1 Demolition and Reconstruction in Chinese Urban Cinema in The

Demolition and Reconstruction in Chinese Urban Cinema in the 1990s Francesca Kaufman University of Edinburgh In the closing decade of the Twentieth Century China experienced a boom in urban construction. From the post-Mao period of the late 1970s economic reforms became increasingly important within centralised planning. Focused initially on transforming the productive capacity of the countryside, in the early 1980s attention shifted to revitalising China’s urban areas with the aim of promoting business growth and attracting foreign investment. What followed was an unprecedented wave of large-scale urbanisation sweeping through the cities of China to rebuild them as global centres1. Changes occurred in the architectural landscape and associated social dynamics of the urban environment on a rapid scale. Vernacular housing compounds (for example the hutongs in Beijing) which had stood for centuries were cleared and rebuilt as skyscrapers, shopping centres and motorway ring roads. Communities were forcibly relocated to multiple locations to make way for hotels and business centres funded by overseas investment. In response to Deng Xiaoping’s declaration in 1992 1 Zhang Zhen considers that the intensity of the urban upheavals caused by the new economic policies can only be compared to the modernisation of the treaty ports in the first years of the Twentieth Century: Zhang Zhen, ‘Bearing Witness: Chinese urban cinema in the era of “transformation” (Zhuanxing)’, in Zhang Zhen (ed.) The Urban Generation: Chinese cinema and society at the turn of the Twenty-First Century (Durham NC, 2007), p. 2. 1 that “socialism can also practise market economy”, a complete overhaul of China’s infrastructure took place, best exemplified by the ubiquitous presence of bulldozers and construction sites. Chinese cinema had been synonymous throughout the reform period of the 1980s with dramatic images of sparse northern landscapes: rolling hills, peasant women, repressive feudal communities. In the 1990s, however, a new ‘urban cinema’ emerged, which took a variety of forms. The best known of these in the West has been the body of work by independent or ‘underground’ auteur directors, whose films portrayed a society of liminal characters experiencing contemporary China on the edges of developing urban society: petty thieves, disenchanted youth, and migrant workers2. In addition to this group was the ‘New Urban Cinema’, a term coined by Chinese journalists to denote filmmakers working on similar ground to the independent directors but in a more acceptable mainstream format3. Key themes in their films were urban transformation, specifically where the space had a traditionally socially-defined role, and the interplay of familial or personal relationships with globalising city culture. The ‘New Urban Cinema’ of China in the 1990s attempted to negotiate emerging social realities in the wake of dramatic physical reconstruction of the cities through the established cinematic forms of melodrama and 2 See for example the work of Zhang Yuan and Jia Zhangke. 3 Lu Hongwei, ‘From Routes to Roots or Vice Versa: transformation of urban space in China’s ‘New Urban Films’, Asian Cinema (Fall/Winter 2008), p. 102. 2 nostalgia. This paper will explore three examples of new urban films from the 1990s to show how they represented and approached instances of demolition and reconstruction in one city, Beijing. Jie Lu’s astute comment that film of the city is always “particular and partial in scope” is well taken, and for this reason the selected texts must be approached as only part of the construction of cinematic dialogue around changing social norms in urban China in the 1990s4. They have been chosen as representative of their type and as examples which have attracted interest among audiences and scholars in the years since their release. No Regrets about Youth (Qingchun wu hui, dir. Zhou Xiaowen, 1991) is an early example of an urban cinema of transformation. A detailed narrative account of the demolition of a local Beijing neighbourhood to make way for an American-style shopping mall is incorporated into a melodramatic love story. Shower (Xizao, dir. Zhang Yang, 1999) is a popular entertainment film starring the well-loved Chinese actors Zhu Xu, Pu Cunxin and Jiang Wu. Set in a traditional bathhouse at the centre of an active local community it parallels the story of a modern-minded older son’s reconciliation with his father and the demolition of the area, once again to create space for a shopping centre. Beijing Bicycle (Shiqi sui de danche, 4 Jie Lu, ‘Metropolarities: The Troubled Lot and Beijing Bicycle’, Journal of Contemporary China, 17/57 (November 2008), p. 718. 