China In Arms BOOKSTORE and GIFT SHOP!
Follow on Twitter
Enjoy China In Arms on the big screen!
Subscribe: $5 Month/$50 Annual (unable to secure a subscription contact the bank for permission for Stripe deposits). If you continue to have problems, please notify me immediately: chinainarms@substack.com
1 February 2024 (Thursday)
The Chairman (1969)
Gregory Peck and the Bamboo Curtain
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德
TAIPEI - I made many spy movie recommendations for the Chinese New Year (LINK), but I wanted to add one more for fun and it is free on the Internet.
The Chairman (1969). Starring Gregory Peck as a scientist sent to China to retrieve a secret laboratory formula that would save millions of poor people.
China refused, obviously, to allow filming in the mainland, so filming started in Hong Kong until local Communist groups set off a bomb. Filming then moved to Taiwan and finished at Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom.
While in Taiwan filming, the women swooned after Peck. A retired U.S. State Department officer told China In Arms:
I was a grad student at the Stanford Center/National Taiwan University 1968-70, so all this seems like "yesterday." Gregory Peck was enormously popular in Taiwan, especially among young women who found him something akin to the ideal male. I still remember one Taiwanese young woman of my acquaintance referring to him not as "Ge-lei-ge-li Pi-ke" but as the somewhat similarly sounding "Ge-lai-ge-qu-ge-pi-gu" (which is roughly "run your hands up and down him and on his ass").
The film was not a big money maker, but it was unique in using real locations in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and for capturing the isolation China had imposed on itself during the Cold War. China was literally a blackhole for Western intelligence collection.
In 1972, while watching the film on the new color Tv, sitting on the living room floor, my father narrated sitting in his big cozy recliner with his cigar. A smoking habit I picked up later in life.
I had never heard of the Bamboo Wall. A wall that miraculously kept a zillion Chinese from climbing over to freedom.
They were trapped in China and only rumors and refugees would trickle out via Hong Kong. Beyond that, China was a mystery.
The Vietnam War was waging and I wondered why the Chinese were not there fighting my relatives and older neighbor kids. I wanted to go, but still had eight years left.
He told me that during the Korean War waves of Red Chinese soldiers would over-run our positions, wiping out entire battalions.
They were like Zombies, he said, and ChiComs (Chinese Communists) worshiped Mao Zedong.
Note to reader: During the Cold War, the media referred to Taiwan (KMT) as the ChiNats (Chinese Nationalists).
However, the Red Guard, a radical youth group devoted to Mao, had gone rogue and were on the rampage murdering professors, burning down libraries, destroying statues of Buddha and Confucius. (Sounds kind of like today’s Progressive Woke).
Note to reader, though today Beijing insists the KMT stole the crown jewels and ancient books from China on their retreat to Taiwan in 1949, now preserved in the National Palace Museum, these treasures would never have survived the Red Guard’s matchstick diplomacy.
It was an unbridled nightmare as I would learn in college while reading survivor’s accounts of the madness.
On the night I watched the movie, my father told me that the Chinese could form four lines and march into the Pacific and it would never end. That was how many ChiComs there were in the country.
He also told me that if Mao wanted to destroy the world, he did not need nuclear weapons. He could simply order his people to jump up and down at the same time and it would cause earthquakes around the world and tsunamis as high as the Statue of Liberty.
I asked what America could do to save the Free World.
“Nuke them, son. We got to nuke them before it is too late.”