Zhao Dayong

“How China is using art (and artists) to sell itself to the world” is an informative and insightful article in The Star by Murray Whyte. It analyzes China’s recent boom in cultural and media industries and its discontents—a burgeoning scene of individual expression. dGenerate directors Ou Ning and Zhao Dayong and producer David Bandurski are featured in the article as prominent representatives of the alternative art scene.

For Whyte, China’s recent supports and displays of cultural development reflect the government’s deep desire to raise “soft power”– “the ability of a political body to get what it wants through cultural or ideological attraction”–in order to match its huge economic development. The efforts include the plans for new museums and “creative districts” nationwide, proliferation of a glossy magazine industry that embraces Western excess, participation in global cultural events such as the Frankfurt Book Fair, the induction of formerly underground filmmakers back into state-run studios, and the production of big-budget political blockbusters such as The Founding of a Republic.

These splashy, showy displays, contrary to common expectation, do not indicate progress in free expression. Artist and activist Ou Ning, whom the article identifies as a “tireless campaigner for cultural freedom,” refers to the overwhelming urban reconstruction making place for the creative districts as “trading a specific brand of artistic freedom for a broader tyranny.” Commenting on the burgeoning media and culture landscape, David Bandurski (producer of Ghost Town) of Hong Kong University’s China Media Project notes, “This has nothing to do with the vibrancy of culture, or the diversity of culture.” Instead, he continues, “[The government] wants a renaissance, but they want it to happen under party control.”

Beneath this superficial and artificial glamor, the article also notices a “thriving underground scene” that represents a “new kind of expression that has sprouted amid the state-mandated cultural flowering.” Documentary film, as the article quotes Ou Ning again, is the country’s new frontier for individual expression. Among them, Ghost Town by Zhao Dayong and San Yuan Li by Ou Ning and Cao Fei both depict abandoned landscapes and lives, one left “on the distant margins of a country pushed into modernization overdue,” the other “swallowed by Guangzhou’s land-gobbling development.” Although Zhao Dayong defines his work as more individual expression than political act, Ou Ning and Whyte both see the progressive effects of this growing individual expression. The article concludes with Ou’s remark, “Everyone to make a small change in their daily lives. That’s how society can change: individually, step by step, by all of us.”

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The fourten films span from the leftist classical, made at the eve of the Communist victory, Crows and Sparrows (1949) to such “model plays” produced during the Cultural Revolution as Red Detachments of Women (1961, modern ballet version 1970) and Red Lantern (1970), from the “historical and cultural reflection” of the fifth generation like One and Eight (1983) and Yellow Earth (1984) to independent products of the sixth and the digital generations, such as Beijing Bastards (1993), Platform (2000), and Good Cats (2009, by dGenerate director Ying Liang, area premiere). As a whole, the series charts the unprecedented propulsive energies at work through years of radical transformation and looks to the future of a country still in flux—one responding both to its past and its relatively new prominence in the larger world.

The series is copresented by the Walker Art Center and the Consortium for the Study of the Asias at the University of Minnesota, and organized by Sheryl Mousley, Walker film curator, and Jason McGrath, associate professor of modern Chinese literature and film.

Dates: November 4 – 23, 2009
Locations: Walker Art Center Cinema (on 35mm film) and Bell Museum Auditorium, U of Minnesota (on video).

All films are in Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles.

Schedule:

Wednesday, November 4
New Year’s Sacrifice (dir. Sang Hu, 100 min, 1956)
6:00 p.m., Bell Auditorium

Friday, November 6
Crows and Sparrows (dir. Zheng Junli, 113 min, 1949)
7:30 p.m., Walker Art Center

Saturday, November 7
Little Red Flowers (dir. Zhang Yuan, 91 min, 2006)
7:30 pm, Walker Art Center
Additional showing on Wednesday, November 11 at 10:00 am.

