Youth (Hard Times): Wang Bing uncovers workers’ resilience in his epic survey of Chinese sweatshop labour
The great Chinese documentarian Wang Bing follows-up Youth (Spring) with the second part of a 10-hour triptych about young textile workers, balancing humanity with observational rigour.
- Reviewed from the 2024 Locarno Film Festival
A village of 15,000 sweatshops, countless more industrial sewing machines, and as many intrepid young migrant workers to man them. This is the unique reality of Zhili, located in Huzhou in China’s Northeastern Zhejiang province, which manufactures the majority of the country’s children’s clothes. Through his latest documentary project, running 10 hours in total, Wang Bing has set to exhaustively map this locale for what it represents about the unwieldy introduction of market capitalism into China’s planned economy, and to also observe how the workers themselves are trapped in and wish to escape its grinding gears.
The second chapter, following 2023’s Cannes premiere Youth (Spring) has the Dickensian title Youth (Hard Times), which is bluntly descriptive yet accurate for what ensues. The concluding instalment Youth (Homecoming) will premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. Youth (Hard Times) mimics a similar structure and tone to Spring yet allows for longer narrative passages that focus on particular characters’ travails, whose eventual fates often leave a pessimistic aftertaste. In lieu of a consistent wage and employment protection, these young people (who live on-site during working season, after migrating from far-off rural areas) are pitted against one another as they toil tirelessly side-by-side, forced to do the intricate work of folding and fastening while navigating their equipment’s juddering jaws and their own faltering motor skills. All this for a single-digit Yuen fee per item, if their exploitative workshop managers pay it in the first place. One young woman is clumsy and constantly falls behind her co-workers’ output. Another young man misplaces his vital copybook; dressed in hip streetwear, his previously confident and flash demeanour is replaced by a hangdog silhouette traipsing home through the night.
The factories are generally functional, as the ceiling-high mountains of cotton jumpers and denim dungarees in Spring show, but the centre clearly cannot hold. As the workers attain consciousness, there is a drive towards unionisation and organisation. As seen in other recent documentary and fiction dispatches from repressive regimes, such as Iran’s The Seed of a Sacred Fig, the youngest generation – the youth, indeed – are the ones to agitate for reform, but in this case, China’s political status quo will likely lure them to conformity, in a rapacious capitalist mode: “Have money, get girl. No money, no life”, as one male worker sadly concedes. Hard Times doesn’t stand on its own as successfully as its more self-contained predecessor, but is an essential part of a triptych that establishes Wang as China’s foremost cine-sociologist; 21st century turbo-capitalism captured with the spirit of 19th century social realism.