MCLC: The coming Chinese crackup (3)

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The coming Chinese crackup (3)
I do not presume to comment on the gist of Dr. Shambaugh’s Wall Street Journal analysis on the coming crackup of the Chinese Communist Party. I will leave prognostications to those who are experts on the future and those whose research centers on what is to come, reserving my own humble scholarship for what has already occurred, difficult enough as it is to examine and understand. I only wish to offer an observation on perhaps a minor point, and that is the reference to Florian Henkel von Donnersmark’s 2006 film (Das Leben der Anderen). Shambaugh asserts that it is an “East German Stasi” film and that we should “watch for the day when” CCP party members begin acting like the agent in the film who comes to empathize with those whom he surveils. Actually, this Academy Award winning film was a West German product that garnered considerable criticism from those of the former East German area, many of whom criticized it for its unrealistic portrayal of life under the German Democratic Republic and a fanciful account of this Stasi agent, who did not exist in reality. The slip over a film that William F. Buckley declared to be “the best film I ever saw” shows us that we need to be careful in separating representation from reality. While this is always difficult in the final analysis, Shambaugh’s obvious conflation of Von Donnersmark’s brilliant and artful, if to some flawed, fictional depiction of life under Erich Honecker with what that life was really like is a cautionary example that we can and need to do better.
Christopher Lupke <lupke at wsu.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on March 12, 2015
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