MCLC: back down the river

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: back down the river
***********************************************************

Source: WSJ, Real Time Report blog (6/4/13):
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/06/04/china-travels-back-down-the-r
iver/

China Travels Back Down the River

By Ying Zhu

Faced with a slowing economy and mounting public frustration over
corruption, China’s new leadership has signaled plans to reduce state
control in economic matters while simultaneously tightening control over
politics and ideology. That bifurcation between economic liberalization
and political repression is reminiscent of an earlier era, when economic
uncertainty coupled with the party’s failure to tackle official corruption
and refusal to allow a more liberal political climate led to the 1989
student uprising.

The connection between China’s current predicament and the 1989
demonstrations — which ended, 24 years ago today, in a bloody assault by
Chinese troops on unarmed civilians in the heart of Beijing — occurred to
me recently when I was tasked with connecting the dots between two films
for a Chinese Independent Documentary Film Retrospective
<http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/film_screenings/18224> at the MOMA
here in New York.

The first was “River Elegy <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39j4ViRxcS8>,”
an iconic six-part TV documentary series denouncing Chinese tradition as
the cause of a repressive party orthodoxy that ran on China Central
Television in 1988. The second film was “iMirror
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vcR7OkzHkI>,” a less well-known but still
striking 30-minute experimental video produced at the height of China’s
economic boom in 2007.

“River Elegy” was a national sensation when it was released. As the name
suggests, the documentary was an elegy for China’s Yellow River, seen as
the symbol of an ancient civilization that had dried up in modern times as
a result of isolation and conservatism. The film equated the Yellow
River’s age-old silt and sediment with the dead weight of Confucian
traditions and consequent Chinese cultural stagnation, arguing that China
needed to exchange its inward- and backward-looking, land-based
civilization for an outward- and forward-looking, ocean-bound civilization
modeled on the West.

China in the 1980s was suffering economic instability. The transition from
a planned economy to a market economy had not been a smooth one: Price
reforms brought inflation while wages stagnated, official corruption and
nepotism were rampant, and opportunities for upward mobility were limited
to a privileged few. In response to the liberal calls for China to sever
ties with tradition and pursue political modernization, the conservative
wing of the party seized the moment to argue for a return to Socialist
values. A sense of anxiety and listlessness prevailed as economic and
political reforms appeared to have stalled while liberals and
conservatives at the party’s top level battled over China’s direction.
Those jitters boiled over into student demonstrations in Beijing in 1986,
which resulted in the ouster of the liberal-minded party sectary Hu
Yaobang.

“River Elegy” captured and indeed amplified a nation in crisis,
transforming an intellectual debate into a public one. Sympathetic toward
the 1986 student demonstrations, it called for the party to establish a
regular dialogue with the public to address concerns about corruption,
inflation and government mismanagement. Amidst the rising popularity of
“River,” the party hard-liners quickly rallied to denounce it as
unpatriotic and counterrevolutionary. Ironically, while bashing Chinese
tradition, “River” actually registered an acute sense of Chinese
patriotism. Director Xia Jun considered himself foremost a patriot—to
assail China’s past, he argued, was to reshape and improve its future. The
film embodied a cultural utilitarianism that aimed to jolt China into
becoming a powerful nation.

By 2007, when “iMirror” quietly appeared on YouTube, China had indeed
become powerful — a global economic behemoth with GDP growth in excess of
11%. Yet by then a crisis of different sort was brewing among the Chinese
youth. Instead of producing feelings of liberation and happiness, the
material abundance and access to global pop culture led to spiritual
longing. With no ideology to guide them and no chance to participate
politically, the country’s young people began to feel lost.

Appropriately, the world of “iMirror” is parasitic, hatched on the back of
the computer-generated environment of Second Life, which allows users act
out their social fantasies through virtual avatars. In the film, the
Beijing-based young Chinese artist Cao Fei plays herself and documents the
virtual world her avatar inhabits. It is a lonely world devoid of
originality and imagination, filled with dollar signs and luxurious
resorts juxtaposed with landfills and industrial pollution. One segment
documents her encounter with the avatar of a San Francisco-based hippy
leftist in his mid-60s in real life.

In “iMirror,” stock art-film tropes involving money, sex and identity are
accentuated by wistful music with numb, mechanic beats. The
cyber-existence affords no genuine discovery, or escape. Unlike “River
Elegy,” “iMirror” captures the crisis of individuals rather than a nation.
The grand narrative of nation building is replaced here with introspective
musing over personal loss and alienation. Trapped in its own narcissism
symptomatic of a generation adrift, the existential crisis captured in
“iMirror” is not specifically Chinese. The longing for a more fulfilling
and meaningful existence is undoubtedly universal, albeit predicated on
material comfort.

That existential crisis, though keenly felt, was at least tolerable to the
party. But now the mood has shifted once again. The arrival of the
financial crisis, which sent China’s growth plummeting and forced the
party to embark on a massive stimulus program that aggravated tensions
within the economy, has saddled young people with the burden of trying to
make it in a country where expectations are high but opportunities are
shrinking. Grim economic prospects have given rise to a new youth
subculture, encapsulated in the term diaosi — a vulgar catchphrase that
translates, politely, as “loser.”

The self-deprecating cynicism of that label is understandable. Though some
more successful members of the population born in the 1980s embrace the
term with ironic pride
<http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1232976/chinas-underdog-youth-find-
success-diaosi-or-loser-identity>, for others it is an all too accurate
description of their circumstances: Among Beijing-based college students
who graduated in July last year, state media reports say only 28% had
found jobs by April. In Shanghai, the employment rate for July graduates
was 29%. And even those members of the diaosi generation who are employed
find themselves struggling in low-paying jobs that make it almost
impossible to buy a house, increasingly seen as a prerequisite for
marriage.

The issues China is confronting now — corruption and uncertain economic
prospects — are no different from those that confronted the country in the
1980s. Yet by the 2010s, state-led crony capitalism has exacerbated the
divide between the have and have-nots. The widening economic and social
gap is created by a developmental model that, while unleashing the force
of capital, continues to deny judicial and press independence and the
presence of a vibrant civil society, which would provide effective
antidote to official corruption and power abuse that has resulted in
mounting discontent among disaffected youth. Rather than move to open up
public discourse on the best way to tackle its problems, the party has
instead reportedly circulated a directive that discourages the discussions
of seven “dangerous” topics in Chinese universities and media, including
press freedom, crony capitalism and judicial independence — issues at the
very heart of China’s predicament.

Recently, the party’s proposal to reshape China’s state capitalist model
from an economy driven by the state to one that jointly fueled by private
sectors has received wide notice. But the dismantling of state capitalism
should not only be about minimizing state domination of and interference
in economic matters. It should also be about minimizing China’s
paternalistic control over politics, culture and ordinary citizens’
rights. Only a free press and an independent judicial branch can fend off
state power abuse. Anything short of political liberalization would fail
to address the fundamentals of a crony-capitalist system in which the
exclusive web of wealth and power has no limits, and no shame.

It is worth noting that, back in 1988, “River Elegy” harbored no illusions
about the long-term prospects for a Communism based on political
dictatorship. While China’s leaders have made the current system work so
far, it’s only a matter of time before the silt builds up to the point
that the water begins to flow backwards.

A leading scholar on Chinese cinema and media studies, Ying Zhu is chair
of the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island-CUNY.
She is the author or editor of eight books, including “Two Billion Eyes:
The Story of China Central Television”
<http://www.chinafile.com/two-billion-eyes> (New Press, 2012).