Heroes of the Korean War!

by Keith Bennett

The Battle at Lake Changjin, directed by Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark and Dante Lam, premiered at the Beijing International Film Festival on 21st September 2021 and was released in China on 30th September. As part of its international distribution it has been showing at selected cinemas all over the world. With a budget of some $200 million it is the most expensive Chinese film ever made. The acclaim with which it has been received however, has also made it the highest grossing film of 2021, the highest grossing film in Chinese history and the highest grossing non-English language film.
    At just two minutes under three hours in length, the film is a revolutionary epic, with the main action centred around the Changjin Lake area of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the bitterly cold winter of 1950, shortly after the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army (CPVA) intervened to help the Korean people during the conflict the Chinese call the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea.
    Confronted with the harshest natural and climatic conditions, forced to survive on starvation rations and faced with an enemy that was better trained, better equipped, better fed, better armed and with complete mastery of the skies, the Chinese troops “fearing neither hardship nor death”, to use the well-known Chinese expression, continued to forge ahead in the most courageous and ingenious of ways. Armed with the element of surprise, and although making the ultimate sacrifice, by successfully blowing up the Shuimen Bridge they scored the most decisive victory, ultimately ensuring the achievement of China’s objectives in the war.
    A great strength of the film is how it weaves into a seamless whole the grand politics of national leadership and vital decisions of war and peace with the lives, sentiments and aspirations of the masses of poor and working people, those whom Chairman Mao always insisted were the real heroes. We see Mao addressing his comrades and arguing his case. We see him absorbed in contemplation. We see his close comradely relations with the CPVA commander Peng Dehuai (something that tragically was not to survive the later twists and turns of the revolution), and we see the interplay between Mao Zedong, his son Mao Anying and Peng.
    Already a seasoned revolutionary in his own right, Anying is determined to be amongst the first to volunteer for the Korean front. Peng tries his best to dissuade him. He doesn’t want the Chairman to be left without his son. But Anying cannot accept that his family should not make the same sacrifices that countless other families throughout China would make. It is Mao Zedong who tells Peng to “let him go”, not because he doesn’t love his son, but because he loves all the sons and daughters of the Chinese working people – something that recalls Stalin’s attitude when his son was held a prisoner of war by the Nazis and which reputedly originally inspired the title of Arthur Miller’s 1946 play All my Sons.
    This interplay may be said to constitute a bridge to the depiction of the mass of Chinese people in war and revolution. The film begins with People’s Liberation Army soldier Wu Qianli returning to join his illiterate parents and younger brother in their home village in Zhejiang province and carrying an urn containing the ashes of his other brother Wu Baili, who has fallen as a revolutionary martyr. Although Qianli will return to the army, he assures his worried mother, who has already lost one son, that the war is over and there are no more battles to be fought. As a result of land reform, the family have been given a modest amount of land as their own and Qianli’s great dream and plan is to build there a home fit for his parents to live in.
    He has scarcely reached home however, before he is called to leave at once for Korea. Again relating the vital questions of international politics to the daily concerns and needs of the people, the point is made that those who have at last gained their own home and land must now fight to repel those who would come and take it away. In a separate scene, Mao opines that the country has only just been liberated. There is so much to do to build a new China. He doesn’t want to fight another war at this time. But if, he presciently observes, this war brings China decades or even a century of peace, then it will be worth it. Moreover, Mao observes, by sending its military forces to Taiwan, the USA has already committed aggression against China.
