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A Path to Modernization: A Review of Documentaries on Migration and Migrant Labor in China - Manufactured Landscapes (2007) 90 minutes. Director: Jennifer Baichwal. Director of photography: Peter Mettler. Produced by Nick de Pencier, Daniel Iron, and Jennifer Baichwal. Released by Zeitgeist Films. - Bing Ai (2007) 114 minutes. Director, writer, and producer: Feng Yan. http://www.cidfa.com/modules/index.php - Up the Yangtze (2008) 94 minutes. Writer and director: Yung Chang. Director of photography: Wang Shi Qing. Producers: Mila Aung-Thwin, Germaine Ying-Gee Wong, and John Christou. Released by Zeitgeist Films. - Losers and Winners (2007) 96 minutes. Directors: Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken. Released by Icarus Films. - China Blue (2005) 86 minutes. Producer and director: Micha X. Peled. Released by Bullfrog Films. - Mardi Gras (2007) 74 minutes. Producer, director, and editor: David Redmon. Directors of photography: David Redmon and Kathleen Rivera. Released by Carnivalesque Films. - A Decent Factory (2005) 79 minutes. Directed, written, and produced by Thomas Balmès for Margot Films/BBC, and Kaarle Aho for Making Movies. Released by First Run/Icarus Films.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2010

Xiaodan Zhang
Xiaodan Zhang
Affiliation:
York College, City University of New York
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Extract

None of the award-winning films reviewed in this article has a blissful tone. In these films, we watch young girls in assembly lines producing all sorts of commodities in China as well as four hundred Chinese workers disassembling a coking plant in Germany. We are immersed in people's personal stories, such as a peasant woman forced to leave her farm and her lone hut, located in the area due to be submerged by the Three Gorges Dam project, and a sixteen-year-old girl learning to labor on a cruise ship along the Yangtze River. In most of the films we also meet managers, Chinese or foreign, who are concerned with nothing but maximizing profit through intense exploitation of labor. These films document how the massive force of modernization in a globalized world affects lives of common people in China. Their struggles with poverty, corrupt officials, and greedy business owners are displayed in sharp contrast to both shining metropolitan glory and rural banality. In this regard, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's photographs of China, as shown in the film Manufactured Landscapes, seem emblematic enough: Modernization in China has altered the trajectory of people's lives as well as the landscapes of their nation. This article discusses the issues embedded in the stories the seven documentaries present: the impact of global capitalism; the relations between national development and globalization; the conflicts between corporate social responsibility and profit-making; and the predicament of migrant workers and their human agency.

Type
Through the Camera's Eye
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 77 , Issue 1 , Spring 2010 , pp. 174 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2010

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References

Notes

2. The full operation of the dam is now expected in 2011.

3. Holden, Stephen, “A Visit to Old China, Before It Drowns,” New York Times, April 25, 2008Google Scholar.

4. Cieply, Michael, “At Toronto Film Festival, Cautions on Documentaries,” New York Times, September 14, 2009Google Scholar.

5. DargisFor more on Still Life, see Manohla For more on Still Life, see Manohla, “Those Days of Doom on the Yangtze,” New York Times, January 18, 2009Google Scholar.

6. Thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting the comparison.

7. See Lee, Ching Kwan, Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (Berkeley, 1998)Google Scholar; Chan, Anita, China's Workers Under Assault (Armonk, NY, 2001)Google Scholar; Pan, Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC, 2005)Google Scholar; and Yan, Hairong, New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China (Durham, NC, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Lee convincingly elucidates the complex calculations and motivations for these factory girls in Gender and the South China Miracle, 73.

9. See Chang, Leslie T., Factory Girls (New York, 2008)Google Scholar.

10. Also see Chang, Factory Girls.

11. Honig, Emily, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford, CA, 1986)Google Scholar.

12. As Pan puts it, industrial capitalism manipulates the dream of the Chinese peasantry to be both industrial producers and modern consumers. Made in China, 13–14.

13. Yan, New Masters, New Servants, viii.

14. This does not mean there are very few Chinese directors and producers making documentaries. Instead, many interesting titles can be found in the Internet. According to the synopses, a few of them are about the living conditions of migrant labor and laid-off workers from bankrupted state-owned enterprises. I did some investigation and was told that most of them lack formal distribution channels and thus are not available for the public in both China and the West.