Martijn de Waal

For the French filmmagazine Tausend Augen I wrote this article on the representation of the Chinese city in the cinema of the directors of the so-called 6th generation.

In the past decade, China, a country of farmers, has become a nation dominated by megacities. Rural villages have turned into regional city centres. Where once farmers ploughed the yellow earth, mirror-glassed high rises now reflect the sun. In the large coastal cities, century old hutongs have been demolished to make way for yet another prestigious office tower or luxurious shopping mall. In the past ten years 40 percent of Beijing and 60 percent of Shanghai has been wiped out and rebuild with a Chinese version of modernist architecture. What is left of the countryside is increasingly depopulated. More than one hundred million farmers have already deserted their remote villages, in search for a better life in the city. Even conservative estimations point out that at least another 400 million will follow them in the next two decades.
The Chinese cinema has seen a similar change of scenes. The postcard aesthetics of rural China pictured by the 5th generation, has given way to the urban landscapes of the sixth generation. But while official state sponsored eulogies celebrate the modern cities as places of joy, as sites where one can get rich and achieve the newly minted Chinese Dream of middle class life, these young filmmakers turn a critical eye on the new urban society that is emerging under their eyes.

When looking at Chinese propaganda posters from the Mao-era, one thing immediately attracts attention: the absence of cities. The posters portray female land workers, proudly mounted on tractors. Young girls study hard before a backdrop of heavy industry and space rockets. Sometimes these posters glorify new infrastructure projects: dams, roads and especially – probably because of their metaphoric quality – bridges. But the city is a rare theme in socialistic realism. The Chinese communists, of course, did not like cities. Cities were ugly, bourgeois, capitalistic places of consumption. When Mao together with Beijing mayor Peng Zhen talked about the future of the capital, they envisaged an endless industrial zone rather than a proper city, with a boasting skyline made up of ‘a forest of chimney’s’. ‘Shanghai is a non-productive city. It is parasitic, criminal and full of refugees’, wrote a communist newspaper in those days.

Half a century later, Wang Xiaoshuai’s film Beijing Bicycle was denied a theatrical release, because of doing the exact same thing: depicting the city as an ugly place. The censors found Wangs Beijing too grey, dirty and disorderly. For in the last two decades the Chinese cities have become the centre of a new ideology: the socialist market economy. From the 1980s on, the country gradually opened up. After decades of almost no growth, cities started to attract millions of migrants. Cities now try their best to present themselves as attractive place for investors, as modern places with a modern lifestyle.

This article will focus on the changed imagination of the new Chinese city. How is this new Chinese city imagined and represented by official sources? And how does the independent Chinese cinema reflect on this process?

We will start our investigation on the observation desk of the emerald colored Shun Hing Tower in Shenzhen. A smart dressed young business man takes in the exhilarating vista’s over Shenzhen, the city that lies at his feet, 386 meter below him. He sees broad boulevards, busy with motorized traffic and shiny, gold coloured skyscrapers. There are lush parks and comfortable apartment buildings, that easily reach 30 or 40 stories.

Everything looks new. Only twenty five years ago this was a quiet fishermen community, right on the border with Hong Kong. There were rice paddies and banana plantations here. In the early 1980s Shenzhen was the first open city of the new era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. There are more firsts in Shenzhen: the first city where foreign investors were welcomed. The first Chinese stock exchange, the first Chinese McDonald’s, and the first city that was celebrated by the communists. In the years past, Shenzhen has taken the imagination of the Chinese all over the country. When writer Ma Jiang traveled through China in the late eighties, he reports how in the smallest villages people are whispering the name of the now mythical city. There were factories that promised jobs and a steady income. You could start your own business and become truly rich. In their letters, even Ma’s friends from Beijing contemplate moving to this new town. Now there are seven million people living in and around Shenzhen. ‘Shenzhen is nowhere’, writes Ian Buruma. ‘But for many young Chinese that is precisely its attraction. To be relieved of the burdens of home, history and tradition is a form of liberation. Opportunities await at the frontiers of the wild south.’

The business man is accompanied by a much older man with a wrinkled face, weathered by years of hard work in the countryside. He is dressed in an old fashioned Mao-suit. The younger men shows the old man around, and points out the landmarks of his new town. The younger man moved here from the countryside a few years ago and got rich. For his father, this is his first visit to the newly erected metropolis. These observation desks have become a popular attraction in many Chinese cities. They are the site where one can take in the new cities of opportunity in its entirety. One can marvel at the endless modern architecture and feel proud about the accomplishments. It is a place where the abstraction of an imagined life in the cosmopolis can be become a concrete option: this is where I will live, where I can become successful. The imagination, Arjun Appadurai states in Modernity at Large consists out of the possible lives an individual can imagine that he or she will once lead, and on which he will also act. It is fuelled by images in the media, and by stories from migrants. Television images and tales of success told by returning villagers lure farmers from remote counties to the growing Chinese cities. But in China the imagination is also energized by the cities themselves. The cities themselves do their best to tell a story of modernization and progress.

