Thoughts on Jia Zhangke’s 24 City 對賈樟柯新電影《24城記》之隨想

Normally I prefer to write a straight up review, but in light of an unusual experience in watching film, I thought I’d make this a meta-review of sorts:

I went to watch this film at Zhongshan park in Shanghai last Tuesday. When the lights dimmed, a “documentary” about Tibet came on. As you know, this is the sensitive year for anniversaries in China, and is, in particular, the 50th anniversary of the uprising in Tibet that led to the exile of the Dalai Lama.The documentary was called, quite pointedly, “China’s Tibet, Past and Future”. If you’ve followed this issue at all, none of the information presented in this film are surprising:

*Tibet has always been part of China and the Tibetan rulers have acknowledged Chinese suzerainty since ancient times. Here are pictures and images of various historical documents that prove this point.
*WHy bother decrying the vetting of Tibetan religious leaders by China’s central government? Emperors used to do this, including with the latest Dalai Lama, so what’s the big deal if the CCP inherits this role.
*Tibet was a despotic, feudal system before the Chinese liberated it. It was a cruel theocracy of vast socio-economic inequality. The lamas and their families–the upper strata of the ancien regime–owned everything, including virtually all the arable land and other resources of production. Regular people had next to nothing.
*China liberated Tibet and gave it a good dose of progressive socialist ideology–and things improved greatly.
*Tibetan heritage is fluorishng and the standard of living has steadily improved.

It was clearly and unambiguously agitprop, but 21st. century China style, wrapping the historical narrative of Tibet up in and interweaving it with that of modern China as a whole, including the successful Beijing Olympics and the upcoming World Expo. At fifteen minutes, it was long and tendentious, and made me a bit impatient, since even after it finished, there was yet another long preview (of a regular movie), so that the film we came to watch didn’t start until a good twenty or twenty five minutes after the time stated on the ticket.

*24 City (24城記）*

Jia Zhangke has said, over the years, that he wants to alternate making docs and fiction films, and in this case he has melded the two.There are real people mixed with actors doing recreations–Joan Chen, Lv Liping, Zhao Tao, among others–but while these actors put on some decent performances these interviewees, the film doesn’t end up being more than a series of vignettes. I doubt that Jia intended to put together some systematic history of the place, but there is an unfinished, work-in-progress feel to this movie that tends to work towards its detriment. However, many of the interviews with the real people are better, because you know they are real–so here, again,is a meta-level question–how does the fact that you are watching Joan Chen change your perception of what’s being shown? It’s obvious that no matter how good Chen’s acting chops are, what she is doing is a performance. Most of the time, of course, we accept this–because that’s what makes fictional films possible in the first place–however, in this case, while Chen and the others are fine, they are still a bit actorly–and you wouldn’t really notice that fact unless you had all these more “real” performances to compare them with.

Jia is probably too intelligent not to notice this himself, but it still took me aback when he confronted this head on during the Joan Chen segment, where she says in her youth, at the prime of her beauty, her coworkers at the factory compared her to the actress Joan Chen. A little pomo joke? Maybe, but it made me a bit skittish. I suppose I still relish the suspension of disbelief,and don’t like the feeling of being taken for a ride, even if the ride, for the most part, is an enjoyable one.

That said, there are some moving moments, both from the actors and the real interviewees–enough to remind you that Jia Zhangke is one of the only Chinese filmmakers out there that can convey the gravity of China’s changing. That pathos, that uniquely Chinese pathos that glossier magazines and Western media don’t–or rather, *can’t* pick up on–are captured by Jia’s lens. One can almost forgive the lack of polish for that very reason–Jia, more than other filmmakers is continually creating audiovisual artifacts for us, the rest of the world, Chinese and non-Chinese alike–that will, I believe, stand the test of time,not only for their aesthetic excellence but because they are excellent chronicles of China. They are chronicles of physical reality, of its metamorphosis–but more than that,they are chronicles of the spirit, of what Chinese people call *jingshen*, which can mean anything mental, intellectual, spiritual–and in Jia’s case, it’s the emotional undertow, the things that are not said, that are glossed over and ignored by ideological or mainstream rhetorics that finally, as it were, get their say.

