Visions of a New China: Beijing Besieged By Waste

Like goats, sheep can evidently eat anything, but it is not particularly pleasant to watch them do it. A herd grazing through the garbage at one of China’s many illegal landfills is one of the many unappetizing sights to be found in Wang Jiuliang’s Beijing Besieged by Waste (trailer here), which screens at the Asia Society this Saturday, concluding their recent Visions of a New China documentary film series.

Wang is a photographer who has documented the ring of landfills encircling the capitol city in various multimedia projects. He has visited hundreds of festering dumps, some legal, others not. Yet, environmental controls appear nonexistent regardless of the site’s status. In at least one instance we see raw untreated sewage openly dumped in broad daylight, without even a pretense of subterfuge.

Literally muckraking, Wang shows some pretty gross images at times, but they are undeniably effective (though the shot of a cast-off Chinese flag surfacing amid the rubbish is almost too perfect.) He lucidly explains the scope and implications of the waste issue, as well as the government corruption that allows it to continue unchecked. Wang also persuasively argues China’s nouveau riche will not be immune to the problem, pointing to the heavily polluted Wenyu River, for which a district of golf courses and horse stables was named.

Though he treats the hardscrabble scavengers picking through garbage landscapes with unfailing respect, Wang never romanticizes them as heroic recyclers, unlike Mai Iskander’s problematic Garbage Dreams. Unfortunately, he never offers any solutions either, dismissing the incineration option rather arbitrarily.

While it becomes somewhat repetitive after a while (if you’ve seen one teeming dump . . . ), Besieged certainly makes its point. It is enough to make an environmentalist out of anyone, at least with respects to China. The irony is hard to miss. China used to venerate the peasant class. That was a while ago and apparently the sentiment no longer applies to the land they work, if it ever did. More than a tad alarming, Besieged screens this Saturday afternoon (10/29), as the final selection of the Asia Society’s Visions of a New China.

Visions of a New China: Once Upon a Time Proletarian

At best, the peasants live at subsistence level. The workers are exploited and young entrepreneurs forgo today, to invest for the future. Yet, there are those making enormous sums of money and consuming conspicuously in contemporary China. Whether it is called globalism, crony capitalism, or old fashioned authoritarianism, Guo Xiaolu (born in China, based in Britain) gives a human face to those grappling with realities of today’s China in Once Upon a Time Proletarian (trailer here), which screens at the Asia Society this Sunday, launching their latest film series, Visions of a New China.

Like a documentary sampler platter, Proletarian presents twelve (or an uneven baker’s dozen) sketches of life in post-Olympics go-go China. Not surprisingly, the old peasant is bitter, expressing open nostalgia for the days of the Mao regime, when the peasantry was at the top of the country’s social hierarchy. Migrant workers are nearly as disillusioned, including those employed at luxury hotels. Though it might sound more pleasant than factory or farm work, their long shifts without bathroom breaks certainly would not pass muster with OSHA. Perhaps most intriguing is the young partner in a prospective chain of economy hotels. She is overseeing the construction of their second hotel, which when finished will cater to construction workers. That is one way to ensure quality control.

As connective tissue, Guo films young school children reading ironic stories (the term joke would be too strong) from their readers, which do not really relate to the following profiles per se, but express the peculiar zeitgeist of unbalanced times. Eventually though, Guo turns her camera on them in earnest, getting a sense of their personalities and ambitions. They are all bright and engaging. Indeed, they represent the best of their country’s future, yet for some reason, the government is trying its best to make them scarce (particularly the girls, who appear somewhat under-represented).

Though largely following in the recent tradition of so-called Digital Generation (or D-Generate) of independent filmmakers, Proletarian is far more cinematic. Guo captures a number of evocative images and her black-and-white transition scenes are actually quite stylish. As one might expect, there is also a lot of blight and angst in Proletarian, but its speed-documentary format lends it greater pacing and variety than the typical vérité films associated with the movement.

Yet, like many D-Generate filmmakers, Guo is rather subversive in her approach, challenging the Communist state with the values and vocabulary generally considered leftwing in any western context. Just to underscore the disconnect between rhetoric and reality, she concludes the film with Paul Robeson’s recording of the Soviet anthem, which is quickly drowned out by angry Chinese post-punk hardcore music. It is hard to miss that symbolism. An effective corrective to the PRC state hype machine, Proletarian is definitely recommended for China watchers when it kicks off the Visions of New China series at the Asia Society this Sunday afternoon (9/25).