As Rem Koolhaas and his co-authors noted in The Project on the City – The Great Leap Forward, it is the function of architecture to display ideology. In the case of China it is to, as Alan Chan stated in the economist, show what can be done. Hence the new skylines in even remote provincial towns whose governments want to show their subjects and the central authorities that they too belong to the future. Hence the luxurious shopping malls all over the country, with its exclusive merchandise, too expensive too buy, but gladly consumed as symbols for a possible future wealth. Hence the popularity of observation desks.

The souvenir stalls at the observation desk sell postcards, that as I have noted elsewhere, takes this point even further and glorify Shenzhen as a truly modern city. One of the postcards shows the skyline of the city. The background shows a dense constellation of rectangular and soft colored modernist buildings, a far cry from Mao’s imagined forrest of chimney’s. It is immediately clear: this is a city where people do not earn their living in dirty industry, but with the white collar work of the lucrative service sector. The foreground of the postcard is completely taken up by a grand highway intersection – infrastructure remains a popular theme, also in this ‘modernist realism’. The shoulders of the freeway are turned into lush parks, painted dark green, with small trees, planted in a orderly and regular pattern. The roads were dotted with exactly so many cars, that it was obvious that this was an affluent city, whose inhabitants could afford to own their automobiles. This without causing the ills of modernity such as traffic jams and constipated highways that would deter the quality of living.

It is hard – as anyone who has recently been in China would agree – to miss this new imagination of the Chinese city. China has over the last few years become a country of model cities, both physical and virtual. These models can be found in the offices of real estate developers and town planners. They show up in countless 3-d animation films that are used to attract investors to new projects. They are painted on the large fences that surround construction sites or on large billboards aimed at the passing traffic on one of the numerous new ring roads around the Chinese cities. Or they are proudly exhibited in a central location, as in the planning bureau’s office on People’s Square in Shanghai. All these images show tall apartment blocks. Or horizontal American style suburbs. Both are deliberately modern and surrounded by ample green, landscaped spaces, where modern people (business men in suits, or leisurely dressed young women) can relax and refuge from the hectic city outside. This is a place, they show us, for successful people.
With a few exceptions, these imagined buildings mimic Western styles. They reflect the luxury of European baroque architecture, dismayingly referred to as Eurostyle by local architects. Or they promise the glass and steel cosmopolitan attitude of the modernist movement. There is a difference, however. Western modernism as epitomized by Le Corbusier is a utopian program. As Mario Gandelsonas writes in Shanghai Reflections, it ‘proposed replacing the dreary, ugly and unhealthy fabric of the historical city with a modern green city of gridded avenues and crystalline Cartesian skyscrapers.’ It promised a new city with a rigid functional division for a new, modern man.

The Chinese have a different program, which I will call Chinese moderni$m. The goal of all these new buildings is to show how modern the country is, and to provide the city and its inhabitants with a certain prestige – hence the often lush and opulent ornamental additions to the rigid demands of modernist architecture. It is indeed a new architecture for a new man and a new society, that revolves around becoming successful in the market economy.

It is a powerful vision of the city that is represented in all these images, on postcards, on fences and billboards, and from the observation desks of the highest towers. They are a tribute to the new modernity that China awaits now that the country has opened up. After decades of urban decay and negligence, the city will be revolutionized, modernized and once again rise as the center of Chinese culture and especially commerce. This is how at the beginning of the new century Shenzhen – and the whole of China – likes to represent itself: urban, energetic, striving forwards, modern, willing to succeed and proud to flaunt its success.

These are the official images. And while these images are unavoidable in China, there are also counterimages. These are put forward by a new generation of film makers, sometimes called the sixth generation, or the digital generation, for their fondness of the digital camera. From the mid 1990s onwards they have chosen to take life in the new cities as their theme. But while architecture, scale models and billboards uphold an image of success, most of these films focus on the people that are left behind, the people that won’t be able to live this new Chinese Dream.
Green Tea, a film by Zhang Yuan, is one of the films that approaches the official imagination of modern urban China. The film is set mostly in interiors, which range from coffee bars to designer restaurants and artistic lofts. Zhang and his cameraman Christopher Doyle make urban China look like the non-place minimalist world order of the cosmopolitan creative class. The coffee shop in which the film opens with its subdued decoration, its designer chairs and the luxurious car parked outside could have been anywhere: New York, London, or Tokyo. Only when the location is shot from outside, we see Chinese characters written on the glass doors. Thus the point is made: postindustrial leisure culture has arrived in China.

