Dear Commons Community,

Those of us old enough to remember the uprisings in Tiananmen Square in Beijing twenty-four years ago, recall that they signaled a significant change in how China interacted with the rest of the world.  On this anniversary, I draw your attention to a colleague of mine from The College of Staten Island, Ying Zhu.   We were together a week ago on Memorial Day, and she mentioned an op-ed piece that she was invited to write for the Wall Street Journal:

Essentially she compares China in the late 1980s and the late 2000s through two Chinese film documentaries.  The first was “River Elegy,” 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,” a less well-known but still striking 30-minute experimental video produced at the height of China’s economic boom in 2007.

As she commented in the op-ed piece which was published yesterday:

“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…

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.”

Ying’s insights are must reading for anyone interested in China then and now.

Well-done!

Tony