It is this kind of pathos that you don’t normally see among the audiovisual artifacts being produced today: and that’s what makes the contrast with the Tibetan propaganda film so striking. Jia was once an unofficial or underground filmmaker–and he no longer is, and he is, as well as know, no longer a skint and scrappy indie guy. He makes money. He’s got connections. But there’s still something very real, and very heartfelt at the core, and in a world of cinematic
phoniness, there’s something to be said for that stick to your guns type mentality.

To bring it back to Tibet: it is a strange juxtaposition, watching these two films together–we’re so used to seeing just previews before the movie that to see this stylish bit of agitprop is a bit startling: it hearkens back to newsreels of old, a time when the news was delivered on big screens, or when the political just had to intrude everywhere
because the world was in the throes of war or what have you. I feel obliged to mention that when we went, on Tuesday afternoon, even with the half off discount the theater was nearly empty.I highly doubt that Jia is going to make much money off this film, at least on the domestic market. Likewise, watching propaganda in the afternoon with a handful of other people didn’t quite jibe with I am sure that they play the Tibet film before the other, popular movies, so that before you settle down to watching “Transporter 3” you get a good dose of “historical” education about the Tibet issue. Just in case things get hairy and out of control in Tibetan areas this March, or throughout the rest of this sensitive year.

China changes, or China never changes. Same ideological posture, except now in IMAX. However, Jia’s world, everything changes–and the only thing that lasts, the only thing that binds us are memories.Children are lost to their parents. Migrations, emotional rows, generation gaps all tear families asunder. The ligature of memory is strained as people get older–it seems strong when they are recalling it in front of us–but of course, we know that simply recalling something and saying it verbally doesn’t really do justice to the “strength” or “saturation” of that memory among the many memories that are stored in your brain or the salient memories constitutive of the sense of self and identity. Therefore, you get the uneasy sense that you are watching something that was unearthed quite by accident, and could very well have been lost. Maybe these “little people”, these “laobaixing” don’t mean much in the large scale of things: you read media articles with Chinese government planners, bureaucrats and energy scientists that are talking about the year 2100 like it’s tomorrow. Just about all of us who are alive now will be dead by that time, and our secrets and wounds, the maybes and could have beens–both individual and collective–will be just as gone. I’ve always been afraid that the official Chinese meta-narrative would swamp and subsume everything else–which is why it’s that much more incumbent on artists, in whatever medium, to keep recording the micro-sadnesses, vicissitudes, twists and turns, warp and woof of the individual life and consciousness. Lest it be completely be forgotten by History.

China sends “stability” teams to regional areas ahead of sensitive anniversaries

Just got this courtesy of a fanfou feed: the Chinese government is sending “stability” teams to local governments to help maintain social stability. Of course, as this fanfou person pointed out, this year marks several sensitive anniversaries: uprising in Lhasa, 20th anniversary of June 4th, etc. The news reports even mention how impt this year is, in particular: 今年维护国家安全和社会稳定工作面临的任务繁重而艰巨.

What is going to be said about the life and death of Hua Guofeng?

Hua died on August 20, and as you can expect w/ someone of his particular stature and role in history, obituaries are going to be terse at best:
On Baidu news, the Olympics coverage dominated most of the top of the web page, and you had to scroll down slightly to get to a few sparse links, as you can see from the image below:

百度新闻搜索——全球最大的中文新闻平台 via kwout

Not that many articles went in depth into who Hua was or what he did, and none of them really were obituaries except perhaps this one. Most of them were, like this one, made note of his passing and threw a timeline of his career in there, which is nice as a reference though totally useless in terms of explaining to the uninitiated what this guy was all about.

THe news of the Communist Party of China website had the following article:

人物春秋：粉碎“四人帮”后的华国锋–中国共产党新闻–中国共产党新闻网 via kwout

This article talks about Hua’s career, mostly with regards to his role in the “smashing of the Gang of Four,” duly noted as a positive political accomplishment, whereas his “two whatevers” policy, based on the unabashed obeisance to the gospel of the Chairman, was considered, in hindsight, to be a political “error.”

I can’t help but smirk a bit at reading the translation of 两个凡是 as the “two whatevers” because whenever I hear the word “whatevers” I hear some southern Californian moppet intoning the word with a roll of the eyes.

