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Sorry Disney, Mulan Was A Hun For Of The Chinese
...And NOT A Feminist

By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive to Rense
8-1-19


Desperate tribal people of the real Mulan who were avowed enemies of Han Chinese vs. The historical revisionist politically correct feminist fake

The surly girly fashion scowl of the lead actress in the new "Mulan" might play well in China's coastal cities, where the Shanghai Media Group is partnered with Disney, but the lead character bears no resemblance to actual frontier women, including yak tenders that I've worked alongside on the Tibetan Plateau and female herders in Altai mountains and Inner Mongolia. Collegiate athletes would have difficulty keeping pace with those hardy women's long strides uphill along the summer migration trails; and try rustling one of their lambs to earn a blade between the ribs. Wrinkled and sun-burned by a life outdoors, the ladies of the high plains are certainly not beauties by contemporary standards based on cosmetic surgery and skin whitener, but their beaming smiles and sparkling eyes are a welcome sign of sincerity, especially after dealing with cynical stares from the living dead of our flimflam urban society.

The historically false depiction of the female warrior Hua Mulan in the new movie and earlier animation version is based on a long-ago adulterated ballad during the Sinification process (gradual adoption of a Han Chinese national identity) that began in the embattled era of the Northern and Southern empires. The Mulan myth is a Han Chinese attempt to hijack the battlefield heroism of the Xiongnu cavalry women with the Five Barbarian Alliance that dominated the Wei northern dynasty in its centuries of struggle against the ethnic Han-dominant southern empires (the latter known as the Six Dynasties).

Memories of these valiant women warriors, which were culturally appropriated to create a fictitious ethnic Chinese "Mulan", belonged to a small band of surviving Xiongnu who evaded expulsion under the Han Dynasty and remained avowed enemies of civilization. The Xiongnu were neither ethnically nor culturally Chinese but were instead the ancestors of the exiled Huns led by Attila who devastated the Roman Empire, casting Europe into the Dark Age. Unlike today's morally pathetic "migrants", they did not journey to work for new masters but arrived to utterly annihilate all oppressors. While the Xianbei (early Mongols) who led the confederation adopted Chinese laws and manners, the Xiongnu made zero concessions to everything they suspected of being a well-laid trap.

For those who feel secure behind those thick walls of the Rule of Law, the Xiongnu and their offspring, the Huns, may sound like unrepentant savages more akin to a salivating wolf pack than rational humans. Yet in the wild one should adapt to breathing in the pure cold air of freedom and learn to survive without comfort, cleanliness or coddling. The real Mulan was one from their lair and certainly not of our degenerate over-domesticated breed of lapdogs. To comprehend their hatred of civilization along with its betrayals and deceptions, one must learn to dance with wolves.

Taming the Beast

The voluntary process among the barbarian nobility of adopting Chinese customs and values, while casting off the rude barbaric practices of one's own nomadic forebears, began with the Xianbei (early Mongol) rulers of the Five Barbarian Alliance. In their captured capital of Luoyang and earlier in what is now Datong, the ruling Tuoba clan by adopted the court customs of the earlier Han Dynasty, the Chinese language, script and names, silken robes, accepted the tenets Taoism or Buddhism, and wed Chinese wives to better manage the imperial bureaucracy. This voluntary assimilation by the nobility, however, met with fierce resistance from tribal die-hards, and the Wei empire was therefore rife with warlord rivalry, rebellion, assassination and religious conflict.

The Xiongnu remained the pastoral group most resistant to Chinese customs, especially the Confucian-mandated domestic household role of women. Their female fighters did not have to disguise themselves as men to join the battle. Indeed the Book of Wei mentions two outstanding horsewomen who were skilled riders and supreme killers. Women became warriors not by choice but due to tribal necessity, to fill the ranks. Following the high-casualty battles with the earlier Han dynasty and then incessant conflict with neighboring tribes, the outnumbered Xiongnu were continually depleted of manpower, and therefore the stronger young women picked up bows and spears to ride off to battle with their brothers and uncles.

For the herder nomads, bloodshed was as natural as milking mares to make the fermented beverage kumis. In the shamanic belief-systems of five tribal groups, human sacrifice was conducted to balance the life-cycle. For the rice-growing Han Chinese, such barbaric customs were unthinkable and therefore unmentionable, largely omitted from official records. Thus the memory of the armed female foes were either neglected or grossly modified over time into the harmless Mulan myth (much like the Amazons in Greek mythology).