Sunday, November 8
Red Detachment of Women (dir. Pan Wenzhan, et al., 120 min, 1970)
3:00 p.m. Walker Art Center

Monday, November 9
Red Detachment of Women (dir. Xie Jin, 92 min, 1961)
6:00 p.m., Bell Auditorium

Wednesday, November 11
Red Lantern (dir. Cheng Yin,112 min,1970)
6:00 p.m., Bell Auditorium

Friday, November 13
Yellow Earth (dir. Chen Kaige, 89 min, 1984)
7:30 p.m., Walker Art Center

Saturday, November 14
Platform (dir. Jia Zhangke, 154 min, 2000)
7:30 p.m., Walker Art Center

Monday, November 16
One and Eight (dir. Zhang Junzhao, 90 min,1983)
6:00 p.m., Bell Auditorium

Wednesday, November 18
Ermo (dir. Zhou Xiaowen, 98 min, 1994)
6:00 p.m., Bell Auditorium

Thursday, November 19
Beijing Bastards (dir. Zhang Yuan, 95 min, 1993)
7:30 p.m., Walker Art Center

Saturday, November 21
Good Cats (dir. Ying Liang, 103 min, 2009) and Cry Me A River (dir. Jia Zhang-ke, 19 min, 2009)
7:30 p.m., Walker Art Center

Monday, November 23
Pirated Copy (dir. He Jianjun, 90 min, 2004)
6:00 p.m., Bell Auditorium

For more information, please visit the program website.

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National East Wind Farm, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Two themes are central to the fifteen documentaries: forgotten or suppressed history and marginal, dispossessed social groups. In the first category, Hu Jie is a pioneering documentarian, who in recent years has engaged in making video works about the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), two forbidden topics in modern Chinese history. His National East Wind Farm (Guo ying dong feng nong chang, 2008) examines the experience of hundreds of “Rightists”–former teachers, cadres, university students, and military officials who were persecuted for answering the Party’s call to voice their criticisms—incarcerated on a “thought reform through labor” farm in Mile County, Yunnan Province of southwest China. The neutral term “national farm” is official history’s euphemism for gulag. Based on interviews with former inmates and staffs of the farm, the film re-examines the absurd history from the Great Leap Forward period through the Cultural Revolution, as well as the sufferings of the bodies and souls subjugated to “remolding.”

Hu’s other work In Search for the Soul of Lin Zhao (Xun zhao Lin Zhao de ling hun, 2005) investigates an unresolved and suppressed case in modern Chinese history of thought. Lin Zhao, a student of Beijing University unique in her keen observation of social problems and courageous expression of her opinion, was persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Movement and executed in 1968. Treating her as a pioneer pursuer of civil rights and freedom of expression, the “Director’s Statement” calls for a re-examination of her legacy against the contemporary need to improve democracy and reassert human rights.

Though I Am Gone (Wo sui si qu, 2006, Hu Jie), tries to reexamine the Cultural Revolution from the sufferings of Ms. Bian Zhongyun, an ordinary high school deputy principal in Beijing who was beaten to death by her students. The film investigates into the fact that educators were the first and most heavily persecuted group during the period, but their sufferings were largely ignored by official media. Hu reveals the reason of this negligence in the “Director’s Statement”: “The huge amount of casualties among ordinary citizens would change the overall picture of the Cultural Revolution, together with the analysis of the movement’s nature, therefore leading to a deepened research on the responsibility of the Cultural Revolution.” The film is a challenge to the thin line in law and media concerning historical accounts.

Looking for the Lost Veterans of 1979 (Xun zhao 79 yue zhan xiao shi de lao bing, 2008, Zhang Dali) focuses on another ignored social group from a forgotten historical event—the veterans from the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war. As the war became out of context, the veterans found themselves deserted by the economical reform and social reconstruction in the past thirty years. From the veterans’ recounts about the glory and brutality of war and their changed experience thereafter, the film asks the question about the affect of war and social changes on common soldiers and citizens.

Many documentaries about more recent history focus on a unique phenomenon among contemporary China’s rapid and sometimes aimless changes—demolition. Artists of Yuan Ming Yuan (Yuan ming yuan de yi shu jia men, 1995, Hu Jie) and Farewell, Yuan Ming Yuan (Gao bie yuan ming yuan, 2006, Zhao Liang) are two direct records of the same event: the forced demolition of the avant-garde artist community around Yuan Ming Yuan (Old Summer Palace) in western suburb of Beijing, and the “last spring” of the artists.