I’m going to keep track of what the Chinese media has to say about Hua, if anything, in the coming days and weeks.

China: Not your typical “Party School” or the use and abuse of ideology

Blogger and author Chen Xingzhi on Bokee talks about his experiences at the Chinese Communist Party School, where they study Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Deng, and Jiang Zemin. He is, of course, a Party Member and no doubt in some kind of leadership position. He spent four months as in the Party School, attending lectures, taking part in discussions, reading, writing reports, etc. This essay is a philosophical reflection on his experiences there, and I found out it to be one of the most moving things I’ve read, in Chinese, in a while. It gets to the heart of the political culture of the Party, but goes beyond that—that is, one reads it and realized how deep the problem is. I hope everyone gets a chance to read it, and if you read Chinese, I hope you read the original. I unreservedly recommend it.

The writer starts off with some light-hearted banter about how dead-boring some of the lecturers and their lectures are:

BBC Chinese on the “harmoniousness” of the Olympics

BBC 中文网 | 中国报道 | 奥运外围：当“和谐”被重复千遍 via kwout

BBC Chinese journalist Meng Ke tells it like it is in the above article. He roasts some of the sacred cows of Olympics propaganda, like the “100 years dream of the Chinese people” (he says: did Chinese people really care about having the Olympics way back in 1908?）as well as the whole thing about “fire and water can mix, why can’t people be equally harmonious” (he says: sounds like a good metaphor, until you realize that it doesn’t make much sense).

Meng is critical of opening ceremony director Zhang Yimou’s attempts to cram in all the best parts of China’s long history and vast cultural depths into a few hours: he wonders whether or not cultural elites are not just like political and business elites in desiring a “harmoniousness” that is derived from and sustained by the power to control.

In the last section, Meng says that “harmoniousness requires decoration”—though “decoration” is the literal translation of what he says, what it means is a certain “dressing up,” which the more critical among us believe lies on the slippery slope towards outright falsification. He talks about Beijing’s rebuilt and cleaned up streets with the faux-ancient buildings (a la Shanghai’s Xintiandi) as a “Disneyification” of Beijing.

Finally, Meng mentions that one of the more well-known BBS in China, the Qiang Guo BBS (强国论坛), has been under tight supervision and monitoring: some netizens are complaining about how fast their posts are getting deleted, making it hard for them to reply to others and engage in any kind of conversation.

China now becoming an infrastructure builder around the world?

I was just reading this article from Ha’aretz about some of China’s major infrastructure projects in Israel, including the Carmel Tunnel. Interesting stuff, for example, a partial list of some of China’s more recent and more prominent projects:

“China’s presence in Israel as an infrastructure builder is new,” says Samuels. “In the past, China used to export mainly cheap labor to Israel. But in recent years Chinese companies have been realizing huge projects, including power stations, airports and railroads. A Chinese company built the subway in Tehran in the past decade. The CCECC is now building a 1,300-kilometer railroad along the entire length of Nigeria. Previously it won an $8-billion infrastructure tender in Algeria.”

Next time I take the tube in Tehran…I am going to be worried, very worried. No, but in all honesty, all this comes at a bit of a surprise because I had mostly heard of Chinese projects in Africa and the Middle East—but mostly relating to oil. Of course, the projects in West Africa and Sudan (in relation to Darfur crisis) have received the most press. But would have thought, huh—the subway in Tehran.

Sex and the Party: Is China ready for a nude island?

The sexologist Pan Hai has called for one of the idyllic islands off Zhuhai–Miao Wan Island–to be turned into a nude island. The blog post, written on July 15, is titled 中国应有裸泳海滩 (China ought to have a nude beach) and lays out some of Pan’s reasons he believes it’s about time for China’s own nude beach. As you might expect from a sexologist, he decries China’s puritanical sex culture, which he traces back to the Tang dynasty. What’s more interesting is what he says the ‘class structure’ behind sexual relations in China today–that is to say, sex can be openly bought, sold, and enjoyed by high officials–including Mao himself–but to do so, while preaching sexual prudishness to the masses, is nothing less than hypocrisy:

