Shut out of school, migrant children study on the street in Cui Zi'en's "We Are the... of Communism"

Recently, both The New York Times and The Economist reported on the sudden closing down of dozens of unlicensed schools for migrant children on safety grounds in Beijing. This round of forced closures has been the largest in scale since a similar campaign to demolish migrants’ schools in Beijing in 2006, which was regarded and criticized for making way for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. How do such government ordinances affect the teachers and children whose work and education face abrupt termination? Cui Zi’en’s documentary We are the . . . of Communism (2006), which follows a group of pupils and their teachers from Yuanhai Elementary School of Beijing in the aftermath of its shutdown, offers some clues to begin thinking about this matter.

(2006), which follows a group of pupils and their teachers from Yuanhai Elementary School of Beijing in the aftermath of its shutdown, offers some clues to begin thinking about this matter.

Although different justifications are used for the government’s decision to close down unlicensed schools – to face lift Beijing, to protect the children’s safety, to push some migrant workers out of the capital, and so on and so forth, the fate of the children from Yuanhai Elementary School is similar to that of Dongba Experimental School profiled in the September 3rd issue of The Economist and Red Star Elementary School in the August 29 article of The New York Times. Parented by migrant workers, who do not have legal Beijing residence, these children are not allowed to enroll in local public schools. To make matters worse, because the parents earn a meagre living by working as cheap menial labor, they can hardly afford the city’s rich reserve of legally registered private schools either. Given the country’s nine-year compulsory education policy, the parents’ only other alternative, besides sending the children back to their birthplaces, is to enroll them in unlicensed but affordable elementary and middle schools, which are said to have sprung up in hundreds in Beijing during the most recent decade.

But how did these unlicensed schools get constructed in the first place? When school buildings shot up from the ground, some of which were eye-catchingly three- to five-story tall, local authorities should have noticed them, not to mention checking their licenses. If they fail to do so, they should not escape the blame and use someone else as the scapegoat. To demolish a building after it has been erected not only wastes resources but also pollutes the environment. And as the title of Wang Jiuliang’s important new documentary suggests, Beijing is already besieged by waste. Tearing down unlicensed schools could discourage migrant workers from bringing their children to the capital on the one hand, but on the other, it is only a temporary solution for a long-term problem.

That is probably why the government tries to justify the shutdown on safety grounds, as it has been criticized for the death of thousands of schoolchildren in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. However, the irony is that the government reacted to the public outcry against their handling the education of migrant children by opening up a few replacement schools in slapdash buildings, whose lackluster conditions hardly impressed parents either. Although the official answer to the parents is centered on the safety and hygiene of the school buildings, the help that the government offers seems at best a half-hearted gesture.

Without schooling, majority of the migrant children will probably return to where they come from. If they stay, like the ones that Cui captures in his documentary, they will be lucky to find one or two devoted teachers who want to teach them for free. As the documentary states near the end: “There is no Yuanhai school anymore, but we are still there. As long as there are students and teachers, there is a school. We want to study, and no one can stop us.” Both the teachers and the children sound undeterred.

However, this kind of humanitarian arrangement will not last without financial support from outside sources because teaching materials cost money. Without these  resources, the streets are the classroom for these children in Beijing.

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This entry is part of a weeklong spotlight of newly available titles in the dGenerate Films catalog.

Director Zhao Dayong opens his documentary Street Life with Big Fatty, a physically imposing but cheerful homeless man who collects recyclable litter during the day and turns into a “street slam poet” at night. He sits in the middle of Shanghai’s Nanjing Road, a luxury shopping district whose daytime crowds give way to “invisible” people lurking on the streets at night. A sort of Chinese homeless griot, Big Fatty sings from the popular masterpiece Journey to the West (Wu Cheng’en, 16th century): “Oh the great Monkey King! There is no hurry, monkey. The Celestial Emperor has asked you to look after his horses… But the Monkey King didn’t kneel down. He didn’t understand the rules of Heaven.” Big Fatty’s  Impromptu recitation of classic Chinese literature constrasts starkly against Nanjing Road’s night landscape of neon signs  and Western luxury shops and restaurants.

Since 1845, Nanjing Road (formerly Park Lane or Main Road) has been a bustling commercial artery of Shanghai, rich in history (a tragic accident occurred here in 1937 during the war with Japan) and commerce. Today Nanjing Road is still the main shopping street in Shanghai, alluring people with its copious malls and electronic billboards, the symbol of development and economic success attracting migrants from all over the country. Zhao Dayong traces a vivid and somewhat ghastly fresco reflecting another side of Nanjing Road, a brutal, raw, and real tale about migrants living and surviving on the street.