Disneyfication of mythology

How did this minor chapter of China's nation-building history enter the Disney collection? The American understanding of a proto-feminist woman warrior originated with Maxine Hong Kingston's novelized autobiography, "The Woman Warrior" (1975). This early venture into Asian American feminism is rife with inflated pride arising from self-hatred and an inferiority complex that infects much of ethnic minority and feminist literature, unfortunately, when truthful accounts however mundane would have been better on grounds of honesty.

The female solider of the Kingston title was larged modeled after the propaganda film "Mulan" of the late 1930s. The Chinese Nationalist (Kuomingtang) army employed the old story for a recruitment film to attract volunteers for a women's auxiliary corps of hospital nurses and service workers. At the time of its release in Chinese movie theaters, the Nationalist Army was trained and commanded by Nazi German advisers personally dispatched by the new German Chancellor. Adolf Hitler eagerly provided military aid to the "Franco of Asia", Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who also received enthusiastic support from the U.S. State Department. Although the German documents are yet to surface, perhaps the Wehrmacht generals saw the potential morale-boosting value of a yellow-skinned Valkyrie Korps combating the female soldiers dressed in the pale blue uniforms of Mao's Red Army.

Much earlier, during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the character Mulan had been thoroughly Sinified in paintings depicting a pretty Chinese girl in silken robes, the model daughter who put the family's honor first and foremost. In today's world that would be like transforming Hilda the she-wolf of the SS into Ditzy, the Jewish American princess.

The high chinoiserie was, of course, an attempt to cover over the haunting memory of the fearsome female riders dressed in animal skins and chain mail circling the massed formations of heavily armored Han Chinese troopers, unloosing arrows and lancing the wounded without pity or remorse, and howling to avenge ancestors. That was not merely a battle between two cultures, but a life-and-death struggle between two conflicted modes of human survival, the herders versus the farmers, much like what transpired in the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the American West and that later continued in the range wars.

The outcome, then and since, was predictable, that the methodical organization of urban civilization would reduce the free-roving peoples of the grasslands to bondage or extinction. The term "xiongnu" derived from a derogatory expression in the Han Dynasty: "disobedient slaves". During that imperial era, which opened the Silk Road to Byzantium (in the age of the Caesars), thousands of Xiongnu children were taken captive for domestic service in the capital Changan. Many became fluent and literate in the Chinese language, and served in the imperial court. Some even joined the Han army in its drive to eliminate the Xiongu and their supreme commander, the Chanyu, who earned a fortune as toll-takers along the vital trading route.

Led by the charismatic young general Huo Qubing, the Han imperial troopers, mounted on powerful horses from Samarkand and armed with crossbows fitted with mechanical brass triggers, handily defeated the main corps of the Xiongnu and then pursued them far into Central Asia. One branch of the confederation destroyed the Buddhist center of Gandhara in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, while the main body of refugees plodded westward, with the aim of sacking the Roman Empire.

Left behind, a small band of Xiongnu in the rich grasslands of what is now northern Shanxi Province, evaded the Han campaign and survived to join the Five Barbarian Alliance, a confederation that included: the ruling Xianbei (Mongols); Qiang (ancestors of the Tibetans, the same who were affected by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake); the Di, related to the Tangut Turkic conquerors of Dunhuang; and the Jie, predominantly Manicheans (with a branch of early Christianity) who had Indo-Aryan (Caucasoid) features. Due to modern China's ethnic minority policy, many of the descendants of these tribal groups continue to thrive in their autonomous districts.

Women's power went beyond fighting

The complexity of tribal politics, religious warfare between Buddhist factions and their shamanic foes, palace intrigues cast a pall of obscurity over the Northern-Southern epoch, despite the intellectual brilliance that shines through to this day from ikey figures such as Zen-Chan sect founder Bodhidharma and the miracle worker Baozhi. Indeed, the southern realm of Liang, under Xiao Yang (Liang Wudi) is Asia's closest analogy to King Arthur's Camelot, a lonely beacon of civilized values in the twilight as teh Dark Age descended upon the entire continent.

The ancient Chinese record discloses the Wei-Liang era produced the most influential Han Chinese noblewomen on both sides of the conflict. These included Lady Ding Ling, the Buddhism-sponsoring wife of Emperor Liang Wudi in the Han-dominated south, and in Northern Wei the politically astute Empress Feng, who patronized the construction of the Datong grotto complex, and her successor Empress Hu, who reopened the Silk Road and attempted a peaceful reconciliation with the south. The latter's assassination by drowning in the Yellow River during a Xianbei warriors' rebellion showed the potentially fatal consequences for Han Chinese noblewomen trying to "tame" the barbaric tribal chiefs though sinification.

