*

Given the demands its still-booming economy, it’s doubtful whether China’s leadership, the fourth since Mao, vets every new film it produces. The country faces serious policy questions over what do about the yuan, the One-Child Policy, privileged education, and the radical stratification that has overtaken its officially classless society.

Three films I caught a few years ago at the Bangkok International Film Festival acknowledge the accomplishments of the elder generations of filmmakers, while boldly examining the One Child Generation. New themes such as euthanasia, cyber-sex, Christian evangelism, and homosexuality mark the new Chinese film’s passage into the twenty-first century. Underlying these films is an intense yearning for connection in an increasingly lonely world.

In The Park (2006), directed by 35-year-old Yin Lichuan, the unmarried daughter of a retired army officer confronts a problem facing many educated woman in the world – how to fulfill family obligations and find a suitable mate while pursuing a demanding career.

“You’re too proud,” her widower-father announces, after discovering her boyfriend is a jobless, would-be musician – and unsuitably younger. “I will only make a suggestion. You, of course, will have to make the final decision.”

The father, played by veteran actor Wang Deshun, heads for a traditional water-park to “kill two birds with one stone,” along with other local retirees who gather to exercise and find a mate for their solo offspring.

China’s One-Child Policy, initiated in 1974, resulted in what psychologists call “emotional over-investment” in their kids. Actress Li Jing gives a luminous performance as a 29-year-old TV producer whom the father “markets” to other oldster parents. (“She’s 28, still young!”) Self-absorbed by her inner conflicts, paralyzed by indecision, and chafing under her father’s benign authority, the daughter fights him over domestic trivialities loaded with historical meaning.

“Have some intestines. I cooked it with garlic this time,” he says to her over dinner in their old-fashioned apartment. “You loved it when you were a child.”

“I never liked intestines,” she insists, furious at last. “And I never liked garlic either!”

She sulkily refuses to eat. Her father’s efforts to find her a mate are also doomed to fail, of course. His chosen marriage-target is revealed in a public washroom to be a closeted homosexual. The unhappy revelation is a huge blow to the old man:

“I fought our country’s enemies!” he cries bitterly at the modern glitzy streets. The obvious, unspoken, and real question is: For what? – So that tattooed young men are free to embrace in public? – So that his beautiful daughter can live alone in her new condo?

“You don’t understand the world today,” she tells him with almost eerie resignation. And here is the film’s power – it’s apparent the heroine doesn’t understand this new world either. She only knows what it isn’t. She is fully aware that their shared history is over – but she is also unsure what this new world is all about, or where it’s going.

But she can’t admit this to her father; she knows it will scare him. With breathtaking economy the director Yin Lichuan tackles the central issue of modernity:

Who are we now?

A pickpocket steals the father’s identity card at the railway station, just when he is “about to go home.” It’s up to the daughter to rescue him from obliteration in a forgotten history – even when her own future is provisional, and unknowable.

{Spider Lilies}

At the other end of the spectrum, but equally sophisticated in its treatment of controversial social issues, is Raised from Dust (2006) directed by Gan Xiao Er. It shows us a rural Chinese Christian community facing disruption from one of China’s vast infrastructure projects.

Actress Hu Shuli plays the cheerful young wife of a miner dying of silicosis in the local clinic. She struggles to keep her daughter in primary school and pay for her husband’s treatment, labouring at an illegal construction site for a few yuan by day, and salvaging usable coal bits from refuse tips at night.

Forced to make a terrible choice between the past and future, the heroine pulls the oxygen tube from her husband’s blue lips, loads him on a bicycle cart, and wheels him home to die. The camera lets it happen in what feels like real time: His bare feet dangle out of the handmade box in the cold light of a new spring.

Their young daughter, unknowingly saved by her parents’ sacrifice, sings grace over the family soup bowl to the Chinglish tune of “Frère Jacques” – “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, for the food, for the food,” in a final scene which combines pathos, surreal humour, and existential terror at once. The film’s Christian themes resonate with the earthy life of China’s rural poor, who still live on the knife-edge of hope and despair.

