Changing Ideas of Chinese Nationalism

Article 4:《是争名夺利还是捍卫著作权─《露营之歌》作者署名的反思》大雪山 or 达雪风 (the origins and authorship of this article are unclear, but I will refer to him as Da Xueshan)

In the past couple of posts, I have been discussing the lawsuit filed in 1999 involving former Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army soldiers and a particular song attributed to one of the NAUA’s most beloved commanders, Li Zhaolin. The “Encampment Song” lawsuit case is significant because it points to changing ideas about how national laws should work, not only what sentiments and historical events led to the founding of the nation.

To summarize the fourth article, the author lays out some logical fallacies in the claim that Li Zhaolin was the sole author of “The Encampment Song.” The author’s argument revolves around the idea that the song was credited to Li Zhaolin posthumously (遗作), seemingly a mishandling in the way the song was archived in the 1950s. Unfortunately, I cannot find enough information online to definitively say how the case was resolved, or even if it is still underway.

One of the striking issues that permeate this and the other articles is how the authors utilize the phrase “truth-seeking” (实事求是) to justify their arguments. Da Xueshan, for example, takes a passionate stance on matters of legality and evidence-based truth. There is no room in this editorial for something so illogical as works attributed to Li Zhaolin after the fact and his death. The “truth” of the song’s authorship should be ascertained by a legal body so that similar cases in the future will have a precedent. For the former NAUA soldiers, on the other hand, the “truth” is a matter of legacy and honor. Their fundamental question is: what good is the law if it does not know its roots? Da Xueshan builds his argument about the song’s authorship on the premise that the courts must value objectivity. In other words, what good is patriotism if corruption or injustice rules the court of law?

Here we can see the significance of Zhao Yan’s statement that this case would be the first meaningful intellectual property rights case to “cross into the new millennium.” Underpinning the case of “Encampment’s” authorship is whether Chinese law can and should shape the limits of nationalism and what it deems to be official national history. We should not forget that the 2000s also brought to the fore the issue of intellectual property rights in the field of high-tech, which has had global implications and repercussions, further marking the limits of Chinese nationalism. “The Encampment Song” lawsuit became a harbinger of this turn towards intellectual property rights on a national level. In terms of historical significance, the former NAUA soldiers should take some comfort in knowing that their wartime call to arms has remained a matter of national importance, despite the conclusion that more than one person wrote the song.