With his DV camera, Zhao follows the work routine of several migrants, specifically focusing on the daily misfortunes of Black Skin (Hei Pi). Black Skin is a young, strong and naïve guy who works hard collecting plastic bottles, paper, and other recyclable litter, which he sells to the “entrepreneur” Fatty Lee. He spends his days in the alleys of Nanjing Road, sweating during the day and hanging out with other migrant workers. Another memorable character is Hubei (his nickname for the province in China from which he hails): petty thief, alcohol lover and experienced with jail after stealing Benz hood ornaments from parked cars to resell them. Black Skin occasionally partners with  the cripple Ah Qiao, who proves to be as greedy as he is fond of gambling: after their hard teamwork, Ah Qiao disappears with their money. We also meet Anhui (also named for his home province), a young entrepreneurial fellow who teases Black Skin for his belief and hope in living on litter collecting. It’s a hard life on the road, no place for children, yet we are faced with a stray boy, abandoned by his mother and neglected by his father, now pushed prematurely into adulthood. He speaks and acts like an experienced man, but breaks into tears when asked about his mother.

There are many real-life characters surrounding Black Skin’s life; it’s a sort of self-organized sub-society, a network of mutual support and reciprocal exploitation. The territory is not that big and the money is not that much, yet “There’s competition everywhere”, as one of them points out. Everyone must work faster and smarter, collecting rubbish on the street and from those collected by others, a truly desperate form of robbery.

These beggars and litter-collectors exist as invisible and forgotten shadows of Shanghai, moving in a sort of parallel reality but strictly linked to the same boom that excites the city. It is just the other side of the capitalist coin, the extreme poverty of the periphery juxtaosed with the growing wealth of the center, adopting the same capitalist strategies for surviving in a dramatic, grotesque fashion. As commercial wealth flows through Nanjing Road, the migrants try to catch it in desperate manners.  An overcrowded night celebration for China’s National Day is an occasion for collecting heaps of litter and picking pockets. Even in the frenetic puzzle of images director Zhao offers us, there are some still moments that are quite dramatic: the tired, tragic and somehow epic walk of old beggars and a blind man in the narrow street singing a love song that virtually brings the entire street to a standstill.

This frenetic world proves too complicated and stressful for the naïve Black Skin: he gets drunk, fights the police and is imprisoned twice. When he emerges from jail he looks mentally disturbed,  no longer the active and bustling man we met in the beginning. He is a rootless body with no identity, wondering around the city screaming, singing and dancing, frantically and breathlessly touching the space around him, discarded in what was once the city of his dreams.

Zhao Dayong

Zhao’s investment of time and attention among the migrants is remarkable, allowing the audience to feeling their stress but also a strange sense of freedom of life on the street; hope mises with desperation, even when everything seems to oppose the fantasy of a better reality. Images and dialogues are vividly captured in the moment. The strenuous effort of living is evident from Black Skin’s nervous twitch; the pain is piercing when the camera fixes on the dragging feet of the old epic beggar; an irrational glee is contagious in Big Fatty’s improvised songs and invented histories.

Much as Zhao would do with a peripheral rural landscape in his masterpiece Ghost Town (2008), Street Life exposes forgotten and hidden urban ghosts with direct and abrupt images. Zhao films daily life as it reveals itself to his eye, without judgment. His glance is genuine and participatory, recording the micro-narratives of people pouring from the countryside towards the promise of Shanghai’s Pearl Tower and the Bund, looking for the opportunity to take part in a new society that apparently doesn’t have place for them. While the madly desperate Black Skin’s sings: “Tomorrow will be a brighter day…Tomorrow will be a brighter day…” a large video screen in the square broadcasts the Monkey King from the Journey to the West, brings us back to the opening: “Curse you, Monkey! You’ve crossed me! Now you must pay!” Unlike the Monkey King, many of Shanghai’s migrants have paid a terrible price for their journey.

Sara Beretta is an anthropologist and PhD student at Milan University, researching Chinese independent cinema and visual production.

