Media Memory and Cultural Vilification: The Case of Gao Lingwei
In the 2016 mainland Chinese television drama Iron-Blooded Military Soul, Gao Lingwei is not only vilified — he is marked for assassination. A young resistance fighter is coached: “Don’t hesitate, don’t think. The more you hesitate, the more mistakes you’ll make”. A sniper promises to teach his apprentice how to shoot, but only after he assassinates Gao Lingwei. The death of this historical figure becomes a training exercise, a rite of passage, and a patriotic act. It is not a question of whether Gao deserves to die. It is only a matter of execution — clean, justified, and theatrically framed.
In one of the more stylized moments, Gao Lingwei is shown stepping out of a gleaming black luxury car, dressed in a Western business suit, calmly adjusting his necktie. The camera lingers just long enough to confirm the message: here is a man of money, vanity, and betrayal. The imagery speaks louder than dialogue ever could. But the scene is entirely fabricated. There are no surviving photographs of Gao Lingwei in Western suit or necktie, and no archival evidence of him adopting such a persona. In historical records, he appears in Beiyang regalia, adorned with official sashes and decorations not as a Westernized power broker, but as a bureaucratic survivor of a fading republic. In his everyday life, Gao Lingwei always appeared in Chinese robes.
To complete the character assassination, the drama inserts a detail both lurid and lazy: characters speak of Gao Lingwei’s daily routine, including afternoon tea with his “third concubine.” The line is tossed casually, but its work is serious — it casts him as indulgent, immoral, and sexually excessive. There is no evidence such a woman existed. In the memory of my grandfather, there was no “third concubine”, only his fifth auntie [1] , the formal wife of his fifth uncle, Gao Lingwei. No afternoon teas. No foreign affectations. There was discipline, silence, and survival. But the fiction requires indulgence. It must justify the bullet by first writing in the brocade. In this case, the weapon is not only the rifle — it is the teacup.
In the series, Gao is not given dialogue. He is not shown deliberating, compromising, or fearing for his country. He is not a man — he is a symbol. The Japanese value him. The assassins pursue him. The British are pressured to hand over the men who tried to kill him, lest they face censure at the League of Nations. The diplomatic subplot underscores what the visual narrative makes plain: Gao Lingwei’s life is politically and morally expendable.
This kind of portrayal does not emerge from evidence. It emerges from a cultural memory shaped by decades of political shorthand: collaborator equals traitor; silence equals guilt; luxury equals moral decay. Gao Lingwei is executed in the drama not for what he did, but for what he looks like, and for what the viewer is meant to believe he represents.
The assassination, notably, fails. Gao Lingwei is not killed in the drama, but the failure is not presented as a reprieve of justice, only a delay. His survival is not treated with nuance or reconsideration, but as an unfortunate setback for the patriotic cause. In the logic of the script, he remains guilty — still deserving of death, just temporarily spared by plot mechanics. His life, in narrative terms, remains a stain awaiting removal. Such fiction becomes fact through repetition. It teaches judgment by costume and innuendo. And in the case of Gao Lingwei, it delivers a sentence that history itself never officially passed — only a screenwriter did.
Despite efforts to contact the production company responsible for Iron-Blooded Military Soul, no avenue of communication could be established. The original producer no longer maintains a website, public contact information, or active business registry presence. It was founded in 2008 under the oversight of the Zhejiang Provincial Radio and Television Bureau, a direct organ of the Chinese state responsible for ideological enforcement in television. In other words, the dramatization of Gao Lingwei was not created by an independent studio, but by an arm of the propaganda apparatus. The fiction was produced in silence and now disappears into silence. The company that fictionalized Gao Lingwei’s death no longer answers questions — nor, perhaps, was it ever expected to. This quiet retreat is telling: those who distort memory often vanish before they can be questioned.
[1] In Chinese: 五嬸