The Battle at Lake Changjin: The Influence of Korean War Memory on Contemporary Chinese War Films

Abstract

Abstract The 2021 film The Battle at Lake Changjin (长津湖) is China’s highest-grossing film. Together with its sequel, its success as a political tool rests on appealing to a broad audience while engaging with familiar themes embedded in collective memory. The Chinese Communist Party, which commissioned the films, leveraged preexisting tropes regarding the conflict and repackaged them for a modern audience. This paper will proceed in three parts. First, it will trace the deliberate development of collective memory of the conflict from its inception up to President Xi Jinping’s gaining power in 2012. Next, it will explore the new emphasis on the Korean War in the 2010s and 2020s, and the political objectives Xi seeks to achieve by propagandizing the Korean War. Finally, it will provide a thematic analysis of the films and how the intended political messaging interacted with the embedded collective memory.