    Later, in the terrible conditions of battle, the soldiers console themselves with the thought that their sacrifice will mean that their children will not need to endure the horrors of conflict. They will enjoy a better life in peace. For this reviewer, it was a touching vindication of that to be able watch the film in a cinema in London’s West End, with an audience otherwise made up of young students from China.
    Much of the film’s human story is centred on the relationship between Wu Qianli and his younger brother Wu Wanli. Wanli’s brother is a people’s army soldier and a revolutionary martyr, whilst, at least initially, he is a mischievous, somewhat ill-disciplined but in reality quite naïve peasant boy, who starts out by thinking that war is some kind of adventure or game.
    Qianli is horrified that Wanli has sneaked away to enlist together with him. Wanli’s progression from naïve teenager to heroic soldier and revolutionary, and not just in a military sense, but for example in learning to write a self-criticism, in a sense recalls the evolution of Pavel Korchagin in the classic Soviet novel How the Steel was Tempered. Towards the end, it is noted that the Wan in Wanli means ten thousand, indicating that his example will be followed by countless revolutionary successors.
    The developing relationship between Qianli and some of his closest comrades on the one hand, and Wanli on the other, plays out against the lives and interactions of the company as a whole. The good-natured ribbing conceals but also highlights and nurtures a deep camaraderie characterised by a willingness to sacrifice for others, both for the person next to you and for the wider cause, a profound humanism and a genuine comradely love. The resulting political synthesis of revolutionary heroism and class hatred, of patriotism and proletarian internationalism, becomes the living embodiment of Chairman Mao’s great call to Resist America, Aid Korea, Safeguard the Motherland and Defend our Homes.
    The film provides a vivid, intense and at times harrowing depiction of just what it means to fight with next to nothing against almost insuperable and apparently hopeless odds – in exposed terrain at the mercy of US bombers and in temperatures that often fall to more than minus 40 degrees Celsius, compounded by a lack of food and adequate warm clothing. And to triumph in the face of such adversity. There is a poignant contrast between the lavish Thanksgiving dinner enjoyed by the US troops at their base with the Chinese volunteers attempting to ward off starvation with a handful of small, rotten and undercooked or raw potatoes – sharing with each other what very little they had. But no amount of roast turkey with all the trimmings can obscure the dawning realisation that Douglas MacArthur’s boast, seen towards the start of the film, of victory by Thanksgiving and home by Christmas was not going to materialise.
    The note of caution raised at the start, that behind Kim Il Sung stood Mao Zedong and Stalin, was arrogantly dismissed with chauvinistic deprecation of peasant fighters. But the history of the 20th Century is in major part a history of Asian peasants fighting and defeating US imperialism and its stooges – in China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. They were often equipped with the most rudimentary of weapons – but they were also equipped with the most advanced revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism and the leadership of a communist party. Of course, both the fact that China chose to make this film at this time, and the fact of its phenomenal box office success, is not unrelated to the New Cold War unleashed by imperialism against China and other socialist and anti-imperialist countries – a cold war that, just as it did in Korea in 1950, can all too easily become an outright military conflict. For Asian workers and peasants in power, however, the days of fighting with rudimentary weapons are over. People’s China and Democratic Korea are both proud nuclear powers, ready and able to defend their independence, sovereignty and socialist gains, as Malcolm X memorably put it, “by any means necessary”.
    It should not be the job of a reviewer to say too much about a film’s ending but suffice to mention that even a US commander is finally moved to salute the courage of the CPVA troops and to opine that it is impossible to prevail against men with such a degree of motivation. This symbolism brought to mind the words of Comrade Fidel Castro, speaking about Bobby Sands and his fellow hunger strikers in the north of Ireland: “Let tyrants tremble before men who are prepared to face death after more than 60 days without food.”


