Inspirational Works About China
The idea of Steel Dragon story is to merge the mythical images of China, with the spectacular and terrifying new landscapes that are being realised in modern China.
The work of the photographer Edward Burtynsky brilliantly captures industrial modern China. His pictures of steel production and of workers inside massive factories are outstanding, and I’d like to capture a similar aesthetic for the relevant scenes in Steel Dragon.
For mythical China, some references to the recent martial arts films like Crouching Tiger would be fun. There are plenty of opportunities for a more comical and satirical look at Western images of China. Tintin in particular comes to my mind (I’ve been thinking about developing the story as a graphic novel/web animation and reinterpreting Tintin critically would be really interesting in this context).
There are lots of good novels exploring aspects of China. The author J G Ballard grew up in colonial Shanghai and spent several years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. These experiences inspired his novel Empire of the Sun (made into an entertaining film that doesn’t capture the deeper themes of the book). While the time period is not directly relevant to my story, the haunting sci-fi like scenes of early modernity Ballard creates still seem to have an echo in China today.
The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester recounts his voyage up the Yangtze River, with lots of good historical anecdotes and discussion along the way, and is well worth a read. Also I must include the rightly celebrated Wild Swans by Jung Chang, an incredible account of life growing up in communist China.