Mixed messages from the merry men

CHINESE cinema-goers will later this month thrill to Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett, as Robin Hood and Maid Marian, flinging the filthy French from the beloved homeland.

Their movie has been selected as one of the 20 foreign films annually given access to China.

At first blush, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor might seem the perfect theme for a society that has been avowedly communist for 60 years.

This, after all, was the way Mao Zedong came to power: leading a revolt against fat rural landowners and inherited wealth.

But a second take leads to different thoughts. Today, it is the Communist Party that is the establishment, and it is cadres who hold most of the keys to privilege and power. The wealthy are expected to become party members.

So who will Chinese viewers identify, if their thoughts turn to today's parallels, as the heroes and villains?

An erroneous view has taken root abroad, following the communist ascendancy, that China's culture is now - as people wrongly presume it always had been - one of subservience and deference to The Powers That Be: the kowtow as kosher.

If so, then, Chinese viewers of Robin Hood will rather focus on the theme of the righteous ruler returning to claim what is rightfully his, rather than on revolt.

The triads can be traced back, legend has it, to secretly loyal followers of the displaced Ming dynasty who conspired to undermine the succeeding Qing rulers, the Manchus, who had swept in from the northeast, from beyond the Great Wall. In this reading, the cruel yet oddly effete French rulers of England in Ridley film might have their equivalents in the Manchu-speaking barbarian Qing emperors.

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