Jia Zhangke's neoliberal China: the commodification and dissipation of the proletarian in The World (Shijie, 2004)

Abstract

This article explores the under-theorized subject of migrant labor and its precarious socio-economic position envisaged by Jia Zhangke in his The World (Shijie, 2004). As discussions of this film have largely been reduced to broad assertions in their handling of developmental adjustments—mainly, the country's entry into the WTO in 2001 and the reality of globalization—the specificities that mark Beijing's continuous and unfettered modernization projects under neoliberalization, are largely left untreated, leaving the study of labor incomplete. I will argue that The World transforms the concerns of the marginalized into a dialectical process by challenging the local imagery and celebrated urbanization in Beijing (commodification), while at the same time the workers in Jia's film embrace newfound consumption (dissipation). The other aim of this paper will be to view new forms of Chinese identity (suzhi) that “marks a sense and sensibility of the self's value in the market economy” (Yan 2003). Put another way, consumptive habits are indicative of a new neoliberal identity that complicates how Chinese service and industrial workers view themselves in post-social Beijing and what is fictionalized in The World.

Keywords:

• Neoliberalism
• Chinese cinema
• Jia Zhangke
• suzhi
• proletarian
• commodification
• dissipation
• Beijing

Notes

Real world leisure and construction workers' labor intensity is discussed in a variety of places and these issues are implicated in Jia Zhangke's film through casualization of the Chinese workforce, and even one character's death due to such unjust policy formations. For more information on these problems see: Yale Globalization Online, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/ or Global Vision Corporation, which is an independent non-profit, NGO that analyze China's labor problems; women's labor issues are also covered by various East Asian NGOs, namely http://www.isiswomen.org/

For example, in The World, Tao's boyfriend Taisheng must sleep in a hostel each night, making intimacy and basic privacy impossible. The simple luxury of companionship at the end of the day must be shared with other iterant workers, resting alongside them in the barracks-like rooms.

See the United Nations Development Report where they discuss China's safety issues in the past and how the Coal Industry can be improved: http://www.undp.org.cn/projectdocs/53962.pdf

My use of the term proletariat relates to the Marxist understanding of the lowest classes in global capitalist society, as they contribute their labor power to the interconnected nature of vertical and horizontal production processes worldwide. In relation to China and its dissolving image as a socialist command economy, the political economic system negotiates its production, investment and surplus in the global neoliberal order differently, and therefore, a clear-cut definition of the Chinese labor classes is not possible. Instead, it is crucial to view these classes in association with specific historical conjunctures over the last 50 years and how these epochal shifts shape class politics.

For more information about China's urban development see Wu, Xu, and Yeh (2007).

For example, for less direct engagements with neoliberalism and Chinese migrant labor see McGrath (2008). In journal format see Gaetano (2009).

This is due largely to the Fifth Generation's preoccupation with visual deconstructions of patriarchal society in pre-Maoist China i.e., Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern (Da Hong Denglong Gaogao Gua, 1991), and the ubiquitous celebration of the worker in Maoist era film—i.e., The Life of Wu Xun (Wu Xun zhuan, 1950) by Sun Yu—both directors have taken this class for granted. Despite Zhang Yimou's avoidance of the laborer directly (focusing instead on feminist/patriarchal critiques of feudal/Maoist China) and the peasant laborer that exemplifies a one-dimensional revolutionary figure of the 1950s and 1960s in The Life of Wu Xun, what are essentially two ornamentalized worlds on film, The World arguably recreates the labor class again through filmic representations under neoliberalism; yet The World resists embellishing these figures for aesthetic or political reasons alone.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keith B. Wagner

Contact address: Graduate School of Film and Digital Media, Hongik University, Daehak-ro campus, room 810 128-8, Yeongeon-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea 110-460.