尽管统治者（包括我们的伟大领袖毛主席）自己从不禁欲，但他们却严格地限制老百姓的性欲。结果，整个中国社会，千百年来便形成了对于性的“二元化态度”或称“双重标准”。即：统治者可以荒淫无度，可以糜烂奢侈，而普罗大众则稍有“出格”，便会遭受道德、舆论甚至国家机器的制裁。

不是么？贪官污吏使用公款或者借用贿资包养情人（长期并多个），非但不受惩处，反而成为权势者的荣耀；小小百姓花一点儿小钱找“小姐”一乐，却时时受到专政机关的威胁，轻则罚款，重者拘禁——同样性质的男欢女爱，对于不同的国人竟有如此不同的“待遇”。这不仅深刻反映了当代中国“性道德”的虚伪，更反映了中国民主政治建设的一大或缺——缺乏实事求是的态度、缺乏一视同仁的公正！

Specifically, Pan mentions that while corrupt officials use their ill-gotten gains to keep several lovers, the little guy on the street trying to get a little action with a xiaojie gets fined and punished. Pan goes on to rail against that the development of Chinese sexual culture has been all but neglected, and what needs to be done to keep this from further slipping into abeyance is to make sure that “sexual development” get incorporated into official policy and pronouncements, so that people understand they have “sexual rights” and ought to strive to build “Socialist sexual culture with Chinese characteristics”* :

因此，当“以人为本”的理念连续写进最近几次党代会的报告之后，人们有理由要求执政者，重新审视自己的性观念，深刻认识人民群众的性权利，重新制定与性相关的政策法规，把“性文明”与精神文明、物质文明一起，列为人类文明的三大建设领域，与“经济、政治、文化、社会、生态”等五大目标一起，列为“建设小康社会”的共同要求，积极而又认真地打造“中国特色的社会主义性文明”，从而使十七大报告所讲的“科学发展观”，真正能够实现“以人为本”，真正能够实现“全面协调可持续”，真正能够实现“统筹兼顾”——既兼顾资源保护，又兼顾经济增长，更兼顾人的全面自由发展。所以，建设健康型的裸泳海滩，应该没有什么难以逾越的障碍。

Now what makes this island so special? Well, located some forty nautical miles or more from Zhuhai, these little islands are fairly isolated; only a few fisherman families live there. The beaches can be easily isolated so that you can limit the nudity and not be afraid that this strange habit will spread to the point that everyone feels obliged to walk around in their birthday suit.

Of course, there are plenty of priggish people that are opposed to this idea. Some of those who have criticized Pan object to his use of “linking up with the world” (与国际接轨）: just because the French and a whole bunch of other nations have nude beaches doesn’t mean that the Chinese have to in order to prove that they are on the same level. The writer linked to above thinks that the whole idea of sexologist is crazy, and to even make such suggestions is to defile five thousand years of Chinese history and culture. “What is a sexologist anyway? Shouldn’t they be trying to heal infertility?” the writer asks.

中华五千年的文明就这样被糟蹋，被诋毁，中华优秀的传统与作风被亵渎，这专家安的什么心？研究什么“性学”，你怎么不去治疗男女不孕？说什么裸体活动，疯子专家一派胡言。

Personally, I don’t know much about Pan Hai, but he’s definitely been a prolific writer/researcher on all matters sex, so might be worth reading if that’s your thing.

The above picture is from an internet survey on the issue of nude beaches in China. In case you were wondering, I am pro-nude beach, and after I submitted my vote these were the survey results that I received. I don’t know if they are accurate, real-time stats, but in any case, you can see that there is still a healthy margin by which the pro-nude beachers lead the anti-nude beachers.

I have to admit that my interest in this island is piqued: if it really is the Maldives of China, and has been relatively unspoilt by the Midas touch of Chinese tourist development, then I hope to go there before that all changes. The idea of going to a tiny island where there are few people has always appealed to my escapist tendency, but I had never considered anywhere within Chinese borders when fleshing out that fantasy.

*what a fucking mouthful

Hu Jintao loves Photoshop

H/t to Matt for showing me the link. Twin brothers, both devoted to the Party. Even whitey’s got to smile at that.

Notice to Chinese petitioners: if you fight the law, the law will win.