3 dir. Wang Xiaoshuai, 2001) was the first film by director Wang Xiaoshuai not to encounter serious censorship opposition prior to its release. At the centre of the narrative is a mountain bike which two teenage boys both want for different reasons, one economic and one social. By contrasting their approaches to life in the city the film explores new attitudes to China’s modernisation among the young. Forgetting: No Regrets about Youth In Painting the City Red, China scholar Yomi Braester makes what seems an apt link between demolition sites and physical scarring. He describes the reconstruction of Beijing in the 1990s as “a collective trauma” in which sites of demolition were “…exposing the material wounds of urban development and giving visual form to the attendant psychological traumas.”5 In a similar vein Jie Lu considers the new architecture of China’s rebuilt cities to be a telling indicator of underlying socio-economic upheaval and discontinuity.6 The aesthetic change from lateral vernacular housing (courtyards, lanes and districts) to vertical skyscrapers created an increasingly polarised landscape, in which the highrise building represented the future thrust of national development on a global stage whereas traditional architecture was relegated, quite literally, to history. After 5 Yomi Braester, Painting the City Red (Durham NC, 2010) pp. 258 & 250. 6 Lu, ‘Metropolarities’, p. 728. 4 1988 over 50% of Beijing’s residential housing was slated for redevelopment and subsequently demolished or permitted to fall into significant disrepair7. As the city was taken over by the modernist iconography of the skyscraper, its long established urban geography and the people who still inhabited it were rendered irrelevant in the new economy. No Regrets about Youth establishes the visual polarity between skyscrapers and hutongs at the outset of the film. In extreme long shot the neighbourhood in which the protagonist, Mao Qun, lives is shown as a squat spread of traditional housing dwarfed and surrounded by looming high rise apartment blocks. Footage of construction workers on scaffolding erecting the next building, of a man wheeling a bicycle through the giant spokes of an early stage building that is going up literally on top of the yet-to-be totally demolished lanes, of another character, Jianong, being surprised in his new flat by a man being lowered past his window holding a drill: all these scenes occur within the first ten minutes of the film, establishing, along with the omnipresent sounds of demolition and construction, the unstoppable onward process of urban reconstruction as a backdrop to the narrative. The film also features real-time footage of demolition taking place. The camera is placed low down as a bulldozer crashes through an ancient stone 7 Robin Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside: urban aesthetics in postsocialist China (Durham NC, 2010), p. 144. 5 wall, and the brickwork implodes towards the lens, filling the screen with the moment of destruction. Later Mai Qun stands at the window of a high-rise apartment and scans the area below with binoculars. To the left she sees an immaculate manicured and landscaped garden, and in point-of-view shot the lens pans across the shining steel and glass structure of another skyscraper opposite her before coming to rest in a lingering gaze at the demolition site where the hutong stood, now completely razed to the ground. By the end of the film this reminder has also vanished and been paved over. The erasure of the city’s identity and architectural integrity is heavily emphasised in the film through parallel linking with Jianong and Mai Qun’s romance. Their connection is and can only be temporary owing to a head injury sustained by Jianong some years before which is steadily affecting his ability to recall memories. As the demolition progresses his amnesia worsens. Greater complexity is added to the narrative, however, by the curious complicity with which the protagonists accept and contribute to the act of forgetting. Jianong is himself a bulldozer driver, and spends each day and some nights furiously demolishing the area marked for destruction. Erasing the physical past becomes the way in which he copes with his own synonymous condition. Mai Qun initially refuses to forget. She clings to her courtyard home long 6 after the other residents have left, becoming a ‘stuck-nail’ tenant who resists relocation. She is effectively forced into a position of acceptance and forgetting by Jianong, however, who enforces her removal by demolishing the buildings up to her front door in the middle of the night, leaving only her house standing in a field of rubble. In a poignant scene the camera observes her strip her room of possessions, removing printed fabric from the walls to reveal damp and ancient plaster underneath, and burn her mementos in a ritual bonfire. She then joins Jianong on the bulldozer and together they demolish her house. The film’s director, Zhou Xiaowen, links the demolition- reconstruction process and forgetting in order to highlight his concern for the loss of identity of the city. Chinese traditional urban architecture was based on the principles of harmony with landscape and building ‘with nature’, which meant horizontal construction along predefined schemes and axes8.

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