Before The Flood, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Before the Flood (Yan mo, 2005, Li Yifan and Yan Yu), winner of the Wolfgang Staudte Award at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, can be seen as a documentary version of Jia Zhangke’s Still Life. For almost the whole year of 2002, the two filmmakers recorded how the two thousand-year-old town of Fengjie was devastated, its residents displaced, to prepare for its eventual flooding for the Three Gorges hydroelectric project on the Yangtze River. The film combines panoramic overviews and detailed observation of individual sufferings and endurance. The “Director’s Statement” calls it an allegorical work: “It focuses on individuals and objects under specific circumstances, and, through their changes and struggles, tries to open a window about this age.”

Two films focus on the 5.12 Earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, and investigate into, from different perspectives, the hidden or unseen reality behind the catastrophe. Who Killed Our Children (Hai zi hai zi, 2008, Pan Jianlin) investigates the death of hundreds of students at Muyu Village Middle School in Qingchuan county, and from this small angle examines the most shocking and heartbreaking fact about the earthquake: the high casualties of students due to the shoddy constructions of elementary, secondary, and nursery schools. As the responsibility concerning the students’ death and the accurate statistics of the causality has become a major source of unresolved conflict between the government and victims’ parents, Pan’s film is a case study of this conflict as well as a response to the problem’s call for independent report.

Red White (Zhong sheng, 2009, Chen Xinzhong), was named after a heavily devastated county, and presents local people’s material and emotional response to the catastrophe through the many mundane details of everyday life: food and shelter, conversations and quarrels, new year celebration, funerals, and religious ceremonies. At the center of the film is the activity of a Taoist master, who serves as fortuneteller, feng shui master, and source of help for many other material and emotional problems. From this unique angle, the film humanizes the survivors and ponders on human need for faith and divinity after trauma. In a review of the 2009 Beijing International Film Festival, Ying Liang, another director from Sichuan, highly praises the film for its withdrawal of moral judgment and its vivid capture of the uncanniness surrounding the landscape.

The relationship between the individual and the state machine is the explicit theme of many films about contemporary issues. Old Mom’s Pork Feet Stew (Lao ma ti hua, 2009) by controversial artist Ai Weiwei is the most recent work in the list and the filmmaker’s direct tribute to the 60^th anniversary celebration. This 75-minute documentary, shot with a hidden DV camera, records the bitter and absurd experience of Ai and other human rights activists of being harassed and illegally detained by the police of Chengdu (capital of the Sichuan province) and their later frustrating struggle with the authorities.

Petition, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Petition (Shang fang, 2009, Zhao Liang) presents a broader and “stranger than fiction” view of ordinary citizens’ struggle for judicial justice. Its protagonists—the people appealing to the high authorities in Beijing for their wrongs unresolved through local channels—are victims of and fighters against the defects of China’s legal and governmental system (according to the sociologist Yu Jianrong). Zhao’s film followed and recorded the struggles and sufferings of the “petitioners” on the margin of Beijing for an amazing 12 years, from 1996 to 2008. Divided into three chapters—”Petition Village”, “Mother and Daughter”, “Beijing Southern Railway Station”—the film combines group portraits and individual depictions. In an interview, Zhao Liang describes his working attitude as “gracious presentation.” The graciousness is especially represented in his attention to and compassion for individual lives and sufferings.

Hu Jie’s Rural Mountain (Yuan shan, 1995) is another compassionate and dignifying portrait of the dispossessed. It records the work and life of one of the most exploded group in contemporary China: the coal miners in some private and often illegal mines on the high plateau of the underdeveloped Qinghai Province. More than a protest against grave social problems—the primitive and dangerous working condition, the merciless mine owners and irresponsible local government, and the appalling poverty behind the workers’ choice, the film is an honest document about labor and life. The “Director’s Statement” expressly stated the film’s aspiration in locating the characters in human history: “[The hard labor] reflects the perseverance and dignity of the working class, and forms a segment of the history toward human civilization that we should never forget.”

Rural Mountain, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Other films present overviews of the sixty years. 60 (2009, Zhang Ming) is part of the oral history project “They Say,” a compilation of interviews with ordinary citizens about their experience in historical and political turmoil in some forgotten historical periods. The protagonist, Wang Kang, is a contemporary to the P.R.C. His sixty years of life witnesses the growth of the republic, the various political movements, and the endless darkness and poverty. The series explores the questions about our responsibility to the often bitter, absurd, and already forgotten past, and the functions of film in the reservation and reconstruction of memory.

