Capturing China in globalization: the dialectic of autonomy and dependency in Zhang Yimou's cinema.(Critical essay)

In 1992 Zhang Yimou, doubtless China's best-known film director both domestically and abroad, released The Story of Qiu Ju (Qiuju da guansi), a dramatic feature about a peasant woman seeking justice for her injured husband. (1) Qiu Ju signals several significant departures from earlier works that bear Zhang's auteurist signature. The extravagant display of exotic colors and customs and the exuberant celebration of the repressed spirit yearning its rightful release that characterize Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, 1987), Ju Dou (1990), and Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong denglong gaogaogua, 1991) are remarkably absent in Qiu Ju. In their stead is a drab documentary look, which is both a deliberate withdrawal of a previous gaze at the mythical Chinese past and an insistent turn toward a contemporary China caught in the sharp relief of the rural and the urban. The film's break in Zhang's oeuvre appears even more striking given the retrospective vantage point we now occupy: the waning of a romantic overtone and the commitment to realism in Qiu Ju continue with such representative later films as To Live (Houzhe, 1994), a family saga of suffering and endurance, and Not One Less (1999), the tale of an adolescent girl fighting for public education. What could account for this sudden shift of aesthetics and ideology marked by The Story of Qiu Ju? What would such a critical account of textual rupture tell us both of Zhang's artistic practice and its social relevance against China's recent rise in world geopolitical economy and the world's domination by global capitalism? (2)

It is instructive to recall that the formal fissure in Zhang Yimou's cinematic corpus roughly parallels a watershed event in Chinese history, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when popular demand for democracy was quelled in cold blood. The first film to appear three years after the crackdown, Qiu Ju's quest of retribution for the wrongful wounding of her husband by the village party chief unmistakably functions as a somber political allegory of governance and justice. But this is no mere national allegory. The Chinese state's monopoly of violence, instead of being viewed as indigenous despotism or communist barbarity, must be apprehended along the end of the Cold War, China's opening to the world, as well as global capital's emerging reign over nation-states. The earth-shattering carnage in "the square of heavenly peace" (Tiananmen Square) appears an atrocious case of traumatic and truncated development that only ensures the smooth march of transnational corporations and China's entry into the world market. In this context, the film's allegorical ambivalence--the fact that The Story of Qiu Ju concludes without any clear narrative resolution as to which party is right--is telling of Zhang's own ambivalence about China's transition from socialism to capitalism and its changing conditions of ethical judgment. The confusion of justice that the director addresses, in other words, mediates a series of value competitions in the wake of global capitalism. The film's repetitive and insistent shuttling between the agrarian and industrializing modes of life spatializes the rivalry between "saving face" in a face-to-face village and the faceless abstraction of property rights in the global village. It also suggests a temporal conflict between the pledging of allegiance to an ascriptive, rooted, and territorially bounded form of sociality and the privileging of an acquisitive, mobile, and unencumbered form of individuality.

In this manner, Qiu Ju encapsulates both the tension central to the globalization of capital and culture and the creative contradiction within Zhang's extensive corpus. If the racy story of forbidden love and its transgression in the pre-Qiu Ju period corresponds with China's unprecedented opening up in the 1980s, with its ubiquitous "high culture fever" and "emancipation of the mind" (J. Wang), symptomatic texts of the post-Qiu Ju period engage the 1990s China when the culture of capitalism has more or less infiltrated its physical and psychic landscape. An aesthetic of self-possessive and affective individualism preoccupies the earlier period: the opposition to the totalitarian socialist state finds its metaphor in the revolt against tyrannical landlords while the appropriation of their women comes to justify the natural rise of capitalist enterprise. In contrast, a gloomy mise-en-scene and gritty texture tend to dominate the later productions, which question whether the free market is tantamount to a free society and whether the weak and the vulnerable can be logically written off the scale of justice. (3)

By seizing this critical disjuncture while reading his Red Sorghum and Happy Times (Xinfu shiguang, 2000) as exemplary text of each period, I will juxtapose Zhang's cinema with China's developmental trajectory to highlight that the director's dilemma about his nation's opening to global capitalism is very much the dilemma of our time. The liberalization of the Chinese economy and the revolution of Reagan and Thatcher are not just historical coincidences in different parts of the planet. Rather, they are expressive of an ascending cross-border consensus of culture after the end of the Cold War and the near disappearance of alternative political economies. If the persuasive power of this neoliberal common sense rests on its radical promise of individual sovereignty and ruthless denial of social necessity, the value of Zhang lies in his earnest and often ambivalent mediation of this cultural logic, sometimes through affirmation and assimilation while other times through questioning and opposition. Zhang's cinema is a clairvoyant capture of globalization in all its contradictions, and it is toward the auteur's split framing of liberty and community against a rapidly changing China that we now turn our critical eye.

1

Typical of the 5th Generation of film directors, Zhang's debut shares the intellectual tension of the mid-1980s China as it opens up to global capital. On the one hand, the movement expresses itself as a renewed desire for an enlightenment modernity reviving the May 4th legacy and its iconoclastic assault on precapitalist Chinese tradition. On the other hand, such passion for modernity is wedded to a national "search for roots," seeking to excavate some hitherto suppressed Chinese Zeitgeist (Lu, 1997, 107-08). This double movement of cultural reflection and national articulation against the landlocked past and toward an oceanic future is achieved in cinema through a salient stylization. (4) The spectacular capture of quaint color and landscape functions as much as the 5th Generation's inoffensive disavowal of communist rule and socialist realism as its deliberate pitch of aesthetic distinction to the international film market (X. Zhang, 1997, 205-06). For Dai Jinhua, "the novel film language" betrays "a biography of a generation's spiritual exile" (16). For Rey Chow, it is an instance of "primitive passion" at the moment of a "cultural crisis": when the traditional begins to converge with the modern, yet fails to achieve signification, a fantasy of common origin arises. The primitive as a figure for this "irretrievable common/place" thus becomes necessarily the "fabrication of a pre that occurs in the time of the post" (Chow, 22; original emphasis). Zhang Yimou's mythical agrarian, it seems, is an ethnographic self-invention that figures an Eastern tradition against a Western modernity.

But Zhang's 1980s is not an era of nineteenth-century colonialism. The founding of the People's Republic of China at once rejects capitalist modernity and carves a divergent path of socialist modernity. For Zhang to evoke the primitive is to negotiate a cultural crisis not of classical colonialism but contemporary neocolonialism under global capital. By emptying the immediate past of macabre socialism and harking back to a precapitalist China, Zhang's primitive reimagines a blank slate so that a current embrace of capitalism could be potentially conceived as teleological progress rather than historical regression. A story of "primitive passion," Red Sorghum is perhaps best appreciated in this context as a narration of "primitive accumulation." It is a film that ingeniously subsumes the pursuit of material interests in the tropes of sexual passion, at once mystifying the naked operation of power and mythologizing the legitimacy of possession. By transfiguring the historical difference between socialist and capitalist political economies into a timeless romantic rivalry, Red Sorghum becomes a successful article of imagistic and ideological persuasion that eventually valorizes a type of hero and favors a type of subjectivity supportive of capitalistic system.