Is ‘Dear You’ China’s perfect propaganda film?

The pinnacle of United Front work — reaching the softest spot in human hearts and winning minds through emotion.

Over the weekend, I went to see Dear You (《给阿嬷的情书》), currently the most popular film in China, boasting a box office gross of 1.69 billion RMB (US$250 million). In a brief moment, just as my mind was deeply stirred by the plot, a chilling jolt brought me back to reality: was this United Front work?

A beautiful lie

Stripping away the emotion of it all, this is a highly successful piece of United Front work — even if the director never intended it to be. For a change, the film’s United Front targets are not the Taiwanese but the global Chinese diaspora, in particular the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. There are no propaganda slogans, nor are there any grand narratives. There is only qingyi (情义), a profound sense of affection and duty, running through the entire film, threading together a half-century-long documentary of devotion written by one woman to another.

The actors in the drama speak entirely in the Chaoshan dialect, and they are reportedly all amateurs. Neither standard Teochew nor Hokkien, the Chaoshan dialect is strange to my ears, but fully comprehensible with the aid of subtitles.

The movie is set in the 1940s. A young Chaoshan man named Zheng Musheng crosses the seas to Nanyang to escape being conscripted by the Kuomintang amid the chaos of war, leaving his wife, Ye Shurou, behind in their hometown to raise three children on her own. Arriving first in Malaya, Musheng later moves on to Siam, present-day Thailand. In Siam, he meets a Chinese woman named Xie Nanzhi. Supporting each other, the two forge a genuine and deeply supportive bond of qingyi.

While working on a ship, Musheng drowns after a struggle with bandits. Nanzhi helps arrange his funeral and subsequently continues to send qiaopi (侨批), overseas remittances and correspondence, to Shurou, whom she has never met, in Musheng’s name. She never falls short on the monetary remittances and even sends items like salted pork and a bicycle, sustaining and protecting another family separated by tens of thousands of miles across oceans and rivers for 18 years with a beautiful lie.

In their twilight years, Nanzhi and Shurou finally meet face-to-face in Thailand. By this time, Nanzhi is suffering from dementia. In a moment of haze, she blurts out, “Are you Sister Shurou? Was the salted pork I sent you delicious?” — a mundane question between two elderly women about food conveying the lifelong weight of emotional bond between them.

Imperceptible influence

After the curtains fell, the audience members sitting behind me, mainland Chinese from the north speaking Mandarin, were discussing qiaopi. It seemed that before walking into the cinema, they had never known what it was. They certainly do not have relatives in Southeast Asia the way southern Chinese do. Qiaopi refers to the mail sent back to China by overseas Chinese during the 19th and 20th centuries, combining family letters with remittance vouchers; the marks of nostalgia from that turbulent era.

As a born-and-bred Chinese Singaporean, I could not help but wonder: when this film screens in Southeast Asian countries, how deeply will these poignant stories of joys and sorrows move the local Chinese communities, especially the older generation who lived through the era of qiaopi, if they are still around and able to visit the cinemas? They might have been mere children back then, but looking back at history now with greying hair, the joys and griefs of ordinary folks recorded in qiaopi during that momentous era — though long faded — remain forever etched in their life’s silhouette. 

What about the reactions of younger generations of Southeast Asian Chinese? Observing other people’s stories as an outsider, will they also feel a resonance, thinking, “That was my great-grandparents’ story”? 

Qiaopi had already passed into history by the time I was born, but I still remember hearing my elders mention when I was young that they needed to send things back to Tangshan (唐山), a colloquial term for China.

In an era where artificial intelligence is all it takes to churn out short videos, Dear You is a fine example of how a restrained and warm piece of humanistic cinema still requires human hands.

To say the film possesses a certain United Front effect is because it truly works in a subtle, imperceptible way, much like a gentle spring rain that nurtures things silently. Unlike clumsy, overt expressions that easily provoke vigilance, almost as if the words “United Front” were stamped across the forehead, this film reaches the softest spot of the human heart through its rustic visual language and sincere narrative. It effortlessly draws audiences closer to Tangshan and creates a trans-regional emotional resonance among global Chinese.

It compellingly forces us to reflect on the connection to China for ethnic Chinese who hold non-Chinese citizenship and were neither born nor raised there. For those who do not comprehend how Chinese society operates, or who may not even be fluent in the language, yet find themselves drawn to China’s rise, what exactly is their relationship with the China of their imagination? 

As China’s national power grows and its United Front initiatives continue to broaden, will this connection grow stronger? If so, what challenges will this pose for ethnic Chinese outside the Greater China region, and what will it mean for the governance of the nations to which they belong? 

While the era of qiaopi has faded, we now have modern applications like RedNote, TikTok, WeChat and Taobao. In far more convenient ways, they are weaving the world into a unified information network built by China.

Where history diverges

Setting the film’s migration destination in Thailand makes “Sino-Thai friendship” a natural selling point. Extending this logic further, any Southeast Asian country with an ethnic Chinese population represents a potential market. A quick online search of Chinese media reports confirms that the film’s distributors have targeted the Southeast Asian market as a key priority, “particularly regions with significant Chaoshan diaspora communities, such as Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore”. 

Unsurprisingly, reports also reveal that United Front departments and federation of returned overseas Chinese across various mainland localities, including Shantou, Fuzhou and Ma’anshan, have designated the film a key cultural project, “organising collective screenings for United Front members, returned overseas Chinese and their families, and overseas Chinese”.

I recall a conversation with a Taiwanese media friend about our ancestral roots. As we are both of Fujian descent, she remarked without hesitation, “The ships our ancestors boarded determined the fate of their descendants”. Her forebears’ ship went to Taiwan; mine sailed to Singapore.

It was a highly evocative sentence, laced with a touch of fatalism and an unspoken sense of historical divergence. The ties across the Taiwan Strait are intricate and deeply entangled; one can only hope that cross-strait issues will eventually be resolved through peaceful means.

Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has stood as a multiracial nation in Southeast Asia. Although ethnic Chinese form the majority, it is not a Chinese nation. The national language is Malay, as is the national anthem. After generations of putting down roots, our national identity and sense of belonging have long been crystal clear. On a personal level, the hierarchy of my identity is unmistakable: a Singaporean first, then, a Chinese Singaporean with ancestral roots in Dongshan, Fujian. My connection to China is one of ancestral heritage instead of patriotic allegiance.

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “《给阿嬷的情书》的统战启示”.

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