Putting Lang Lang in Context: The Background of His White House Performance

Lang Lang’s performance of an anti-American song at the White House needs to be seen in the context of communist China.
Putting Lang Lang in Context: The Background of His White House Performance
Lang Lang, a Chinese pianist, plays the piano at the White House on Jan. 19, 2011. The music he is playing is the theme song from an anti-American propaganda movie about the Korean War. (Screenshot from Youtube)
Heng He
1/28/2011
Updated:
10/1/2015
<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/lang_lang_whitehouse.jpg" alt="Lang Lang, a Chinese pianist, plays the piano at the White House on Friday, Jan. 21. The music he is playing is the theme song from an anti-American propaganda movie about the Korean War. (Screenshot taken from Youtube)" title="Lang Lang, a Chinese pianist, plays the piano at the White House on Friday, Jan. 21. The music he is playing is the theme song from an anti-American propaganda movie about the Korean War. (Screenshot taken from Youtube)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1803190"/></a>
Lang Lang, a Chinese pianist, plays the piano at the White House on Friday, Jan. 21. The music he is playing is the theme song from an anti-American propaganda movie about the Korean War. (Screenshot taken from Youtube)

Lang Lang’s performance of an anti-American propaganda song at the White House state dinner for China’s paramount leader Hu Jintao is not an isolated event. That performance is part of a history in communist China of the political uses of music and the feelings it is meant to inspire.

After performing “My Motherland,” Lang Lang wrote in his blog that this was “one of the most beautiful songs in the eyes of the Chinese.” Lang Lang understood himself through his performance to be making a statement “about a powerful China and a united Chinese people.”

He may have learned to view the song in this way one day in 1997, just before he was to leave for the United States to study at the Curtis Institute. Lang Lang went with his parents to visit their close friends, the composers Yin Deben and his wife Jiang Hong, who worked at the Liaoning Opera House.

Yin and Jiang presented Lang Lang with a book of tunes they had arranged for the piano, one of which was “My Motherland.” Lang Lang did not initially like the piece and did not know how to play it. Yin and Jiang determined to help him.

Present that day was Liu Yuanju, who was writing a book on Lang Lang. In “Dad’s Heart Is This Lofty,” Liu described the scene in the rehearsal hall of the Opera House: “Yin Deben emotionally waved his arm and sang the main theme of “A Big River” [the original title of “My Motherland”] loudly. He asked Lang Lang to play with more reverberation, more energy, and more excitement.”

Yin and Jiang had transcribed the piano solo “My Motherland” from the theme song of the famous movie “The Battle of Shangganling.” The movie is about a battle in the Korean War, which is always called in Chinese propaganda the “Campaign to Oppose America and Assist North Korea.” In their arrangement, they added a quotation from the song “Battle Hymn of the Heroes,” which is the theme song for another “Oppose America and Assist North Korea” movie, “Heroic Sons and Daughters.”

The lyrics to the section of “Battle Hymn” that were inserted into “My Motherland” are: “Why is the army’s flag so beautiful? The hero’s blood has dyed it red. Why is the spring eternal? Because the hero’s lives are blooming.” In that movie, the hero was a Chinese volunteer Army soldier who killed many U.S. soldiers and himself with the last pipe bomb.

Culture as a Weapon

There is a direct line between Lang Lang’s use of music to inspire feelings about a “powerful China and a united Chinese people” and the policy on culture enforced by Mao Tse Tung.

Yan’an is a place in the mountains of northwest China where Mao’s army hid as the nationalists fought the Japanese Imperial Army. It was the site of the Yan’an rectification movement and may be said to be the birthplace of the modern CCP culture. At Yan’an, Mao ruthlessly enforced adherence to CCP ideology, including the doctrine that all forms of culture must serve the interests of the CCP.

Wang Shiwei was a writer who questioned Mao’s cultural and artistic policy. He was beheaded in 1947—two years before the CCP took over China—under orders of the Central Social Bureau,  which was directly under Mao’s control. After the anti-rightist campaign in 1957, nobody was able to step out of Party’s control in this field. Almost every single song or piece of music written during that period has political meaning.

That political meaning may not be obvious, particularly to those coming to communist China from the outside, and harmless or even beautiful words may have hidden meanings. Patriotism, for instance, has a different meaning in today’s China than it has in other nations and cultures. Patriotism is not love of the nation or the people. It is first of all love for the state—in this case the Chinese communist regime. But this is not all. The culture established by the CCP teaches that the love for the state must be expressed in the form of hatred towards its enemies.

One of the CCP’s role models is the People’s Liberation Army truck driver Lei Feng. In a famous poem, he described his loyalty to the Party: “(we should) treat our comrades as warmly as the spring, and treat the enemies as ruthlessly as a harsh winter.”