This is the world of cheap labour that moves China’s boom-economy, shown dispassionately, without moralizing. Raised from Dust, with actors who don’t appear to be acting and a director who doesn’t appear to be directing, transcends national concerns, and illuminates our common lot under globalization.

Equally adept at examining moral authority in global society is 38-year-old Taiwanese director Zero Chou, 38. Her film Spider Lilies won the 2007 Teddy Best Feature Film at the Berlin Film Festival.

Spider Lilies (2006) explores international youth culture in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, where, like everywhere, tattoos, computer sex, and film-going are not merely urban obsessions, but fundamental ways of connecting to the world’s frenetic currents. A teenage web-cam sex performer falls for a lesbian tattooist, in a plot that unites the hard facts of our depersonalized age with the soft truths of private fantasy.

“I am a phantom in your dream,” the heroine reminds the darkened audience beyond the screen, “And you, too, live in mine.”

We, of course, are the unseen watchers whom Chou addresses, the multiple layers of watching watchers in a surveillance-mad society. The electronic audience is the real protagonist of her film. And, as screenwriter Singing Chen takes pains to emphasize, we are hopelessly isolated despite myriad electronic connections.

“I have no choice but to live in a virtual world,” confesses the heroine, a lesbian tattooist played by a stark beauty, Isabella Leong, 18. A violent earthquake, which takes her father’s life and sunders the family, can be read as Taiwan’s political divergence from the Mainland, or as the seismic shock of the new technology; but either way it only finds its cure in an act of personal will:

“If you remember me,” says Jade, the teenage cyber-stripper, seducing the older girl, “And I remember you, then we are real.”

This is the special burden society puts on the individual. A cogent bit of dialogue is central to both the Taiwanese and Mainland films. In The Park, the heroine’s vegetarian boyfriend refuses to eat meat at a family dinner with the response, “When animals are killed, they release a special poison in the blood.” In Spider Lilies the heroine warns that the spider lily flower of the title is “permeated with a poison that makes one lose consciousness and memory.”

Is this a Chinese folk tradition?

Or is it a comment on our increasingly narcotic environment?

*

Interview with Director Zero Chou

Zero Chou, director of Spider Lilies, was born 1970 in Keeling, Taiwan. She studied philosophy at university and became a journalist before embarking on a film career, with five films to her credit.

Were you playing with the film audience, their voyeurism?

The moment a movie begins to play, it forms a relationship with the audience. I wanted Spider Lilies to hypnotize the audience right from the beginning, so that they give the film attention under such a state, and enter a world of non-realism.

Were you deliberately making people uncomfortable with their need to watch?

The interesting thing about voyeurism is the discovery of human nature. On the surface, you are looking at an object. But in fact, you are hearing your own heartbeat, and looking at your own nature.

The film has lines about poison affecting memory. Is this a traditional Chinese theme?

The “poison” from the spider lily flower is also a “cure.” It can help one lose memories, become crazy… but it is also a defence mechanism to protect yourself.

Was the earthquake in the film about the split of Taiwan from the Mainland?

No, Taiwan is region of earthquakes, a natural force. The earthquake symbolizes a rift, a break in memory. The human heart is fragile, it is afraid of breaking, but it needs breaking to cure itself.

Who is your favorite director?

Pedro Almodóvar. I identify with his colourful style. Who said art must be grey and depressing? I always wanted to rebel against that!

Walk into a box store like Toys R Us or Costco and you will see that toys today constitute an overwrought universe, a shrink-wrapped house of affliction parallel to our own. The tall aisles are packed with violent pinks and piercing reds and hard, mean yellows, all clashing like brass cymbals. You are quickly overcome by their frantic urgency and charmless glitz.

The toys glare out at you from their blister packs and window boxes, demanding that you stroke their fireproof furry tummies to produce a negligible burp, or wiggle their horns to extract a tinny roar. They’re immune to feeling, hard packed as proof against shipping error, “shrinkage” and kiddy-traffic.