Ms. Hong (Hong jie, 2009, Zhang Gong) portrays the experience of the Red Guards generation. Ms. Hong was the filmmaker’s neighbor, whose turbulent life is common to ordinary citizens in a stormy society. Notably, the film is an animation. As one of the three animation shorts, together with Mist (Mi wu, Zhang Xiaotao) and Idol (Ou xiang, Chen Xuegang), to open the 2009 Beijing Independent Film Festival, it indicates a new direction for Chinese independent films.

West of the Tracks, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

The last film on the list, West of the Tracks (Tie xi qu, 2003, Wang Bing), is a climactic work of Chinese independent documentary filmmaking, and a master combination of panoramic view and closely-observed details. The nine-hour film is a comprehensive record of the heavy industry district in northeast China through the difficult years brought by the huge and cruel transformation of the nation from a planned to market economy. Its three chapters—”Rust”, “Remnants”, and “Rails”—focus on industrial work, youth and family life, and individual emotions respectively, and also respectively treat the social problems of bankruptcy and unemployment, demolition of old neighborhoods, and the lives on the margins of the city and of modern industry. Just like Before the Flood and Red White, the daily details recorded in the film also shockingly reveal piles of ruins. In “West of the Tracks and the New Documentary Movement in Contemporary China,” Lu Xinyu uses the image of ruins as an allegory for the loss of utopia among the huge historical and social changes in today’s China. The new documentary movement, for her, arises from and responds to the ruins. She claims, “The destiny of ‘art’ in contemporary China is to reestablish the connection between art and the people that humbly but stubbornly live on the land, to search for justification for the existence and emotion of these people.”  West of the Tracks is an artist’s response to this destiny, which is also the destiny of the more and more records of unsanctioned memories.

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This so-called “leitmotif commercial blockbuster” breaks the pattern of regular political films with its star-studded cast, featuring nearly 200 of China’s well-beloved film professionals, including action heroes Jackie Chan and Jet Li, international star Zhang Ziyi, comedy king Stephen Chow, and even directors Chen Kaige, Jiang Wen, and Feng Xiaogang. In an interview with South Capital Entertainment Weekly, director Han Sanping proudly calls this film an “ingenious cooperation of politics and commerce.” A report on Chinafilm.com reads “The elder generation watches history; the younger generation counts stars.”

In an illuminating report in The Independent, Cliff Coonan defines the film as both an “A-list extravaganza” and a “stirring propaganda epic,” and gives a good reading of the “moments of subtlety and what appear to be hidden political messages” in the plot. Contextualizing the film in global cinematic propaganda, including Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1905), Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996), and, most disturbingly, Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1934), Coonan notes, “By peppering the picture with stars, its producers hopes to update the patriotic cinema for a new generation.”

In an interview with AFP, Luisa Prudentino, an expert on Chinese cinema, also predicts that the “Jianguo Daye” formula will be the model for future propaganda films. “This allows the authorities to counter Hollywood’s growing influence here by making blockbuster films that make money while also getting their message across to the masses in a more glamorous way,” she said.

On the other end of the spectrum, almost simultaneous to the opening of The Founding of a Republic, controversial artist Ai Weiwei uploaded onto the internet his own “celebration gift film,” Lao Ma Ti Hua (named after a famous Sichuan saying roughly meaning “old mom’s pork feet stew”). This 75-minute documentary, shot with a hidden DV camera, records the bitter and absurd experience of Ai and other witnesses for the human rights activist Tan Zuoren of being harassed and illegally detained by the police of Chengdu (capital of the Sichuan province) at the eve of the court meeting.

The political message is overt. Tan was persecuted for his investigation into the shoddy constructions of the collapsed school buildings at the 5.12 earthquake last year, but here the splendid marble-clad building of the Chengdu municipal police bureau draws sharp contrast with the so-called “tofu crumble” projects at the background. The main part of the documentary records the frustrating and unresolved negotiation of Ai’s group with different parties of the Chengdu police about the release of their detained partner and about a proper explanation of their sufferings–just as Qiu Ju did in the Zhang Yimou film. A police officer managed to say nothing remotely meaningful in hours, often not even complete sentences.

