China on the Move
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Jia Zhangke
11 min read
The article centers on Jia Zhangke's film 'Caught by the Tides' as a lens into modern China's transformation. Understanding his filmography, his history with Chinese censors, and his distinctive neorealist style would deeply enrich the reader's appreciation of how his work serves as anthropological documentation of China's rapid modernization.
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2008 Summer Olympics
12 min read
The article references Beijing's successful bid for the 2008 Olympics as a pivotal moment in China's thrust into modernity. The Olympics represented China's coming-out party on the world stage and catalyzed massive infrastructure investment, directly connecting to the book's thesis about China as an 'engineering state.'
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2008 Sichuan earthquake
1 min read
The article's reference to 'tofu houses' and collapsed schools in Sichuan directly alludes to the devastating 2008 earthquake that killed nearly 70,000 people. The scandal over poorly constructed school buildings that collapsed became a symbol of the human costs of corruption and corner-cutting during China's breakneck development.
Much of contemporary discourse about China remains trapped in what might be called an all-consuming Trump vortex, where nearly everything is refracted through the prism of the 45th and 47th president.
Two new works on China manage to escape that pull for a wider lens look at a country that has undergone a rapid shift over the course of the past several decades.
Jia Zhangke, perhaps China’s most internationally celebrated filmmaker, and deservedly so, returns with Caught by the Tides, an elliptical tone poem and time-lapse romance that doubles as an anthropological portrait of modern China, revisiting central characters of his past films and following their lives across decades as the country transforms around them. Meanwhile, Dan Wang’s new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, offers an assured and lively technocratic account of the political and economic machinery behind that transformation.
In an early scene in Caught by the Tides, which stitches together new and archival fragments, and features actors from Jia’s prior films, including his longtime artistic collaborator and wife, Zhao Tao, a group of Chinese youth dance ecstatically to the Swedish pop song “Butterfly” by Smile.dk. The kinetic dancing scenes bleed into street celebrations of Beijing’s successful bid to host the 2008 Olympics. The evocative montage feels like a fever dream of a country in motion, being thrust into modernity.
Wang’s book traces the very same rise more soberly, explaining how the Soviet Union’s love of heavy industry shaped Beijing’s Politburo, for whom “production was a noble deed to advance communism, while consumption was a despicable act of capitalism.” Wang’s story, and Jia’s more lyrical companion, is one of a relentless focus on the “real” economy: modernizing poor regions of the country, glorifying production, and disdaining consumption. In the U.S., where a financialized economy long ago eclipsed a manufacturing one, Americans are almost resigned to a kind of material decay, if not a spiritual one.
Yet Wang also details the cracks in the China Hype Machine. One fissure in the growth narrative is the fallout from China’s imploded real estate bubble, including the corner-cutting that the breakneck growth encouraged. Long before the bubble burst, parents were already referring to collapsed schools in Sichuan as “tofu houses” due to their fragility, a shorthand for the costs of corruption and speed.
Tofu houses aside,
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