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 (äžćœæ°é»ćšć), which appeared on a multitude of newsstands. The picture shows the famed Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke 莟æšæŻ (1970â) being hugged by his wife (also his favorite actress) Zhao Tao è””æ¶ (1978â), 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 âundergroundâ director has become a well-known member of the social elite of the countryâs 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 â[Where there is] Jia Zhangke , there are old friends in the worldâ (莟æšæŻ/ć±±æČłææ
äșș), which has two levels of connotation. First, it refers to his most recent movie Shanhe Guren (Mountains May Depart, ć±±æČłæ
äșș) (2015), which literally means âthe mountains, the rivers, and the old friends.â Yet, its second level of meaning, âold friends in the world are vanishing,â may be more significant, as it echoes the key feature article of the special edition of China Newsweek. Entitled âJia Zhangke and the Disappearing Sixth-Generation ,â the last two paragraphs of this essay encapsulate the gist of its significance:
Jia Zhangke believes that the so-called âsixth generationâ has disappeared. After the commercialization of Chinese film industry around 2004â2005, the mission of this generation has accomplished. In general, the populaceâs individualist concept has been awakened. âTheir (the sixth-generation directorsâ) efforts were to transform themselves to be individuals, but not a âgenerationâ or a group,â 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 Chinaâs cinematic ânew wave .â What are the similarities and the differences between these different cinematic movements? And, finally, in what circumstances did Chinaâs âNew Wave Cinemaâ 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 Chinaâs Integration into Global Capitalism
In his seminal paper âNotes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,â Fredric Jameson affirms âthe relationship between globalization and the world market,â seeing it as âthe ultimate horizon of capitalism .â In other words, globalization is âan intrinsic featureâ of the âmultinational stage of capitalism.â 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 subsistenceâŠthe forced integration of countries all over the globe into precisely that new global division of laborâŠstandardization on an unparalleled new scaleâŠthe 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 âWesternâ) 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 policiesâsuch as large-scale privatization , massive deregulation and the neglect of rampant marketization âhave brought about dire economic and social consequences. In light of this fact, critics argue that âfrom 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 penetratedâor had previously been kicked out of.â 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 âcenter.â 5 In this âepochal tide,â the phenomena of âbecoming cultural of the economic, and the becoming economic of the culturalâ characterizes both globalization and postmodernity . 6 As Jameson aptly notes, âglobalization essentially means unification and standardization.â 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 âs 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 âWashington consensus,â which violates the socialist doctrine. Since then, globalization has decisively engulfed China with the establishment of market-oriented institutions and the so-called âmodern enterprise system.â 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 âdevelopment,â China now apparently has ârisen upâ to be the self-styled âstrategic partnerâ of the singular super-power that is the United States. The new English neologism âChimericaâ 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 Chinaâs lower social classes and championing the cause of anti-imperialism, the CCP under Deng Xiaoping and his successor Jiang Zemin installed Chinaâs âdigital revolutionâ from above by relying on the countryâs technocratic elites and rearticulating Chinaâs 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 âmonopolization of Chinaâs basic political structure by capital and power is not at all a coincidence,â because the two processesâthe âfall of the workersâ state and the legal and political changes produced by Chinaâs adaptation to market economicsââare âinextricably intertwined.â 10 Therefore, the challenging situation that China now poses to scholars around the world is âa 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.â 11
Regardless of how we understand the so-called âChina miracle,â there is no doubt that Chinaâs 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 âsingular modernity,â ...