There are too many boxes. And besides, your kid wants the CheeDor or HyenaGor, and according to the geeky clerk you’ve finally managed to find, these were sold out months ago. Why? Cuz they dint makinuff, he mumbles through his wad of Extra gum as he restocks a 9-foot shelf of greenish Star Wars fighters.

He looks greenish himself in the jittery store-lights. Working in a toy store, and he’s exhausted. A toy store is anything but fun.

Why are toys such hard work today? Why are kids involved in endless schoolyard Ponzi schemes with their Pokemon cards, trading scores and codes from Lego’s Baraka at recess as if were so much black market currency? What are China’s endless pastel boxcars doing here anyway? Full of action figures bound for suburban box-stores the year round — toys that roar and bleep and refuse to budge from blister packs that will cut your hand badly if you’re not careful? And that’s the real thing.

(“These counterfeits are dangerous,” says a cop whose team has just seized another shipment of fakes from Hong Kong, “They’ve got lead in them.”)

I hold just such an Action Figure in my hand. It is my son’s battery-operated grey camel robot from Star Wars. It’s called Hoth, with guns where its eyes and mouth should be, and a little white starship trooper hiding in his plastic trap-door hump. For Game Theorists, this is closed toy as opposed to an open toy, like Barbie.

Barbie belongs to the old world of dolls—and teddy bears, bats and balls, red wagons, cowboy guns — the kit of the child-narrator, who scripts his own story. Hoth is a closed toy, part of an Operating System external to a player’s life. Hoth’s O/S is free of child’s rule in two ways.

First, Hoth belong to a collection; and as the Star Wars catalogue itself smugly reminds us, “No collection is complete!” without the rest of the collection. This promise of completion is never delivered, because these toy manufacturers sell incompleteness.

Why should they? The real money’s in need. The catalogue begins by seducing kids with coy offers of role deception:

“Your friends will think you are… a gaming mastermind — but only you will know for sure (we won’t tell).”

So secondly, Hoth isn’t really a toy at all, but a component, part of a System; and it’s the System who allows the kid to pretend he’s a warrior or gaming mastermind — not the toy.

No, the toy is beside the point. The player quickly understands this, too. He or she understands by age eight that action figures in blister packs are of necessity always incomplete, even when freshly purchased and still boxed. And that his purchase completes nothing but a provisional entry into an anxious system of commercial craving.

Is this stuff any different from the imported silks that threatened ancient Rome with bankruptcy? Or the costly teas that wrenched the British Empire apart? The Chinese have always specialized in providing the West with its pretty addictions; this thrill is more profound and dangerous. It’s a metaphysical hit.

For if the player’s position relative to this unknowable System is vague and subservient, the toy continually reminds the child that he himself is incomplete, too. Hoth requires batteries: a wire plugged into his anus connects him to a power pack, external yet essential. The routinized, jerky movements that follow deny Descartes, disprove Aquinas.

Free will in the West? Forget it. Unlike the wind-up robot of a generation ago, Hoth’s got no autonomy, no place to go. Press On, and he agitates humpily around his grey lump.

The third part of this toy-system, and more important than the camelbot or the anus-battery, is the stand — complete with a moon crater and embedded footprints.

This device keeps the player out of the loop, distancing him as the spectator who “won’t believe the incredible detail!” Even if the kid tries, his attempt is frustrated. The little warrior can’t stand up by himself; he keeps falling down unless his gun his positioned straight over his head, as if surrendering. The player soon learns it’s better to leave the little fellow where he is, lying on his back like a foetus, inside his camel hump.

Some warrior!

The message in the Blister Pack is that futility and powerlessness attaches to any purchaser who attempts to add narrative elements to the program envisioned by the System. This futility quickly makes itself known to every young player, no matter how imaginative. The toy figure arrests and frustrates efforts to produce alternative scripts, refusing them under the totalitarian motto, Resistance is futile, and proving it in his fumbling. His ineptitude (and that of his parents’) is caused by ignorance of the codes of animatism. Arresting the action is the job of action figures.

Why should this cheapo plastic stuff be so important today? The meta-life of objects is now widely felt to be growing out of control: objects have a complete life of their own. What are Edward Burtynsky’s photos of Machine China, but shots of Ground Zero where the old world of artifacts is dematerialized into a bar-coded chimera?

