China's most expensive film, a bloody blockbuster about the Japanese army's massacre of civilians in Nanjing, will be released in cinemas across the country on Friday as Beijing steps up its efforts to project its "soft power" across the world.
The Flowers of War, a £60m epic, is China's official entry to the best foreign language film section of the Academy Awards.
The film is partially funded by the state, following increased government investment in the media and culture industries.
But official hopes that it might represent a resurgent Chinese film industry have been dented by early reviews that castigate its poor plot, wooden acting and propagandist message.
The film stars Christian Bale as an American mortician who tries to save Chinese women and children from rape and murder during the rampage by troops who invaded the city of Nanjing on 13 December 1937.
Released just days after the anniversary of the killings, the film – directed by Zhang Yimou – looks set to stir up nationalist passions, both over the country's historical grievances and its modern cultural ambitions.
There is no more sensitive subject in modern Chinese history than the "Rape of Nanking" – as the massacre become known in the west.
Historians estimate that between 150,000 and 300,000 civilians were slaughtered by Japanese soldiers.
Dramatisations of the killings have been a staple of Chinese films since the black-and-white propaganda epics of the Mao era. But the new big budget production adds racier dialogue, image makeovers and hi-tech gore.
Zhang, the director of Raise the Red Lantern, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, is mainland China's best known director. But he has yet to win an Oscar and his recent works have not received the glowing critical reception garnered by his earlier films.
"People will always go to see a film by Zhang Yimou, but we no longer have high expectations," said film critic Taotao.
Flowers of War – adapted from a novel by Geling Yan – seems unlikely to reverse that trend. Overseas reviewers have panned the film for what they see as a crude mix of commercial vulgarity and political propaganda.
"It's something you'd think only the crassest of Hollywood producers would come up with – injecting sex appeal into an event as ghastly at the Nanjing massacre," writes Todd McCarthy in the Hollywood Reporter. Chinese critics say the plot is weak and Bale's performance unconvincing.
Bale has dismissed suggestions that the film is anti-Japanese propaganda. "It's far more of a movie about human beings and the nature of human beings' responses to crisis and how that can reduce people to the most animalistic behaviour and also raise them up to the most honourable behaviour," he said after the movie premiere this week.
Many Chinese filmgoers believe Zhang — who directed the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics – has become too close to both the communist authorities and commercial interests.
But this is part of a wider trend. With hefty government support and more foreign collaboration, China's film industry has expanded rapidly in recent years to become the third biggest in the world, after Hollywood and Bollywood, in terms of films produced and box office revenues.
Xiang Yong, deputy director of the institute for cultural industries at Peking University, said the government was financing film for political as well as commercial reasons.
"It is sometimes said that Hollywood is the real foreign ministry of United States, which shows how important the movie industry can be to a country," he said.
"China currently has very few high quality films that can make it overseas. So from a cultural perspective, the promotion of the movie industry is an important means of strengthening the 'soft power' of our country."
Qiang Zhongyuan, a director at the Beijing Forbidden City Film Company, noted earlier this year that government policies have helped moviemakers to more than double the budgets they had two years ago.
"Now we can go for big productions of 30 or 40 million yuan [£3m-£4m]. Some even as much as 100m yuan," he said.
"These are the benefits we get from the government's policies, which are aimed at strengthening cultural industries and 'soft power'."
The Bank of China is among those funding The Flowers of War, which will be shown this week on more than 8,000 screens in the country. It will then be released in the US and Europe.
It is unclear whether it will be shown in Japan, where nationalist groups have mounted protests in the past about films that show their country in a bad light.
Tokyo-based film critic Mark Schilling said the lack of enthusiasm was not entirely due to political sensitivities.
"Given all the anti-Japanese films coming from China over the years, one more won't make a big difference," he said.
"But there are certain risks that any distributor here would have to run, from rightwing protests to the usual one of financial loss.
"The minimum guarantee the sales company is demanding may be too high relative to actual Japanese audience interest."
Rightwing academics – including Hiromichi Moteki, secretary general of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact – have likened Japan's reluctance to promote its alternative view of events including the Nanjing massacre as "historical masochism" in which the widely accepted view of Japan as the aggressor goes unchallenged.
After years of accepting the "fabrications of the left", Japan should be less hesitant to promote alternative interpretations of 20th century conflicts, Moteki has said.
With the Chinese film industry likely to benefit from more government largesse as China's economy and influence grows, critics say it would not be surprising if directors turned again to the subject of Nanjing.
"There are already more than 10 films about the Nanjing massacre," film critic Raymond Zhou said. "Chinese directors making films about this subject are the same as Jewish directors making films about the Holocaust. It will never stop."
Additional research by Cecily Huang
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