When I enthusiastically reviewed the first part of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy for Business Doc Europe, I concluded that the film focused more on the personal and social lives of its protagonists – young migrant workers in the textile workshops of Zhili, China – than on their economic and political circumstances. But I also wrote that ‘it’s possible that the announced trilogy on the subject, with an estimated combined running time of nine hours and forty minutes, will have a different effect.’
And indeed, while the first part, Spring, showed lively youths, most in their early twenties, having fun, fights and romantic entanglements in their workshops, dorms and surrounding areas (all the while working at breakneck speed for fifteen hours a day), the almost four-hour second part Hard Times, world-premiering in Locarno’s International Competition, foregrounds their economic difficulties, with a heavy dose of indirect political criticism, especially of the police.
Still, the two episodes are less different than one might expect. You can find heady discussions with managers about financial issues in Spring and young workers flirting in Hard Times. And both films end similarly, with scenes of workers returning home to their families, thousands of miles away, which is presumably the focus of Youth’s final instalment, Homecoming, which will premiere in Venice later this month. Roughly speaking, Wang has taken the same elements and changed his own stance. As if he took the same recipe, called Youth, but adjusted the amounts of ingredients and the times they need to simmer.
In a sense, Wang has taken a step back. Hard Times still has a great sense of space – with the small concrete workshops, and their third-floor dormitories, packed onto streets full of parked cars and drying laundry – but is somewhat less immersive than Spring. Instead, we get more of a sense of how it all functions. And doesn’t. And with Homecoming, we can expect an overview on an even larger, regional scale. In this way, the trilogy zooms in on the structural issues by zooming out both socially and geographically.
Some context is useful here. First, as the end credits mention, the 18,000-plus Zhili workshops produce mostly for the domestic market, especially children’s clothing, reportedly accounting for more than two-thirds of children’s wear production in China. So the film has relatively less to do with Western fashion imports. Also, the Zhili workshops are an exception within China. They are privately owned, require little paperwork and, it seems, suffer little oversight. This equates to a sense of freedom – albeit a chaotic one – which was pervasive in Spring and can also be found in Hard Times.
As Wang explained in an interview with the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation: “In Suzhou, for example, they mainly have these enormous factories with ultra-tight surveillance, where you clearly can’t film. Zhili is on a comparable scale – 300,000 migrant workers come to work there each year – but production is scattered among thousands of small units, individual or family businesses, all of which are self-managed. This means that control and surveillance are also fragmented, making access much easier for a documentary filmmaker.”
And: “In most places, to start a business you need capital, [a] plant and a workforce, you have to pay corporate and local administrative taxes, and so on. Not in Zhili: here you can set up your business in a day. In the morning, you find a workshop, sign a lease on the spot and put up a sign offering work for fifteen machine operators. Everything else you need – machines, materials, fabric – is locally available. Buyers come to your door, and by evening, your finished product can be bundled and shipped out by special convoy to the four corners of China. (…) This archaic set-up doesn’t exist anywhere else in China, where the other economic sectors are entirely controlled by the State.”
For the Youth trilogy, whose production slowed down during Covid, Wang amassed 2600 hours of footage between 2014 and 2019. During this period, wages were under pressure, while rents were rising. And because the workers get paid individually, per item produced, intense discussions about the going rates for each item – from basic shirts to long trousers – form a central part of Hard Times. The mostly young workers act as their own de facto unions, with collective bargaining their best hope. But no one knows in advance how much they will earn, as these negotiations take place only at the end of each season. And, as more than one worker sighs, the results are increasingly disappointing.
From the manager who ran off with the money, to the young worker talking about the 2011 riots (when a sudden increase in the ‘sewing machine tax’ threatened to put many Zhili workers out of business) and the torture he and others subsequently suffered at the hands of the police, to the uprooted, overworked and underpaid workers discussing how to hide failed products within outgoing batches, a sense of disintegration pervades Hard Times. How long will this vast system of garment production be sustainable? And what, if anything, is the alternative for these young workers, whose talk of marriage and settling down feels less like plans for the future – as it mostly still did in Spring – and more like unattainable dreams? As the young man explaining the riots says: “Some people think we were just a bunch of rowdy kids who needed to be taught a lesson. In fact, what happened was that [the police bureau] opened our eyes to the reality of this society.”
When we see a group of workers running rather than walking across a pedestrian crossing, fearful of approaching traffic, it seems symbolic: the workers are using the system, but they don’t trust it.
Will the future of these young workers maybe lie not in Zhili, but back with their families in the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu, where most of them come from? This will perhaps become clear in Wang’s final part of his already impressive Youth trilogy, Homecoming. Stay tuned.
France/Luxembourg/Netherlands, 2024, 223 minutes
Director Wang Bing
Production House on Fire, Gladys Glover, CS Production
Producers Sonia Buchman, Mao Hui, Nicolas R. De La Mothe, Vincent Wang
International sales Pyramide International
Script Wang Bing
Cinematography Shan Xiaohui, Song Yang, Ding Bihan, Liu Xianhui, Maeda Yoshitaka, Wang Bing
Editing Dominique Auvray, Xu Bingyuan
Sound Ranko Pauković