[Edward Burtynsky: Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Jilin Province]

Our anxiety about the secret life of globalization is anxiety about the death of the organic world. Our familiar world is losing its parts.

We once believed that Technology opposed Nature, that technology offered us hope of controlling the bad weather of history. It turns out that technology is exactly like weather. It, too, is subject to fits of pique and catastrophe — as system crashes, software glitches, and chronic metal fatigue constantly remind us. The causes remain mysterious long after power is restored. The lights go on again, but we are still in the dark.

Artists seized on the issue in the 19^th Century. The German painter Max Klinger did a series on the misadventures of a lady’s lost glove in 1881. In 1909 the Italian futurist and artist Filippo Tomasso Marinetti coined the phrase “animatic” for his view that inanimate things are alive. As the output of box-store stuff continues to mount, we can only experience it referentially, and passively. Forget capitalists: nobody today really controls the means of production.

[Max Klinger, "Ein Handschuh" (A Glove), 1881]

The jumble of forever-incomplete toy “sets” littering the bedrooms of generations of children, never mind the slightly-defective printers and monitors and TVs littering landfill sites. My experience, like that of my child’s, is denied by the System that is deliberately creating a junkyard of the landscape. Here’s a summary of just the past year, which I suggest is more important than God in its proofs of a terrible new metaphysic:

1. A week after I bought it, the $175 Panasonic portable phone slipped to the vinyl floor and died without visible injury.

2. Two weeks after my new $2500 PC system was installed by a “geek pro,” it fried itself in the middle of the night – sparks, smoke and everything.

3. The new “digital” answering machine gives such lo-res audio that it takes us multiple Repeats to figure out who called

4. The camcorder began erasing family videos as it played them.

5. The SLR camera freezes on nice days, but never when I take it back to the camera store; a new wireless mouse died at three weeks; the DVD portable player at one month.

I could go on, but whenever you do complain you get a clerk’s recorded answer: more consumption. Toys such as Hoth are here to teach us about this inhuman new world, about the fritzing and frying and freezing.

Don’t blame China for this defective stuff, for its glitches of mass production.

Take comfort from the toys, who offer their symbolic condolences for our loss of the World. The organic world we once knew can longer compete with the coded reality that produces this unending flow of immaculate novelty. Coming to terms with its triumph — the triumph of the arrested image over narrative will — is now a rite of passage for us all.

More from the China-Africa symposium at IU: The general outlook of most speakers is reservedly optimistic about the prospects of China’s engagements in Africa. If the last fifty years of Western-sponsored development on the continent have borne so little fruit—and in the case of France’s coddling of psychopathic tyrants, some very rotten fruit—why not grant the Chinese some goodwill as they expand Africa’s meek infrastructure and industrial capacity. Yes, China is presently helping shield and support genocidal leaders such as Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir. But these are early days yet. And no other power seems as willing or able to step up to the task as China is.

The comments echoed what I heard from many African activists at a conference on mining, environment and society in Accra last summer. They’d already witnessed enough of the bad from Western governments and corporations. China was Africa’s second opportunity. They were not blind to China’s abuses and put little stock in its rhetoric of developing nation brotherhood. But they liked some of what they heard so far about agreements China had signed with Zambia and Angola. China doesn’t impose conditionalities like the IMF. Meanwhile, it’s committing staggering amounts of money to build much needed roads and facilities. And there is also the sense that Africa can learn from China’s own economic take-off.

The success of these investments will depend on how well African governments do their job. How proactive they are at defending their own citizens’ interests, rather than their own bank accounts or China’s investments. They will need to demonstrate foresight, technocratic competence and savvy when negotiating deals. It’s questionable whether many governments on the continent have the capacity or honesty to do so.

On this, Howard French, the former New York Times bureau in both Africa and China, had an interesting proposal. He recounted a recent meeting with Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton and until January was a Director at Citigroup. Rubin, who is now “hiding out” at the Council on Foreign Relations, asked French what he thought was the most effective/least costly thing the U.S. could do for Africa.

