept clean after the [1949] liberation’” (31). The other is that the suicide is unwarranted because the Cultural Revolution is over; no one is going to drag Dieyi out into the street and denounce him for his homosexual past. The conflict between these two perspectives boils down to whether homosexuality has no place in the Chinese nation (even if its practitioners might), or if there can be good/useful homosexual bodies. However, Dieyi’s suicide spoils both attempts at nation-building, for now homosexuality is tangible, and its fallout despoils the nation’s bodies.
Dieyi’s suicide is also objectionable because (with a strong disclaimer that I am not pro-suicide) it gives him too much power. In his paper, “Necropolitics,” Achille Mbembe operates under the following basis:
...the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. (11–12)
Mbembe goes on to cite Georges Bataille and say that “Sexuality is inextricably linked to violence and to the dissolution of the boundaries of the body and self by way of orgiastic and excremental impulses” (15). That being said, while there is an element to which Dieyi slicing open his throat (and presumably spraying his blood everywhere) a la the titular concubine is a liberated, orgasmic release to a lifetime of repression, it goes deeper than that. Later in the paper, Mbembe details the “logic of martyrdom” within the context of suicide bombers. When it is no longer possible to “execute others while holding one’s own death at a distance,” “a new semiosis of killing emerges”: “The power and value of the body result from a process of abstraction based on the desire for eternity...In other words, in death the future is collapsed into the present” (36–37). Dieyi knows his love for Xialou is doomed. There is no future for him there. But in his own self-destruction, he achieves, to again quote Mbembe, “a moment of supremacy” over his mortality whereby he converts the value of his body into an expression of homosexuality like an atom bomb converts mass into energy. He sublimates his act within a Peking opera classic, yet it remains violently, orgasmically incompatible with any efforts to incorporate his body into any nation, nevermind China. The Chinese censors may have been (were almost certainly) homophobic, but if that was the extent of their concerns, why single out the ending, where the main gay character dies for his homosexuality? Rather, the ending of Farewell My Concubine is dangerous because it transforms Dieyi from a mere engager of homosexual acts to an explosive suicide faggot.
In her 1995 book, Primitive Passions, Rey Chow writes the following about the process of “translation”:
Contemporary Chinese films are cultural “translations” in these multiple senses of the term. By consciously exoticizing China and revealing China’s “dirty secrets” to the outside world, contemporary Chinese directors are translators of the violence with which the Chinese culture is “originally” put together...To borrow Michael Taussig’s words, contemporary Chinese films constitute that “novel anthropology” in which the “object” recorded is no longer simply the “third world” but “the West itself as mirrored in the eyes and handiwork of its others.” (202)
Farewell My Concubine certainly exoticizes China. It displayed decades of culture-suffused violence in China, all but professing to serve as an origin story for contemporary China, to the tune of the nation’s first Palme d’Or and wide commercial distribution throughout the West. It reproduces an originally Western medium through the frame of Peking opera. Its use of Hong Kong source material further inflects the film with the West itself. However, Farewell My Concubine is also a lynchpin of China’s national cinema. It cuts Hong Kong out of the narrative. Its main character is a “hysterical faggot.” The hysterical faggot in question commits suicide in a way that not only criticizes the Chinese government, but undermines attempts at nation-building in an incendiary manner that grants him a moment of supremacy. When the Chinese government attempted to censor the film domestically, they only succeeded in opening up a new can of worms. What power they did demonstrate comes at the cost of the Streisand effect, and they had to also contend with a broadside of transnational discourse portraying them as free speech-crushing, human rights-abusing, uniquely homophobic intolerants. It would be easy to dismiss the commotion surrounding Farewell My Concubine’s release in mainland China and the ultimate sparseness of cuts as much ado about nothing, but it is much more revealing to consider the “nothing” outcome as the product of a multi-dimensional balancing act between a wide array of discourses and goals.
Works Cited
Chen, Kaige, director. Farewell My Concubine. Tomson Films, 1993.
Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Columbia University, 1995.
Kristof, Nicholas D. “China Bans One of Its Own Films; Cannes Festival Gave It Top Prize.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 4 Aug. 1993, www.nytimes.com/1993/08/04/movies/china-bans-one-of-its-own-films-canne….
Lim, Song Hwee. Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.
Mbembe, Achille, translated by Libby Meintjes. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, vol. 15 no. 1, 2003, p. 11-40.
Perlstein, Rick. “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy.” The Nation, The Nation, 7 Dec. 2018, www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-….
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007.
Tyler, Patrick E. “China’s Censors Issue a Warning.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 4 Sept. 1993, www.nytimes.com/1993/09/04/movies/china-s-censors-issue-a-warning.html.
Tyler, Patrick E. “FILM; Who Makes the Rules in Chinese Movies?.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Oct. 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/17/movies/film-who-makes-the-rules-in-c….
Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese National Cinema. Routledge, 2004.
Zhang, Yingjin. Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. The University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 2002.