Despite the questionable posthumous accusations of immorality hrled against Empress Hu, these female leaders were great civic-minded heroines who, however, did not ride around the plains spearing enemies but instead made their best efforts to end hundreds of years of brutal conflict to reunite their war-weary country. In the light of this history, Hong Kingston's text has inspired cartoons and a movie that gives zero attention to the outstanding contributions of actual Chinese women to the cause of peace and inter-ethnic cooperation in the process of nation-building.

Disney's de-sexualized innuendos

The Disney travesty of the Chinese history is an exploitative attempt to desexualize Asians, by promoting masculinized feminism and also by suggesting the bisexuality of Mulan's commander, who in the cartoon version who is shown to be irresistibly attracted to his feminized young "male" recruit, Mulan in armor. This observation is not puritanical: Even under strict Confucian morality, East Asian societies have made allowances for deviance from family-centered norms, which is accepted but not assertively or put on parade. Discretion being the better part of valor is by now forgotten among the braggart sexual identity crowd.

There was undoubtedly male homosexuality and lesbianism during the Wei-Liang era, as expressed in the romantic poetry of the time compiled by Emperor Liang Wudi's literati son Xiao Ming, who was stripped of his title as crown prince due to his Oscar Wildish sexual scandals along his treasonous role in palace intrigues. His father, to the contrary, was a womanizer until the remorseful loss of his first wife, when he turned to Buddhism for solace and remained loyal to the devout Lady Ding.

Overall, however, in a Dark Age of incessant warfare and devastation, the vast majority of people were mucn too preoccupied by the struggle for survival to make a fuss about their choice of sexual amusement. Indeed, fertile couples had to be coaxed and pressured into procreation to prevent a population collapse. The expansion of Buddhism indicated that abstinence from sex was increasingly prevalent in the vegetarian south, where grazing land was used to raise war horses and wagon oxen rather than for meat. Buddhist nuns and monks provided the labor for healing the wounded, burying the dead and sanitizing areas to prevent pandemic outbreaks similar to the plagues that swept through Constantinople. Our modern narcissistic fascination with sexual identity was not an issue for people living on the edge of survival when feeding the children was barely achievable.

The critique here is not about sexual preference rather it is focused on historical and cultural accuracy and misappropriation of true-life narratives. How would Americans respond if the legacy of Annie Oakley or Calamity Jane were warped, say, in a Jackie Chan film, portraying these heroines as transvestites without providing a stitch of medical or forensic proof, thereby implying Jane's lover Wild Bill Hickok was queer? Maybe indeed the legendary gunfighter was gay, like many a lonely cowboy, but proof's required before consigning him to Brokeback Mountain. Disney has long ago sold out to LGBT alphabet soup liberal politics, which is psychologically inappropriate to kids yet to reach puberty.

So, given the Hollywood standards for accuracy, why not produce a movie about Princess Pocahontas being the brave woman warrior who shot Captain John Smith in the gut after he mistook her for a boyish catamite and then led the triumphant attack to burn down the Jamestown colonialist garrison? Hey, that could inspire the script for Quentin Tarantino's next last great movie, being nearly as untruthful as the current one.

Demise of the Xiongnu

As Wei entered an internal crisis due to the Rouran Khan's rising threat to the Silk Road, the Xiongnu were dispatched against that powerful band of Mongol renegades, a mission that led to devastating losses for the real-world Mulans. Instead of a fanciful fiction for court ladies, the song of Mulan should have been a folk tale of loss for a doomed people fighting along a hostile and barren borderland.

Were Hun women really as handsome as the movie Mulan's image suggests? Roman accounts of Hunnish women described frightening hags aboard war chariots uttering bone-chilling spells and curses against their enemies prior to bloody battles, meaning those shamanic sorceresses were way scarier than the wicked witch of the East. Their psychological warfare was highly effective, judging from the battlefield outcomes. (Today's Hungarians are genetically intermixed with the Magyar tribe, so their much-acclaimed beauties shed no light on this tantalizing question.)

If feminine beauty is defined, as it stands now, on hairless whitish skin tones, almond eyes, pouty lips, then the Mulans of the Xiongnu were by contrast urgly creatures scarred by the harshest of living conditions, dressed in stinking unwashed leather, and without any of the comforts of servitude, and therefore probably more beautiful in their hearts than our corrupt indolent society can ever imagine.