The film ends with a sequence of shaky images when the police forced Ai to surrender his  camera in front of the Chengdu Police Station. It’s true to the mode of guerilla filmmaking: the civilian’s desire to record finally triumphs over the authorities’ suppression of the moving image.

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New Socialist Climax aims at capturing and examining various levels of reality in China’s recent state-sponsored Red Tourism, a national campaign which brings people, especially government employees and young people, to the old Communist revolutionary bases.  This documentary does not simply document the ‘content’ of life in China today, but also tries to ‘restore’ the different layers of reality and leave the judgment to the viewers.

On the surface, Red Tourism is a win-win for all parties involved: the Party gets to boost its ideological propaganda in support of its fading legitimacy, the tourists get to splurge on a free trip and to exhibit political loyalty to the establishment, and the locals get to cash in nicely with floods of Red Tourists coming and spending (often extravagantly if the government is covering their expenses).

The documentary was shot at Mt. Jinggangshan, the cradle of the Chinese Communist revolution led by Mao Zedong, and is the first independently-made film (i.e., not within the state-controlled media establishment) on Red Tourism.  Production was completed between June 1, 2007 and October 2007.  The year 2007 marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Mt. Jianggangshan Revolutionary Base.

The documentary is made up of four chapters, based on footage shot around the four key dates of the year for Red Tourism: June 1 (International Children’s Day), July 1 (Chinese Communist Party Day), August 1 (People’s Army Day) and October 1 (National Day for the People’s Republic of China).

Jian Yi is an independent filmmaker, visual artist and writer currently running an IFCHINA Participatory Documentary Center (blog) in Ji’an City, Jiangxi, China.  He is the producer and director of the award-winning narrative film Bamboo Shoots and of the documentary Super, Girls!.  Jian has worked as a filmmaker and senior art consultant for a number of European Union projects in China.  In 2005-06, he partnered with premier documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang to launch the China Villager Documentary Project.  Jian’s photos on China’s village governance toured the nation’s seven provinces as well as the headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels and the European Parliament in Strasburg.  He is a Yale World Fellow (’09), Starr Foundation Fellowship grantee (’07-‘08) under the New York-based Asian Cultural Council, a Fellow (’08-’10) of the India-China Fellowship at the New School, NY, USA, and a Visiting Fellow (‘07) at Cambridge University, United Kingdom.  Jian is one of the three Chinese national finalists selected by the British Council for its 2007 International Young Film Entrepreneur of the Year award.

New Socialist Climax (China, 2009. 80 mins.)
“Take Communist Viagra, Make Capitalist Love, and Get a New Socialist Climax!”

Film Screening followed by Q&A Session with Director
Thursday, Sept. 17, 8pm
Auditorium, Henry R. Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

Click here for more information on the New Socialist Climax screening

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Photo courtesy of TreeHugger.com

It’s always an interesting time to be in China, a place seemingly without uninteresting times.  To be here now, though, lets you see a singular moment in society floating, unpinned, somewhere in between two bankrupt ruling ideologies.  The collapse of official Communism/Maoism/Socialism with Chinese characteristics, as the ruling thinking evolved from pre-Liberation through the Cultural Revolution to post-Mao Dengism, is the keynote for lots of standard accounts of China today.

Traditional Chinese culture was, for a time, obliterated by various more or less radical and institutional versions of leftist ideology.  These slowly disappeared in fact, though the rote sloganeering formulas persist, especially around the “liang hui” or annual meeting of the Chinese government’s legislative bodies, that took place in the spring.  Following Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, and the unbridled embrace of wealth-concentration and manifest corruption in the Jiang Zemin era, the new god became capitalism, in its rawest, unregulated forms.  Free market ideology imported from its Western exponents has washed over China, pushing some groups and regions ahead, leaving millions in the interior and the countryside, behind.  Now that financial market capitalism is having its own profound existential crisis in the West, does China have to think about tossing out its brand new ruling ideology, right on top of the refuse of the old one?  It’s enough to cause a case of ideological whiplash.

What happens when an unstable society starts to face the possibility that its hot new set of ideological nostrums might be just as insubstantial as those it has just recently thrown over?  It must be a dizzying sort of disorientation for those Chinese who have invested their new identities in the new ways of thinking.

