The Cairo Declaration dramatises China’s fight against Japan but is condemned for showing Mao at the 1943 meeting with Churchill and Roosevelt

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Chinese bloggers have ridiculed a blockbuster film that attempts to place Mao Zedong at the centre of a second world war summit he never attended.



The Cairo Declaration – a big-budget war movie produced by a company with ties to China’s military – hits cinemas this month as part of Communist party commemorations of the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender.

Its focus is the Cairo conference, a 1943 meeting near the pyramids at which Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and China’s Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek gathered to assess the progress of the war against Japan and plot Asia’s post-war future.



“The Three Great Allies expressed their resolve to bring unrelenting pressure against their brutal enemies by sea, land, and air,” the resulting declaration said.



Chairman Mao, who became the Communist party’s leader in 1935, played no role in the historic dialogue, which saw China recognised as one of the world’s “four great powers” alongside the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom.

Yet that didn’t stop the Cairo Declaration’s producers using Mao as their film’s main poster boy.

Joe Xu (@JoeXu) Trailer for the movie Cairo Declaration, again featuring Mao for some reason https://t.co/vi6r5SZB21 #terribleCGI

Chinese internet users mocked the Great Helmsman’s unexpected Cairo cameo, producing dozens of spoof posters that placed figures including Kim Jong-un, Gollum, Saddam Hussein, and the Minions at the conference. One fake poster features Chinese president Xi Jinping – born 10 years after the meeting. Another carries the image of blind dissident lawyer Chen Guangcheng who fled China in 2012 after escaping from house arrest.



A website has been set-up allowing users to place take credit for the Cairo Declaration by uploading photographs of themselves.



“Let’s go. Let’s attend the Cairo Conference. Does anyone want to join a car pool?” joked one user of Weibo, China’s Twitter.



Even China’s usually obedient state-controlled media has turned on the film.

An opinion piece by the editor of the party-controlled Global Times attacked the “inappropriate” use of Mao’s picture to promote a film about an event he had not attended. “Misunderstanding is inevitable,” it said.

Sima Pingbang, an arts critic, told the newspaper’s English language edition: “By featuring Mao, who was not present at the meeting, but excluding Chiang, the poster shows no respect for history nor to Mao.



Some people might use the film “to defame chairman Mao,” Sima warned.



Adam Cathcart, a University of Leeds historian, said the Communist party had long tried to “insert itself at the main junctures of Chinese history”.

“What is different now, in 2015, is that Xi Jinping and his mighty bureaucracy seem absolutely determined to depict the People’s Republic of China as ‘present at the creation’ of the postwar global order, a global order which they interpret as being constructed around the constraining of Japanese power, cognisance of Japanese brutality, and punitive toward Japan.”

As part of that push, Xi will promote a huge military parade in Beijing on 3 September, sending tanks, missile launchers and thousands of troops through Tiananmen Square.

Reluctant to appear supportive of Xi’s campaign to vilify the Japanese, most western leaders, including Barack Obama and David Cameron, have declined invitations. Vladimir Putin is expected to attend.

Cathcart said the producers of Cairo Declaration appeared to have given history a vigorous massage rather than completely rewriting it.

“I don’t believe the producers have gone so far as to send Mao to Cairo in the film, but placing him at the vanguard of establishing the global order in 1943 seems to be stretching things,” he said.

“At this point, when he was in his cave in Yan’an, Mao had yet to meet a single representative of the American government, and the Dalai Lama, who was not even 10 years old, got more correspondence from the US president.

“While Mao had written some important anti-Japanese treatises in 1937 and 1938, by the time the Cairo Declaration came around, he was primarily concerned with expanding his inland base area against Nationalist government resistance and calculating his best chances to overtake Chiang Kai-shek after the Japanese surrendered.”

“Mao was extremely well informed about how the wider war in Europe, in China, and the Pacific was going,” Cathcart added. “But to depict him as the mental crucible of China’s second world war international policy is overreaching.”

A spokesperson for the Cairo Declaration told the Global Times its Mao poster was designed to “pay tribute” to the Communist party’s contribution to the war.



Posters featuring Chiang Kai-shek – whose troops did the bulk of the fighting against the Japanese and who was actually present at the Cairo Conference – and others “will be released soon”, they added.

Additional reporting by Luna Lin