It would be easy to imagine these locations as the interiors of the urban landscapes seen on the postcards and billboards. But once the camera moves outside, we see a different China. The main characters walk through restored hutongs and chat between the wooden pillars of a traditional walkway. And when the camera looks outside through the glass doors of a hotel entrance, we are shown a city scape with the tiled roofs of classical Chinese architecture.

We never see the overwhelming megastructures, the office towers or highways that at least in the official imagination complement the hip interiors. Nor do we see the urban chaos of traffic jams, street hawkers or illegal DVD-sellers that complements them in real Shanghai or Beijng. The traditional city we do get to see is mostly sanitized.
Green Tea tries to constantly reconcile the international postmodern look of the new city with traditional themes. As if it would like to ground the international design firmly in Chinese culture. On all levels there is clash between the discourses of Chinese tradition and modernity, a split that is most evident in the favourite drinks of the two main characters. She drinks green tea, he orders coffee, since the arrival of Starbucks in China, the drink of choice of the urban leisure class.

Green Tea refuses to take sides. It shows that an international version of modernity can be incorporated within traditional Chinese culture. And although is doesn’t elaborate about the price at which this comes – as the other films will – it is also not completely without criticism. In the background of the loft apartment of the best friend of the main character, a large painting stands against the wall. It looks like a famous Fang Lijun painting, the artist that gained international recognition with his post-Tiananmen cynical realism. These paintings parody the optimism of Maoist social realism, and remind the audience of the social detachment and upcoming individualism that abounds now that the old communal society is dissolving.

‘The Chinese have built destroyed and rebuilt their cities for thousands of years’, writes Ian Buruma. ‘What matters is not the actual age of a building but the location.’ This is exactly what is happening again right now in China. Old sites are completely wiped out, to make room for the Chinese moderni$m. But while official versions of this new city prefer to look forward, some film makers dare to question this process. For what happens to the people who used to live on the site where the new China now is built?

This transformation process is beautifully recorded by Wang Bing, in the second part of his nine hour long documentary Tie Xi Qu (West of the Tracks) about the dying state steel industry in Northern China. The second part called Remnants focuses on the workers of Shenyang’s Steel Factory. In one of the opening scenes, a car mounted with a loudspeaker drives through the neighbourhood where they live. Through the megaphone, an invisible mechanically sounding voice informs the inhabitants that their quarter will be modernized. The old houses will be torn down, and the workers are summoned to leave their houses before November 7th. They will be appointed a new apartment, many miles away from their old houses.

From then on Wang subtly shows the gradual disappearance of the old neighbourhood. Every so many scenes, another house will be gone. On the horizon, we see newly built modern apartment blocks, coming closer and closer. Wang never shows us the actual demolition or building process. All we see are the different stages of the disappearing old China and the upcoming modern China. In the end of the second part of Tie Xi Qu the former workers quarter is turned into a fresh building ground for the project developers.

Wang shows us how in the imagination the destruction and reconstruction of China has become as an inevitable process. He makes an explicit point to depersonate the whole transformation. We never get to see the decision makers, the policy planners, the project developers or even the builders. It is as if an invisible hand is turning the country upside down. ‘That is at least how the people experience it themselves’, Wang stated in an interview I once held with him. To them the process seems unavoidable as a rising tide. And that is also the preferred vision of the Chinese authorities. Once it is decided that a neighbourhood will be turned upside down, there is not much room for negotiation. There are few known stories of remnants who were able to persist the modernization drive. For a short while, one lawyer in Shanghai by the name of Zheng Enchong had a few successes suing project developers and local governments. But not long after that he was arrested with charges of revealing state secrets. Needless to say that Wang Bings film cannot be shown inside China.

Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle shows the city from the perspective of the newcomer, the migrant who has acted upon his imagination fuelled by stories of other migrants that had gone before him. Guo Liangui is a young farmer who finds a job as a bike messenger in Beijing. When he takes his first trip, the city is captured from his perspective. Shots of the tall modern skyscrapers that live up to all his expectations, are cut with close-ups of his gaze.