The Battle at Lake Changjin is currently freely available on YouTube and Vimeo.

Playing with fire in the Himalayas…

India is playing a dangerous game in the Himalayas. Indian attempts to encroach into Chinese territory were beaten back in a skirmish in which at least 20 Indian troops were killed and 120 more wounded this week.

In the past India followed the path of independence and established friendly relations with the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies in Asia and eastern Europe. Leaders such as Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi were pillars of the non-aligned movement. Now it’s led by Narendra Modi, the leader of the BJP, a front led by the secret Hindu nationalist RSS militia, a fascist bloc of high-castes, landlords and industrialists.

The BJP leaders replaced India's traditional policy with one of support for Israel and partnership with US imperialism. Some of them even talk of joining NATO now.

The Modi government claims it wants to make India “self-sufficient”. Modi says a self-sufficient India would be fully integrated with the world economy whilst not dependent on anyone in strategic areas. In practice, all this means is privatising the country’s natural resources for the benefit of foreign and Indian big business.

The Indian government has proved totally incapable of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic that is sweeping across the sub-continent. The mostly privatised health service cannot cope and at least an additional 150 million people have been rendered unemployed during the lockdown period.

The needs of millions upon millions of Indians who live in abject poverty are ignored by the government that seeks to establish authoritarian rule throughout the country.

Despite being the country's largest religious minority, India's Muslims are frequently subjected to violent attacks by Hindu fanatics, like the riots in Delhi last February that forced many Muslims to flee the capital in terror.

India’s corrupt ruling class hopes to divert the masses down the barren road of sectarian violence whilst they dream of riches to come by squandering billions on weapons in a drive to become America’s chief enforcer in the region.

The hidden hand of US imperialism clearly lies behind the latest Indian provocation in the Galwan Valley, like it did when it covertly backed Indian support for the Dalai Lama’s futile revolt in Tibet in 1959 and the border war of 1962. On both occasions the Americans did nothing and the Indians got a bloody nose. Let’s hope wiser counsel prevails in Delhi this time round.

…and on the Korean peninsula

Democratic Korea dramatically countered recent south Korean provocations by blowing up the empty north–south liaison office in the border town of Kaesong this week. This dramatic piece of street art was clearly intended to send a message to the Seoul regime that has resorted to old Cold War tricks along the de-militarised zone that divides the Korean peninsula.

Helium balloons carrying anti-communist propaganda leaflets have regularly been launched into the DPR Korea by what the puppet regime calls “defectors”. But everyone knows that these people, more accurately called “riff-raff” and “human scum” by the north, are agents of south Korean intelligence, which itself is but an arm of the CIA.

During the height of the Cold War the Americans and their local lackeys used balloons to drop dollars and propaganda across the armistice line drawn up at the end of the Korean war in 1953. Donald Trump’s summits with Kim Jong Un raised hopes of a new page in inter-Korean relations. But despite the fine words, the Americans have done nothing apart from stepping up their blockade of the DPRK.

Corbyn’s last bow

Jeremy Corbyn took part in his final Prime Minister’s Questions as Labour leader last week. Boris Johnson paid tribute to Corbyn’s “sincerity and determination to build a better society”, whilst the Labour leader warned the Prime Minister not to deliver his political obituary because he will not stop campaigning for social justice in the future.

 “My voice will not be stilled,” Corbyn said. “I will be around. I will be campaigning. I will be arguing and demanding justice for the people of this country and indeed the rest of the world.”

Whether that voice will still be heard on Labour’s front-bench largely depends on who will take his place. Corbyn says he’d like to be Shadow Foreign Secretary. That might be too much to swallow for Sir Keir Starmer, the bookies’ favourite to become the next Labour leader.

Of the three contenders, Starmer, a lawyer turned politician, is the darling of the Labour Remainers who, even now, still dream of reversing Brexit. Rebecca Long-Bailey poses as Corbyn’s successor whilst Lisa Nandy’s problem is that she is largely appealing to the same constituency within the Labour Party that Starmer has already sewn up.

Labour’s voice has, so far, been overshadowed by the coronavirus crisis. Although Labour and the unions have clearly been involved in informal discussions with the Government at a national level over the emergency, the new Labour leadership now needs to reflect the voice of organised labour on the street as well as parliament in the months to come.

Strange Times – New Times

The news that Russia is sending medical assistance to the USA reflects the nature of the coronavirus plague that has plunged the world into a health crisis not seen since the devastating Spanish Flu pandemic that swept the world shortly after the end of the First World War.

During the Cold War the USA and the satellite states that their lackeys called the “free world” exploited disease and famine in the Third World to trumpet the supposed superiority of the capitalist system. They sent their ‘aid’ to maintain neo-colonialist control of large parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America for the benefit of trans-national corporations of the imperialist heartlands.

