Sheng si jing tan wang ming fei (1995)

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Director:

Ewei Liu

Genre:

Action

Plot:

Criminals kidnap a scientist with information about a new energy resource. |

Cast

Changchun Liu

...

Li Hantao

Country:

China

Language:

Mandarin

Color:

Color

Company:

Changchun Film Studio

Extremely bad alteration of the truth due to governmental censorship

The literal translation of the title of this movie is: Life and Death, Shockingly Ruthless Bandits.

The original script was loosely based on the true story of the failed ex-USSR attempt to kidnap Chinese scientists of nuclear research: After the Sino-Soviet ideological split in 1960, most technical cooperations between the two countries came to a complete halt, but there were exceptions, such as joint nuclear physics research, which lasted until 1964. When Chinese scientists were finally allowed to go back to China, ex-KGB had something else in their mind: recruiting these Chinese scientists as spies to spy on Chinese nuclear energy researches, and they would try anything to force the Chinese scientists to do so, including kidnapping. (which also includes the relatives of the Chinese scientists).

Giving the year of this movie was made, China and Russia had became friends again, and such realistic depiction of history would not constructive for the Sino-Russian friendship in the eyes of Chinese government, so the governmental censorship forced the original script to be changed to what we see today, with all bad guys became Chinese and the setting is changed to China also, so that there would not be any potential problems for diplomacy, but such changes totally ruined the truth and the new story is rather not convincing enough because scientists are not highly paid profession in China and they do not have much money and as a matter of fact, in China, robbers, kidnappers and burglars often avoid targeting scientists, teachers and professors because there really is not much to steal.