Contemporary China in Cinema

Midway through “A Touch of Sin,” Jia Zhangke’s dark marvel of a film about violence and vengeance in contemporary China, a steely-eyed drifter named Zhou San walks into the teeming throng of Chongqing Railroad Station and scans the thicket of bodies around him. Chinese New Year has just passed, and like almost everyone else at the station, Zhou is looking to buy a ticket out of the megacity. Like many of the other migrant workers going home, he is a husband and father who spends the better part of the year away from the family he supports. But as the audience learns over the course of the film, Zhou also happens to be a merciless, cold-blooded murderer.

I was reminded of this scene when news broke on Saturday of a mass killing at Kunming Railway Station, in southwest China, which left twenty-nine people dead and more than a hundred and thirty injured. According to the Chinese police, eight assailants, dressed in black and wearing cloth face masks, burst into the station’s crowded ticket hall on Saturday evening and began slashing indiscriminately with long knives. When the police arrived, shortly after the attack began, they shot and killed four of the attackers, and wounded one female suspect, who was taken into custody. But in a matter of minutes, the slaughter had turned the open-air railway station into a theatre of war, whose carnage was documented in real time on Chinese microblogs. Three of the alleged attackers managed to flee the scene, but have since been arrested, as well.

The four story lines that make up Jia Zhangke’s “A Touch of Sin” were inspired by Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. During 2011 and 2012, when Jia was making the film, a string of apparently senseless killings—including severalkindergarten rampages—dominated headlines and sparked anguished soul-searching among the horrified public. (For a time, the country’s most popular viral video showed a two-year-old hit-and-run victim bleeding on the roadside, ignored by eighteen people who passed by.) As Christopher Beam argued in apiece that drew a link between Jia’s film and China’s sobering drumbeat of violence: “In a country with no ‘good Samaritan’ laws and a history of victims suing their helpers, [those who walk past without lending a hand] were acting rationally, albeit monstrously.”

It is a chilling thing to be both rational and monstrous: we tend to believe, rightly or wrongly, that inexplicable evil does not involve logic. But it’s hard to determine whether any of these calculations apply to the premeditated attack in Kunming, which quickly came to be known as “China’s 9/11.” Almost immediately after the attack, authorities identified the perpetrators as Uighur separatists from Xinjiang, in the country’s restive northwest. (Reports claimed that police on the scene had recovered a black flag traditionally associated with those who support independence for what some Uighurs call East Turkestan.)

On the morning after the attack, China’s security chief, Meng Jianzhu, visited the wounded in Kunming, and pledged to “mobilize all resources and adopt all means” to capture the “inhuman and anti-social” criminals. In Beijing, President Xi Jinping vowed to bring the “terrorists” to justice. Given the timing of the attack—which took place a few days before the opening of China’s annual parliamentary session—it is hard to avoid concluding that attracting the attention of Meng and Xi was precisely the attackers’ aim.

In the past year alone, there have been more than two hundred incidents of violence in Xinjiang. The most high-profile attack, however, took place in Beijing last October, when a jeep deliberately plowed into pedestrians in Tiananmen Square and caught fire, killing the three Uighurs inside, and two pedestrians, while injuring more than forty others.

In the Chinese media, the bloodshed has often been characterized simply as the work of unhinged Muslim extremists, whom the ethnic Han majority already tends to regard as an inferior “other”. With their darker complexion and Indo-European features, Uighurs resemble central Asians more closely than the East Asian Chinese. Culturally, the differences are even more acute. Inhabiting the westernmost edge of northern China, Uighurs share little in the way of customs, religion and language with Han Chinese. In the past, the region that is now Xinjiang was under the control of many different empires. It came under Communist rule in 1949. In recent years, Han encroachment into Xinjiang, the result of a deliberate policy to shift the demographic balance, has bred further resentment among the Uighurs, who have no outlets for protest or dissent. The government’s restrictive religious policies and heavy-handed security measures, which are aimed specifically against ethnic minorities, have only exacerbated matters.

In the urban centers where Uighur youths might, under other circumstances, become more assimilated, desirable employment opportunities are scarce. More often than not, they are relegated to low-paid menial positions, like hawking fruit or selling meat skewers on the street.

None of this, of course, justifies the unprovoked violence unleashed in Kunming, or diminishes the heinousness of that crime. But there may be a logic, however twisted, in the way that despondence and desperation ferment into vicious malevolence.

Not for the first time, the words that have been censored on Weibo offer greater insight than what is on view. The government has discouraged TV stations from covering the Kunming massacre, which means that social media has been the venue for most of the discussion and speculation about the attack. But the file of deletions is growing. In the since-disappeared words of one journalist, “No one ever bothers to give us clear accounts of what really happened. They just let us let blindly, fear blindly, and die senselessly without knowing.” Another post, also erased, asked what are apparently unacceptable questions: “I am deeply curious about the personal background and past of the female suspect who is now being held in custody. She has become a villainous beast in the eyes of the people but undoubtedly, she couldn’t have been born a beast. Really hope the media can open itself up, take the time, and mine her story.”

Like these comments, “A Touch of Sin” remains censored in China, a decision that disappointed many but surprised few. The portrayal of an imperfect country—with its murderous citizens, who are far from mad—is predictably one that the leadership is reluctant to accept. The first time that Zhou San kills in Jia’s film, it is an act of self-defense against three knife-wielding highwaymen. But the second time, his victim is an unarmed pregnant woman leaving a bank. Between the two killings, Zhou blithely goes about his life: attending his mother’s birthday banquet, lounging in bed with his wife, admiring fireworks with his young son. To a casual observer, his story couldn’t be more ordinary.

Source: newyorker.com