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We Are the... of Communism (dir. Cui Zi'en)

By Ariella Tai

Earlier this month a study conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, showed Shanghai students placing first in the world, far outscoring the United States. The New York Times article reporting on these “surprising” test scores posits that a stronger “culture of education” is responsible for the stellar performance of Shanghai 15 year-olds, as well as raising anxieties that students in the United States are lagging academically. Collective investment in China’s reputation as reflected by the test scores, as well as an “amazingly strong” work ethic are also attributed to the high scores. Mark Schneider, commissioner of the Department of Education under the Bush Administration, suggests that the government may be allowing especially talented high school students to study in Shanghai instead of their home provinces in order to boost city performance on such exams.

In The Atlantic’s subsequent analysis of the test scores and related New York Times article, James Fallows makes the argument for examining the context of China’s educational environment rather than generally attributing high performance to cultural difference. He points to reaction of a scientist at a major US university who questions not only the efficacy of standardized tests such as the PISA, but also points out that a sample group of 5,000 students might not necessarily act as an accurate sample size for a population of half a million 15 year olds enrolled in secondary school.

In the 2007 documentary We are the…of Communism, director Cui Zi’en shines light on the darker side of the educational reforms taking place in China’s urban centers. He follows the struggles of students in The Yuanhai Migrants Children’s School in Beijing as they are forced to fight for their right to be educated. These students are workers of migrant workers who are not official residents of Beijing, and therefore are not eligible for public education in the city. Instead, they are enrolled in private institutions whose standing with the official education system and local authorities may be on shaky ground. This becomes the case one day when the students go to class one morning only to find that the government officials have shut down their school for unclear reasons. Cui Zi’en illuminates this heartrending case study as part of the larger problem of discrimination that the children of migrant workers face in China due to their marginal status. These students exist is a very different educational environment than those who are “officially” residents of these big cities, and their stories reveal an alternative side to the runaway success being reported in the news.

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It’s interesting to compare this take on overseas Chinese migration with a recent article in the New York Times about how tens of thousands of Chinese migrants have transformed the Italian city of Prato into a low-end textile and garment hub of Europe, with mixed-to-negative reactions by the Italian locals.

But for all the talk of how the impact of Chinese foreign commerce and migrant labor is being felt around the world,  there is much-needed activity happening in the opposite direction, as China serves as a destination for both commercial and cultural exchange. We’ve reported earlier about the interesting “Raiding Africa” project funded by the Rotterdam Film Festival and spearheaded by Gertjan Zuilhof.  He’s submitted several updates on the project during its summer run: entries five and six are particularly interesting in describing how visiting African filmmakers are encountering China, interacting with local Chinese and filming their experiences.

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Fan Lixin, director of Last Train Home (Photo by Nan Chalat Noaker/Park Record)

One of the most acclaimed films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival is Last Train Home by Lixin Fan. Already the Best Feature Film winner at last November’s International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Last Train Home chronicles a migrant-worker couple in Guangzhou trying to get on a train back to Sichuan to see their kids during the Chinese New Year, the busiest and most impossible travel period in China. Ella Taylor of NPR calls it her “favorite film of the festival, bar none… Watching this devastating portrait of a family trying to glue itself back together, you wonder how China, on its way to becoming the world’s richest nation, will avoid civil war if it doesn’t also attend to the needs of the millions of poverty-stricken families like this one.”

More info (including backlash from China) and video trailer after the break.

An interview with Nan-Chalat Noaker of the Park City Record reports Fan’s desire for the film to “help to put a human face on the exploitation of migrant workers in China:”

The problem, he says, stems from the United States’ and China’s mutual addictions. The U.S., he says, wants ‘cheap stuff’ while China is trying to satiate a need for jobs for its enormous population.

“It is a very complicated dynamic that involves migrant workers, private business owners, the government and international corporations,” he explained.

Calling the film “a documentary masterpiece” Brian Brooks of IndieWire also interviews Li and gives an overview of his career, including his work on To Live is Better Than To Die, a documentary on AIDS in China that also appeared in Sundance.

Conversely, Fan, who now lives in Canada, has been criticized in China for the involvement of non-Chinese production and funding support in his work. Danwei.org translates a Southern Weekly report by Li Hongyu that accounts for the film’s budget:

The plan [to then make the documentary] was favored and in the end was awarded funding from the Canadian government, funding from the cultural department of Quebec, funding from the Amsterdam International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival funding and the support of US independent TV ITVS. Together with the prior purchase of broadcasting rights by the UK’s Channel 4, France’s TV5 and a fee-charging HD TV station in Canada, Last Train Home filming budget reached one million dollars. For many Chinese filmmakers, this amount is quite extravagant.

Fan answers this criticism, and addresses several other questions, in his interview with Li Hongyu.

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