For several days in October 2015, many readers in China were enticed by an image on the cover of the new issue of a popular Chinese journal, China Newsweek (中国新闻周刊), which appeared on a multitude of newsstands. The picture shows the famed Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯 (1970–) being hugged by his wife (also his favorite actress) Zhao Tao 赵涛 (1978–), looking self-assuredly at the camera and, implicitly, the readers. His face is the focal point of the image, highlighting the appeal of this national celebrity (but not that of his wife as a film starlet). In itself, this shows the fact that this former “underground” director has become a well-known member of the social elite of the country’s cultural world. However, the more intriguing aspect lies in the contents of this special edition, which is not only dedicated to the director, but also to the group to which he once belonged and through which he honed his skills.
The caption under this cover picture reads “[Where there is] Jia Zhangke , there are old friends in the world” (贾樟柯/山河有故人), which has two levels of connotation. First, it refers to his most recent movie Shanhe Guren (Mountains May Depart, 山河故人) (2015), which literally means “the mountains, the rivers, and the old friends.” Yet, its second level of meaning, “old friends in the world are vanishing,” may be more significant, as it echoes the key feature article of the special edition of China Newsweek. Entitled “Jia Zhangke and the Disappearing Sixth-Generation ,” the last two paragraphs of this essay encapsulate the gist of its significance:
Jia Zhangke believes that the so-called “sixth generation” has disappeared. After the commercialization of Chinese film industry around 2004–2005, the mission of this generation has accomplished. In general, the populace’s individualist concept has been awakened. “Their (the sixth-generation directors’) efforts were to transform themselves to be individuals, but not a ‘generation’ or a group,” he says.
The dispersal of the sixth-generation is not the disappearance of the spirit of a certain type of movie; but the directors who by chance had been included into that genealogy begin to seek the direction most fit for them. The collective group vanishes, and changes to be individuals experimenting [by] themselves. In reality, this is the more normal state of condition. 1
Whether or not the generation has disappeared (or whether it ever existed) is moot. However, in this moment, at least we can ponder the following questions: In what circumstances did the group of auteurs emerge? What kind of social reality was transcribed, projected and articulated in their movies? The cinema that this generation created has been compared to Italian Neorealism and French New Wave; to a certain extent, it could be regarded as China’s cinematic “new wave .” What are the similarities and the differences between these different cinematic movements? And, finally, in what circumstances did China’s “New Wave Cinema” more or less reluctantly disintegrate and disperse? This chapter begins our examination with a contextualization or better, historicization, of this idiosyncratic cinematic phenomenon.
Globalization and China’s Integration into Global Capitalism
In his seminal paper “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” Fredric Jameson affirms “the relationship between globalization and the world market,” seeing it as “the ultimate horizon of capitalism .” In other words, globalization is “an intrinsic feature” of the “multinational stage of capitalism.” 2 In this stage, we witness:
the rapid assimilation of hitherto autonomous national markets and productive zones into a single sphere, the disappearance of national subsistence…the forced integration of countries all over the globe into precisely that new global division of labor…standardization on an unparalleled new scale…the worldwide Americanization or standardization of culture, the destruction of local differences, the massification of all the peoples on the planet. 3
Indeed, globalization is the spreading of global (read ‘Western’) financial capital into other parts of the world, mostly the third world, and has been surging forward since the 1980s. China began to embrace this process only after the 1990s, when the state decided to welcome the Western market and import its economic model in order to reconstruct a market economy . Although the government refuses to acknowledge its adoption of Western neoliberal principles, its policies—such as large-scale privatization , massive deregulation and the neglect of rampant marketization —have brought about dire economic and social consequences. In light of this fact, critics argue that “from the perspective of post socialist states, the term globalization often appears to be simply a label for the rapid, technologically enabled spread of capitalism into areas it had not previously penetrated—or had previously been kicked out of.” 4 With global capitalism as the major catalyst of the spread of financial capital, some scholars believe that Western Europe and America have lost their monopoly on global power and are seeing the weakening of their economic forces. In this way, globalization is taken as a process of decentralization, or bringing about the absence of a “center.” 5 In this “epochal tide,” the phenomena of “becoming cultural of the economic, and the becoming economic of the cultural” characterizes both globalization and postmodernity . 6 As Jameson aptly notes, “globalization essentially means unification and standardization.” 7
With its economic reform policies in the early 1980s, China joined the global market, despite lingering reservations due to its residual socialist principles. Since its beliefs regarding globalization in the early 1990s, the Chinese government has advanced a higher version of capitalist modernization, especially after Deng Xiaoping ’s southern tour in 1992. Calling for a thorough repudiation of taboos dividing socialism from capitalism , the advocates of market reform accepted many tenets of the neoliberal “Washington consensus,” which violates the socialist doctrine. Since then, globalization has decisively engulfed China with the establishment of market-oriented institutions and the so-called “modern enterprise system.” While, in the 1980s, to a great extent the Chinese government still abided by the socialist principles when designing its economic policies, since the 1990s it has often unabashedly followed the neoliberal principles to stimulate its economy, which involves illegal privatization of state-owned enterprises. Thus, while the period after the 1980s in China has generally been considered by scholars as the post-socialist era, we need to make a qualitative differentiation between the two distinct eras.
After three decades of “development,” China now apparently has “risen up” to be the self-styled “strategic partner” of the singular super-power that is the United States. The new English neologism “Chimerica” was created towards the end of the 2010s to describe the new situation of economic symbiosis in international political-economic relations. 8 In terms of the domestic class structure, an almost total replacement of Maoist socialist politics has also been completed:
If Mao had led the communist revolution in the first half of the twentieth century by mobilizing China’s lower social classes and championing the cause of anti-imperialism, the CCP under Deng Xiaoping and his successor Jiang Zemin installed China’s “digital revolution” from above by relying on the country’s technocratic elites and rearticulating China’s political economy with transnational capitalism , leading to the de facto formation of a hegemonic power bloc consisting of Chinese state officials, a rising domestic urban middle class , as well as transnational capitalists, foreign state managers and policy makers. 9
From a leftist point of view, this “monopolization of China’s basic political structure by capital and power is not at all a coincidence,” because the two processes—the “fall of the workers’ state and the legal and political changes produced by China’s adaptation to market economics”—are “inextricably intertwined.” 10 Therefore, the challenging situation that China now poses to scholars around the world is “a poor country that has managed to rise up in the global capitalist order while dramatically increasing domestic class inequalities, and a nation with staggering ethnic, gender, urban-rural, and regional divides.” 11
Regardless of how we understand the so-called “China miracle,” there is no doubt that China’s successful story depends on its reliance on, rather than severance from, the existing rules of the game. In this light, we could say that this process confirms nothing but a “singular modernity,” ...