To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke).
It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
- Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
The long and empty platform The wait seems never ending
The long box cars are carrying my short-lived love The long and empty platform
Lonely, we can only wait All my love is out-bound Nothing on the in-bound train
- Lyrics of a Chinese pop song “Platform” (Zhantai)
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.
“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones?
It is only the arch that matters to me.”
Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
The end of the Cultural Revolution following Mao’s death would lead to the end of the era of Chinese socialism characterized by criticism of capitalism. With introduction of the market economy system since 1978, the socialist reform movement has promoted economic development and modernization in the name of “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics.” Posed by severe criticism of the previous era’s socialism that had centered on the system of public ownership and egalitarianism, the Chinese economic reform proceeded to encourage the private sector to enhance competition and efficiency.
In the countryside this led to the disbanding of the agricultural communes, in place of which household-based agriculture was promoted according to the individual responsibility system. Such responsibility and shareholding systems were also gradually introduced into the urban industrial sector (Wang H., 2003: 151). The transformation of the economic system in the 1980s certainly motivated individuals to get rich by taking on private ownership of property on the economic level, but also impacted on the socio-political level by giving rise to great socio-socio-political expectations and utopian visions, despite the confusion, ambiguity, and even chaos that the reforms caused. While it has variously been dubbed “the post-Mao era”, “the post-revolutionary age”, “the eighties,”
and “the Reform decade,”, this period was labeled the “New Era” (Xin Shiqi, 1978-1989), in an attempt by the Communist Party to overcome the painful history of the Mao era, while simultaneously opening up the possibility of the construction of a new nation. In other words, the “New Era” reforms aimed to implement a new modernization project within the capitalist system, abandoning the previous Maoist socialist modernization.
The economic reforms produced considerable debate about how to build a new society in the 1980s, and among these, as Wang Hui (2003) has argued, the most dynamic intellectual discourse was the New Enlightenment movement. This was an ideology of modernization, theoretically based not on socialism but rather on Western ideas which were introduced to China throughout the 1980s through pedagogic, literary, aesthetic, and political discourses. (155-157). The form of modernization pursued under the New Enlightenment movement was based within Western capitalist modernity, and debates on Chinese modernity were consequently subsumed within the dichotomy of tradition/modernity, thus resonating with the Enlightenment movement of the May Fourth discourse in the early twentieth century. Chinese intellectuals involved in the movement for the liberation of thought in the 1980s understood the socialism of the previous era as a residue of feudal tradition, and thus they sought to construct new self-identifications through their reflections on the weaknesses of the previous socialism. In the field of literature, for instance, a trend called “Scar Literature” (shanghen wenxue) emerged that reflected on the people’s trauma during socialist eras, particularly during the Cultural Revolution period or the “shinian dongluan” (ten years of chaos). This new era literature, which included a few additional categories, was labeled by critics as
“Retrospective Literature” (fansi wenxue), “Reform Literature” (gaige wenxue), and
“Roots-seeking Literature” (xungen wenxue). By and large, it appeals for a rethinking of the wounded individual in Chinese modern history through its allegorical critique of socialist periods which is represented as the oppressive feudal system. Moreover, it was through completely new genres, such as “Misty Poetry” (menglong shi) and “Avant-garde/experimental Literature” (xianfeng wenxue/shiyan wenxue), that new era literature
explored individual subjectivity and pursued literary innovation as an expression of the modernist movement through literature.52
The cultural elite’s utopian discourse of the New Enlightenment and the state’s project to reconstruct a socialist utopia, then, coexisted uneasily during the 1980s, but was inevitably ended following the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June Fourth, 1989.
With the inevitable collision between intellectuals and the state, the demise of one utopian project in the 1980s gave rise to the growth of another, the post-1989 economic boom (Wang J., 1996: 2-3). Although intellectuals identified themselves with cultural leaders and heroes for the establishment of a new utopian society during the 1980s, under the pervasive commercial culture of the 1990s intellectuals became “painfully conscious of the fact that they are no longer contemporary cultural heroes and arbiters of value” (Wang H., 2003: 144). As the elite intellectuals and cultural heroes of the 1980s became experts, scholars and professionals, they were gradually incorporated into the 1990s market economy, which is generally called “xia hai” (jumping into the sea) in Chinese53. With the elite enlightenment discourse of the 1980s being spurned by the rise of popular culture in the 1990s, modernist literature lost its position to new popular literatures, such as Wang Shuo’s “Hooligan Literature” (liumang wenxue). The utopianism embedded in an elitist discourse of the 1980s was eventually absorbed into the huge stream of Chinese post-modernism which was dominated by the market economy.
52 For more details about new era literature and modernism during the 1980s, see part 2
“Literary Discourse” in Zhang Xudong, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms, Durham:
Duke University Press, 1997 and Wang Jing, High Culture Fever, Berkeley: University of California, 1996.
53 For the more debates on cultural heroes under the Chinese social transformation between the 1980s and the 1990s, see Dai Jinhua ed. Shuxie wenhua yingxiong (Writing Cultural Heroes), Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2000.
It is this decade of massive upheaval, spanning the period between Mao’s death (1978) and the period leading up to the Tiananmen movement in 1989 that Jia Zhangke’s second feature film, Platform (2000), reflects. The upbeat atmosphere of the New Era had delivered great expectations and utopian visions to ordinary people in backward provincial locations as well as to the urban elite intellectuals. To the former, the social transformation of the 1980s comprised a visible and embodied change in the reality of their daily lives, while to the latter, it was a shift in ideology and a modernization project. Platform delineates these individuals’ experiences and memories of social transition through the rise and fall of a local troupe of cultural performance artists (wengongtuan). While ‘Fifth Generation’ films are commonly understood to present the story of Chinese national time or history through the life of individuals as national allegory (Chow, 1995), Platform could be considered as an attempt to personalize or localize Chinese national time into the specific time that an individual experienced. In other words, the Fifth Generation films produced in the 1980s, most of which are based on modernist New Era novels, reveal the utopianism of the 1980s through their reflection on national history. Conversely, Platform recalls the individual memories and experiences of the 1980s from the present perspective of the 1990s and early 2000s. Hence, what Platform captures is a local and specific reception of how ordinary people experienced the New Era, rather than the central and ideological discourses of elitist intellectuals. In the context of Jia’s filmography, Platform might be seen as a prequel to his previous work Xiao Wu, because although there is no direct continuity of story between them they are both set in the same local place, Fenyang of the 1980s. At the same time, the film serves as a thematic and emotional prototype for
his subsequent films in terms of tracing his filmic concerns back to the time when the Chinese social change started54.