In essence, the video is saying, if we achieve the Four Comprehensives, then the party will have succeeded in delivering what people need. One gets the impression of a committee asking itself, “Do people understand the relationship between these four goals and an achievable, deliverable end state?” Worried that people don’t, the committee comes up with the idea of a video that’ll make the relationship explicit. Online, the video has been criticized as offensively dumb. The Four Comprehensives lead directly to Xi’s master slogan of the Chinese Dream - which is, like most national dreams (the American Dream included), a protean, flexible concept empty of specific content.
The main point emerges upfront, when the girl asks, “Does it have something to do with the Chinese Dream?” The answer is a resounding yes. Sung in Mandarin by the Chinese-American YouTuber and The Voice contestant Katherine Ho, it swells anthemically beneath visuals of protagonist Rachel Chu coming to recognize that she’s strong enough to move forward.This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. As promised, Chu triumphantly features it, unmistakably Sinified, as the film’s final song, during its protagonist’s climactic moment of self-realization. Within an hour, the band emailed him back, granting him permission. It was an incredible image of attraction and aspiration that it made me rethink my own self image.” Allowing him to use the song in the movie, Chu wrote, would give a “a whole generation of Asian-Americans, and others, the same sense of pride I got when I heard your song.” “The color of the stars, her skin, the love. “For the first time in my life, it described the color in the most beautiful, magical ways,” Chu wrote. The rejection prompted Chu to write the band a direct letter, explaining his love for the song, and “complicated relationship” with its title. Coldplay rejected the request to use “Yellow” as soon as it was submitted. The band had been taken to task for cultural appropriation following the lurid video for 2012’s “Princess of China,” which put Rihanna in exotic orientalist drag, and again in 2016’s “Hymn for the Weekend,” which was shot in India during the festival of Holi, and featured Beyonce in traditional Indian garb. But getting Coldplay on board was harder. “All credit to them, I said, ‘Guys trust me on this one’ and they gave in,” laughs Chu. “They were like, ‘Whoa, we can’t do that, what do you think people will say?’ And I told them, ‘Well, a white director couldn’t do it.'” Some at the studio were concerned that the song would evoke these stereotypes, Chu says. For Asians, it’s frequently used as a slur, a reference to the color of Asian skin, used in ominous phrases like “yellow peril.” Chu himself says he remembers being called yellow in a “derogatory way throughout high school.” The name itself was enough to cause head-shaking at Warner Bros, when connected with the first US studio film with an all-Asian cast in 25 years. Though the song is not about race, the term “yellow” is fraught with negative associations: It’s identified with cowardice, with illness, with fake news. The centerpiece of Chu’s remix playlist is a Chinese version of a song by the British band Coldplay, its first real breakout, titled “Yellow” (video).
It felt to me like a critical part of what we were trying to do.” “That crazy blend of identities and cultures that makes up who we are. “I wanted to take hit American songs and make them Chinese, to give audiences a sense of how we feel as Asian Americans,” Chu tells Quartz.