But after this initial phase of enthusiastic amazement, reality settles in. Guo and his only city friend, a shopkeeper, do not live in one of the newly built luxurious apartment buildings. From the shop they have a view on one of these new loft buildings, but a wall separates the world of the city folk from that of the rural immigrants. There was a time when Beijng had one forbidden city, now there are many. All they can do is watch from a distance, to see a lifestyle that they in all reality have no hope of ever achieving.

From then on, Beijing Bicycle mainly focuses on the old Beijing that is disappearing to make room for the modern city. Wang shows us the small alley’s of the hutongs, the grey walls of the brick townhouses. It is a world where the strict distinction between the private and the public of the new China does not yet exist, a far cry from the exclusivity of the fancy restaurants and gated communities of the new rich. Old women exercise their dance routines on the sidewalk. People brush their teeth on the street, and have to rely on public toilets. This world is filmed in warm, sometimes nostalgic colours, although it doesn’t conceal that it is also a grim, decaying place.

Shots of the old Beijing are alternated with scenes from a Beijng that is in between the old and modern: concrete skeletons of buildings that haven’t been finished and desolated area’s that are cleared for rebuilding. It is these area’s that young boys from one of the vocational schools have claimed as their own space. Here they do tricks on their bikes, impressing each other and their audience of watching girls. It is telling that it is only these in-between-spaces that offer any hope for the working class people to somehow manage. Again the city with its skyscrapers –magically lit at night – is within their view. But it will never be their city.

The end of the film continues this point of view. When one of the vocational school boys has stolen Guo’s fancy mountain bike, his friend offers him his old state factory produced one speed bicycle. But already after a few blocks, the old bike – a symbol for the old system – breaks down. When a few shots later he finally receives back his new bike – a symbol for his hope to lead a modern life – he accidentally ends up in a fight. He is severely beaten, his bike is in pieces, and his imagined life in the modern city shattered.

The films of Jia Zhangke, notably Unkown Pleasures, has a similar take on the promises of the Chinese Dream, and the gap between reality and the imagination. Unknown Pleasures takes place in a provincial town, far from the cosmopolitan centres of the New China. Still, the presence of the dream can easily be felt. Invisible speakers advertise a new lottery, that uses ‘modern methods’ and promise a quick way to become rich. A campaign team for a Mongolian wine proudly presents girls who perform a ‘modern dance’ to promote the alcoholic beverage. When Beijing receives the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games – the proof of international recognition that China truly is a modern country – the audience that watched the announcement on television jumps up with great joy. Other newscasts also promise progress: a new road – a metaphor of course for moving onwards – is constructed and will soon be completed.

It is the city as a stage for all these actions that contradicts the promises of the Chinese Dream. There are no modern buildings in Jia’s provincial town, no design architecture or fancy shopping malls, no lush green parks along broad highways. Instead the city in Unknown Pleasures looks grey and unattractive. The apartments are small and crowded, the shops are unsophisticated and in the cultural centre the paint is peeling of the walls. It is another reminder that the city, once the stage for culture – is now an arena for commerce. As Jeremy Heilman has pointed out, the soundtrack of the film stresses how unavoidable this new consumer culture is. Radio and television burst out a continuous stream of commercials, while making the point that in this new society culture comes second to commerce. In one of the tv-ads the cartoonized icon of the traditional Chinese Opera The Monkey King is now promoting a brand of beer. In another scene a performance event promoting the Mongolian wine takes place next to a giant billboard that promotes the construction of the new highway, symbolizing that the road that China has taken is one to blunt commercialism, to Chinese moderni$m.

The characters in Unknown Pleasures dream hopefully about this commercialism. When they find a one-dollar bill hidden in a bottle of Mongolian Wine – a gimmick of the marketing department, they think they are truly rich. But in reality, the new society is out of their reach. The father of one of the protagonists works in a state run factory and hasn’t received any wages in more than three months. ‘The whole country moves ahead, except for you’, another character is told.
It is once again the physical appearance of the city that stresses this point. The main characters live in a deteriorated concrete apartment block. When they walk to the bus stop, they have to traverse a dusty open plane, surrounded by old houses that are almost completely demolished. Jia makes his position clear: the old system is torn down, but most people – in spite of all the promises – get nothing worthwile in return.

This point is strikingly made in the last scene of Unknown Pleasures. After a failed robbery – inspired by Pulp Fiction – one of the main characters heads out of town on his motorbike, smoothly riding on the asphalt of the now finished motorway. After only a short ride, his bike breaks down. The road might be finished, but he just does not have the right means to travel on it. The promise of a road to modernity might be there, but like most people, he is going nowhere.