French suggested initiatives to enhance civil society in Africa, such as university exchanges and training, anything that might equip its future leaders with the tools they need to challenge power. China tends to work government-to-government; strengthening the so called “Third Sector” in Africa is a means of creating accountability.

This, French said, is where China will likely bloody its nose eventually in Africa. When civil society in Africa challenges China to live up to its promises of development and rhetoric of brotherhood. “How will that encounter change the equation?” Will China just walk away if the engagement no longer serves its self-interest or is too troublesome? Will it play one neighbour against another for a better deal? Or will it affect an ethical component to its foreign policy?

French finished up with a potentially grim, dystopian scenario. It’s 2050. With 2 billion people, Africa’s population has doubled in 40 years and its mineral resource wealth is mostly depleted. Who knows what the impact of climate change will be then. What then if China’s efforts, this “second opportunity”, ultimately fail to help produce prosperous states?

(Photo: Chinese boss hollerin’ at his ditch diggers in Kabwe, Zambia)

Presently at Indiana University in Bloomington, attending an academic symposium on China’s rapidly expanding investments in Africa, and the implications it will have for the continent’s long-term development.

I am also buying buckets of fireworks. Or seriously considering it. Indiana has some of the laxest fireworks laws in America, which I suppose makes it an apt place to host a symposium about China (where fireworks were invented). In 2006, the state legalized the home use of exploding firecrackers and rockets with minimal restrictions. A local newspaper complains that the new law has “turned almost every summer night into Independence Day.” I didn’t know this in advance, but figured something was up when we crossed the Michigan-Indiana state line and were welcomed by a half-dozen fireworks warehouse emporiums, and the exuberantly-phrased roadside billboards advertising their never-ending array of celebratory combustibles.

Beyond the state-line fireworks stores, the other first impression Indiana makes is that it smells like poo. There are lots of farms, at least in the flatter north end of the state.

As for the symposium: the most revealing and entertaining presentation thus far has come from Wenren Jiang, a political science professor from the University of Alberta. What sets Jiang’s research apart is that he focuses not only on the official, state-level engagements between China and African governments (often involving Chinese state-owned enterprises), but also the mostly overlooked small and medium-sized Chinese entrepreneurs operating in Africa without state support.

Jiang’s presentation was based on research done in the Katanga region of southeastern Congo, paying particular attention to the sudden proliferation of copper smelters there 3-4 years ago, when copper was going for a handsome $9,000 US per tonne on world markets. The western media’s perception of China’s involvement in Africa, has mostly been a) skeptical, and b) focused on the state’s direct or indirect involvement. The story Jiang told was a “Wild West” scenario where independent Chinese investors went in, hastily threw together smelters, bought raw materials from freelancing locals (as opposed to establishing their own mines like Western companies in the area) and paid bribes to local bigwigs when necessary. Generally, they had little contact with Chinese officials in the country. The Chinese ambassador in Kinshasa told Jiang these dudes “only call when they’re in trouble.”

Relations between the entrepreneurs and local employees were strained. The smelters were frequently robbed, sometimes by their own staff. Safety and environmental regulations were either non-existent or unenforced. And the Chinese made little effort to understand the local culture or language. Not much after the would-be copper barons arrived, however, copper prices plummeted; first to $6,000 per tonne, and they’re now in the neighborhood of $3,000. Suffice it to say the Chinese are gone, and left little behind but unpaid wages, derelict smelter compounds, and a rising tide of crime. (But the region still has copper, plus cobalt, uranium, and diamonds—which is why some fear the resource wars currently happening in northeastern Congo, at the Ugandan frontier, could spread southward.)

Jiang’s point being that, contrary to the way we’ve framed our understanding of China’s involvement in Africa as  state managed, there’s a growing contingent of non-state, market-driven Chinese actors who are making their own deals, and in some cases, their own rules. For these players, diplomacy and south-south economic ties mean little. All that matters to them is the global market.

This article in the Asia Times by Jiang references his research around Lubumbashi, the capital of Katanga province.