In those days the US-led global imperialist bloc tried to stifle the national liberation movements that had broken the chains of the old European colonial systems after the Second World War. The imperialists spent billions on bogus aid projects to counter the Soviet Union and the resurgent communist movements that had come to power in eastern Europe and parts of the Third World, in propaganda campaigns to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people the imperialists intended to oppress and plunder.

Although the wild dreams of the ‘Project for the New American Century’ and the ‘new world order’ that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union were shattered on the streets of Baghdad and the Syrian plains, the imperialists still think they can do what they like with impunity.

Trump and his cronies initially did little or nothing to tackle the coronavirus plague that has claimed thousands of American lives. They were only interested in exploiting the crisis to tighten the screws of their economic blockades of Democratic Korea, Cuba, Syria, Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran. They even tried to stop their NATO allies accepting Chinese medical assistance. Now Trump, under public pressure to be seen doing something, is forced to accept Russian aid.

People’s China, Cuba and Vietnam have beaten back the virus, whilst Democratic Korea has no reported cases of infection due to the emergency measures taken by the people’s government to keep the virus out of the country. Whilst the USA descends into chaos, Chinese and Cuban medical teams are helping to combat the virus all over the world. If nothing else, this clearly demonstrates the superiority of the socialist system.

No Deal Trump not welcome here

Donald Trump’s minions tell the world that their boss is a great negotiator. Trump says in a book that he probably didn’t write that: “Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals.” But what has he actually achieved?

Absolutely nothing. Trump said he was going to make the Mexicans pay for the wall he’s building to keep out illegal immigrants. Well they didn’t.

He unilaterally pulled out of the international nuclear deal with Iran and stepped up sanctions in a bid to force the Iranians to renegotiate on American terms. That didn’t happen.

Despite three meetings with Democratic Korean leader Kim Jong Un on the nuclear issue, Trump’s put nothing concrete on the table and the whole process has stalled. So that’s been a waste of time.

Trump hiked up tariffs to force the Chinese to agree to a one-sided trade deal with US imperialism. All that’s done has been to spark off a trade war that could plunge the global economy into another recession.

And the worthless “Deal of the Century” that Trump’s men thought could bring peace to the Middle East by giving Israel all that it wanted and giving the Palestinians nothing in return died before it even got off the ground.

Whilst his Democrat rivals claim a moral high-ground they simply do not possess, Trump is no saint either.

The Democrats like to portray Trump as a vulgar, corrupt racist unfit to hold public office. But he is so much more than that. The property tycoon turned president represents those who no longer want to pay for wars they cannot win – which has been virtually all of them since the Second World War. They too want US hegemony over the world but they believe it can be won through trade wars and unequal treaties, which was the preferred form of US overseas expansion in the 19th century. This is what Trump means when he says he wants to “Make America Great Again”.

The US president wants to cut his losses in conflicts he did not initiate in Afghanistan and Syria. He doesn’t believe in ‘globalisation’ or the ‘new world order’ of past Democrat and Republican administrations that tried to use US might to establish American hegemony throughout the world.

Trump represents the American capitalists who want to cut back US military expenditure in Europe, Afghanistan and south Korea so that they can concentrate on controlling the global energy market by taking over the entire Middle East and restoring US imperialism’s control over south America.

Trump’s coming to London again in early December for a NATO summit. He wasn’t welcome the last time he came. He isn’t welcome now. It isn’t just because he’s a moronic climate-change denier with sexist, chauvinist and bigoted anti-immigrant views. It’s because he is the Supreme Commander of the most oppressive country in the world.

No US president should be welcomed here until US imperialism ends its occupation of south Korea and closes its ring of bases that target Russia and People’s China. No US president should be welcomed in Britain until the USA ends its support of the fascist regime in Kiev and the Saudi intervention in Yemen, pulls out of Syria and Iraq, and drops sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and Democratic Korea. No leader of US imperialism should be fêted in Britain until America ends its support for Zionist Israel and recognises the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.