徐贲：善待底层民情_网易新闻中心 via kwout

These two pictures, from Hunan province, have been making the rounds on the internet because of what it says on the banners: the first one says “谁不依法信访就打击谁” which means “whoever unlawfully petitions the government will be attacked” while the second one says “违法上访，坐牢罚款”, which means “illegal petitions will be result in jail sentences and fines”. There are, evidently, even more. It’s amusing, in a completely depressing way: there’s an inherent contradiction in telling people that there are both legal and illegal ways of having recourse to the law. For example, going to the provincial petition office, or even more sinfully, Beijing—that would be a loss of face for local government, and that’s exactly what operates behind the linguistic facade here—there are “laws”, but calling a spade a spade, they are really “rules” for well-behaved and docile citizens that can be, if necessary, be imposed by state force

Characters painted on walls and banners in prominent places have always been one of the government’s more friendly ways of reminding the people where the lines are. I’m reminded of the one-child policy banners and slogans, where people were told that they would be punished if they had more than one, etc. The not so subtle message, of course, is that the state can use the various and sometimes violent means of keeping the troublemakers and rabble-rousers down.

It makes me pessimistic to even think about it, because the distance between China and true social progress is not measured in what treaties it signs or what “ism” holds power, but in how the state perceives itself vis-a-vis the hoi polloi: as a deferential servant, or as its master. Of course, it’s never completely one or the other, even at its best or most abysmal—but as I am currently reading The Age of Revolution by Eric Hobsbawm, it strikes me the historical struggles of the Europeans, in the 19th c. and beyond—manifested in their (sometimes failed) revolutions, insurrections, and political mass movements—were precisely about this, about carving out this space for the people that the violent arms of the government could not reach. This is the practical, day-to-day meaning of the universalistic conception of rights—it’s our protection against the arbitrary violence that the king, emperor, and state can use against us.

The troubles in Weng’an and Jiang Jie He village: gangs, dams, mines, gambling, death

I was reading Southern Weekend’s investigation into the Weng’an region: the common wisdom now is that the problems didn’t begin or end with the June 28 incident, but that the latter was merely what happened when long simmering problems reached the boiling point. This report about a place called Jiang Jie He Village (瓮安县龙塘乡江界河村), where there has been a long-standing antagonism between the local government and the people.

The situation is this: the village was moved because of a hydropower project (dam), and as you might imagine, the compensation became the focal point for the villagers affected. They were offered a lump sum of around 18,000RMB. The villagers asked why people in other villages and counties were offered more–500rmb per square meter, for example, when they were only given 232. For every orange tree they lost, people in neighboring places were given 1000 rmb, while the people in Jiang Jie He were only given 100 rmb per tree.

The stand-offs predictably became violent, and the villagers gathered en masse. They held a couple of gov’t cars hostage, and eventually the government brought in 400 police. Thirty-four villagers included women and children were injured. Some of the injured sought treatment in local hospitals and were refused. Many of them had to treat themselves or cross the river and go back home. Incidents like these were not rare.

The article also mentions the effect of sulfur mining. The mining began in 1998, and sometime around 2003, the water levels in the soil began to drop, which made it difficult for the peasants to irrigate their fields. Furthermore, local sources of potable water began drying up, or the water would turn murky white. In fact there are loads of different kinds of mines all around Weng’an:

除了磷矿之外，瓮安还拥有煤、铁、硫铁、铅、锌、铝、硫磺、硅石、重晶石、钾页岩等矿产。这些矿产遍布瓮安，因此各地矿群纠纷不断。而多数时候，当地政府都是出动警力，采取高压手段.

Another problem they have over there is general lawlessness: illegal or “black” taxis, gambling dens, etc. Most of the young people are in some form of gang. The police report that members of at least six gangs were involved in the June 28 events. The article says that women have their own “gangs,” one of which is called the “Auntie Society” (姨妈会).

I haven’t read this article that in-depth, but it does manage to paint an interesting and much more subtle picture of Weng’an and the surrounding areas than we got at first. While other media outlets mention it mostly as some kind of vague anti-CCP anger, there is so much more in it. There are criminal elements, general lawlessnes, and yes, anger at the government that seems to be good at ignoring certain problems and exploiting other problems to their advantage. I don’t envy the people that have to live there.