Post-Jiang Zemin China has spawned a brittle, tacky, sometimes grotesque superstructure aping ostentatious luxury.  Beijing has thrown up gold, silver, and blue buildings that flaunt Greek, Roman, steel-and-glass, and faux-Qing-bangled facades.  Today, more often then not, these monster buildings lurk under stilled, looming construction cranes hiding vast, endless ranks of empty offices in a post-Olympics slump that wasn’t the endless boom people were expecting.  Small encampments of workers, who look like migrant labourers now without work, have just cropped up on the streets around my home.

What does this crisis look like in today’s Chinese films?  At the top end of the commercial spectrum is Feng Xiaogang, whose Chinese New Year blockbusters have always both directed and crystallized the public mood.  You Are The One, released at the end of 2008 is a magical, tragedy-tinted romance among the newly rich.  But it registers a profound disquiet with the limits of financial success.  Through the film’s obligatory New Year uplift ending, with stock prices magically soaring back to the stratospheres of pre-2009 financial heaven, Feng signals the missing, impossible happy ending required by both the genre and the money-as-happiness mindset China has embraced.

Er Dong (dir. Yang Jin)

At the other end of the spectrum are many recent independent films about going nowhere in China’s rural inland backwaters — it’s a veritable Chinese indie genre.  Take Yang Jin’s accomplished Er Dong (2008), which tells a story about a young man who drifts out of school and into minor, then really serious trouble.  He can’t get any traction in a series of small towns far from the economic action, the kind of places where having nothing means you’re going nowhere, forever.  All that’s missing is that other standard ingredient from Chinese indie so-called miserablism circa 2009: the girlfriend turned prostitute by her rapacious exploiter of a boyfriend.  See, for example, Wang Yiren’s Tatoo (2009) and Peng Tao’s Floating in Memory (2009)

The rise and fall of the hit TV show Super Girl Singing Contest (China’s answer to American Idol, now called Happy Girls) provides a fascinating model, lightly abstracted, for just what the post-communist fantasy of super-capitalism looks like here.  Jian Yi’s documentary Super, Girls! (2007), an account of some contestants attending regional auditions in 2006 for the show’s second year makes this all engagingly clear.  The film follows a number of hopeful young female contestants, all wanting to become overnight amateur singing superstars.  They are inspired by the sensational success of the 2005 edition of the show that transfixed the country and made new superstars out of winners, like the slightly androgynous Li Yuchun.  The show’s ruling ethos, that absolutely anyone can become a superstar, is taken painfully literally by the documentary’s engaging subjects, who have the desire but (for the most part) lack the talent and marketable star-potential to succeed on the show’s terms.

Super, Girls! (dir. Jian Yi)

That is what’s simultaneously fascinating and sad about the film: we see these young women yearning media-based “superstardom”, a dream manufactured and perpetuated by Chinese media and commercial interests who are obviously looking for exploitable talent.  But the young women have so completely bought into the show’s ideology (if one can call it that) that they are totally self-deluding, and inevitably shocked, bewildered, and crushed when they don’t pass the auditions.

It’s hard for me not to think of this model as a perfect analogue for mythical free-market capitalism and its delusional seductions, which pretends that anyone, regardless of environment, birth or advantages, can become a millionaire, a winner in financial capital’s prosperity sweepstakes.  What this model masks, both in its Chinese capitalist version, and its Super Girls entertainment guise, is the seductive delusions implicit in its appeal.  In a corrupt environment like China’s where closeness to power and pre-existing advantages (often tied together) determine one’s success, unregulated capitalism is a field where pre-determined winners amass more wealth and power, leaving the rest behind.  Super, Girls! shows how dreams of ordinary people, consigned to being left behind by the system, are nurtured to support a system built to exploit and abandon them.

The film also reveals, in some cases, these young women’s resilience and determination to exploit whatever opportunities they can squeeze out from between the cracks.  As the consensual fantasy girding the now vanishing world financial system also cracks apart, I have little doubt that Chinese dreamers and makers — released yet again into an ideology-free zone that’s both terrifyingly unmoored and saturated with limitless possibility — will find their own spaces to wriggle through and thrive in.

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