Whether intentionally or not, lyrics in “My Motherland” echo the sentiment of this poem: “When friends are here, there is fine wine /But if the jackal comes/What greets it is the hunting rifle.” The “jackal” is the CCP’s enemy, the United States. But the lyrics of “My Motherland” as whole have a totally different meaning among Chinese than Westerners would understand from reading their translation.

The most popular songs among the Chinese outside China are, “Ode to the Motherland” and “My Motherland.” Both were written during the harshest time of Mao’s rule and neither of them has anything to do with the Chinese nation—with China’s tradition and culture.

Outside China, Chinese students sang these songs to attack those protesting the Olympic Torch relay. The pro-CCP patriot, in the name of loving the country China, can always find someone to hate, which shows their loyalty to the regime.

Most of them don’t even realize the meaning of their patriotism. It is in their bones and blood and they were taught as toddlers to think this way. The concept of “enemy” is an abstraction that the Party can use as a weapon as convenient. The “enemy” could be the United States, which has always had a privileged role as the number one enemy, or Taiwan, or the Dalai Lama, or Rebiya Kadeer, or Falun Gong.

Next on page 2: Communist Campaigns

Using Everyone

Once I happened to be near the Chinese national flag raising ceremony in Houston. After the flag was raised, one local pro-CCP Chinese community leader gave a speech. I still remember one sentence that he said: “Today, we raised the five-starred-red flag in the United States. Tomorrow, we will put the five-starred-red flag all over the world.”

This was exactly the same sentence as was used in the 1960s and 70s, when the CCP’s policy was openly to export Maoist-style revolution. We call it the Red-Guard language. “My Motherland” and similar songs are the musical expression of this “Red-Guard language.”

Today, the CCP is using “soft power” to extend its ideological influence around the world.

Recently a Times Square billboard began showing a one minute ad that is meant to soften China’s image by showing Chinese celebrities and ordinary Chinese. Those who represent the image of communist China are not even all Chinese. Three of them are U.S citizens, and others have U.S. green cards.

The key consideration is whether these individuals are willing to be used by the CCP and to what extent. The CCP uses everyone who is a Chinese citizen, who is naturalized in another country but was originally a Chinese citizen, or who has a Chinese blood line. The united front work is everywhere.

Continuing Campaign

For Party officials, being opposed to the United States is part of their job. During the daytime, they criticize the U.S. imperial enemy in Party meetings. In the evening, they host banquets for investors from the United States. In a normal society, this kind of behavior could be a sign of a serious mental disorder. In China, it’s just a Party official’s daily life.

One day in September 2005, the mayor of the Jinshan District of Shanghai, Hao Tiechuan, led a business delegation to visit Houston and Hao was beaming with amiability.

Before he became the Mayor of Jinshan, Hao was the deputy director of the propaganda department of the Shanghai CCP Committee. In that capacity, he published an article on Liberation Daily, the mouthpiece of the CCP Shanghai Committee, expressing strong anti-American sentiments.

On Feb. 24, 2001, he wrote: “The United States most likes to control other countries. If they cannot control your country, they will cause trouble for you.

“One of the common means to cause trouble is to support the so-called ‘opposition groups.’ The Communist Parties in a lot of Eastern Europe countries were forced to step down in this way. Behind the political struggle, one important goal is to dominate the market and make money, and to found U.S. happiness on the suffering of other countries.”

When he met the Houston city officials and businessmen, one person in the audience asked him, “I know you hate America, what I don’t understand is how you could change your position so quickly.”

In responding to Lang Lang having played “My Motherland” at the White House, some China scholars working in the West have talked about the different cultures of the two countries. These scholars did not explain that the culture in today’s China is not traditional Chinese culture, but the culture established after the communist regime took over China. And they did not explain what the Chinese regime’s culture is really like.

In China, the red songs—songs meant to inspire devotion to the CCP—are far from history. In 2009 in the megapolis of Chongqing the CCP Party head Bo Xilai started a campaign for singing red songs that is reminiscent of a Maoist movement. It has now spread all over the nation. “My Motherland” is one of the most important of these red songs.

As for the “Campaign to Oppose the United States and Assist North Korea,” it figures every day in the CCP’s propaganda. For most Americans, the Korean War is history, but for the CCP, the Korean War has never ended. And due to the CCP’s propaganda, the Korean War has also never ended for the Chinese people.

Sun Tzu said in “The Art of War” that if you know your opponent and know yourself, you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat. Perhaps it’s time to come to know ourselves better by learning what we don’t know about the Chinese communist regime.

Heng He is a commentator on Sound of Hope Radio, China analyst on NTD's "Focus Talk," and a writer for The Epoch Times.
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