Youth (Hard Times)

Starting with Spring (Chun) and moving into Hard Times (Ku), the second instalment of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy premiered in Locarno ventures deeper into a territory where the vibrant joy of youth is replaced by the cumbersome burdens surrounding labour disputes prematurely borne by young workers. While small-scale textile factories in Zhili, in Zhejiang Province of China, the largest children’s clothing industry cluster in the country, keep churning out piles of clothing cut out and stitched together by young labourers from poorer provinces such as Anhui, their playful flirtations, banter, and the TikTok scrolling typical of their youth are now overshadowed by the frantic search for the paybook – without which thousands of hard-earned Yen from their labour go unpaid.

While Youth (Spring) celebrates the raw energy, brutal honesty, and emotional intensity of youth, Youth (Hard Times) reveals even more starkly the merciless reality of a system that focuses on manufacturing products and grinding individuals down — a system impossible to challenge without legal expertise or powerful connections. Despite their efforts to appear confident and well-groomed, these young workers cannot mask their vulnerable position in negotiations for payment per garment or their legal rights when factories go bankrupt.

Zhili’s prosperity, once buoyed by the country’s economic boom and the rapid rise of e-commerce, took a severe hit when China’s annual GDP growth plummeted from its peak of 14.2% at the start of the century to less than half of that. The film, shot between 2014 and 2019, captures a period of the country’s descent. Although these young protagonists may not grasp the workings of macroeconomics, they can feel the deterioration of their work and living conditions acutely as small factories around them fall into debt, owners disappear without paying employees, and workers are left to hold meetings to discuss how they might recover their wages.

In Youth (Hard Times), all sources of “bitterness” (as suggested by the original Chinese title “Ku”) in the microcosm of Zhili, stem from material conditions: the materiality of life, manifested in different facets under Wang Bing’s relentlessly immersive lens, and the overwhelming human-material relationship within capitalist society. While the previous Youth (Spring) immersed itself in the energy of youth and burgeoning love (sometimes resulting in underage pregnancy and forced abortion for financial constraints) the second part of this trilogy portrays a world dominated by objects. Piles of rubbish clutter staircases. Sewing machines await valuation for resale. Piles of clothes need mending. Bags of cotton and cartons of milk are discarded on the street, refused by the intended recipient. On Happiness Road, where rundown buildings are situated, all happiness hinges on material remuneration, which dictates their purchasing power and, by extension, their discourse power.

Love is no longer in the air; instead, a deep sense of frustration, helplessness, and disillusionment pervades, an overwhelming disbelief that government officials, policemen, or any law-enforcement could bring justice or recover their unpaid wages. As the film’s tone shifts, the colour scheme darkens, spaces become more cramped and chaotic, and the atmosphere grows increasingly claustrophobic and the action more hectic. The mood intensifies as the camera courses through unlit corridors of a young workers’ dormitory in a decrepit building which is even more neglected, by residents and owners equally, after said factory owners disappear without paying their dues. It feels as though the entire capitalist world is closing in, cornering these workers, leaving them with little room to breathe. This is a generation of socially underprivileged youth left to fend for themselves, armed only with their raw arguments and, at times, their fists. Negotiations invariably fail, and fistfights land them in police stations, where they are given just one cup of water per day. This generation of youth has arrived too late for China’s economic boom following the open and reform policies, missing the general optimism for a brighter future at the turn of the century. They have glimpsed the comfort brought by material goods and harbour dim hopes of obtaining wealth through hard work. However, 46 years after Deng Xiaoping's policy to let some people and regions prosper before others, the brutal reality is that while some have amassed wealth, others remain confined by the capitalist logic of exploitation — an irony for a government initially founded on the ideals of socialist rule and land justice.

Wang Bing’s unobtrusive handheld camera, with its signature cinematographic style, transforms the camera — and by extension, the audience — into a character that commiserates with the workers. The camera breathes with them, enters the darkness of their rooms, runs when they run, climbs stairs as they do, participates in their heated meetings and frustrated rants, or simply stays with them in silence in a dimly lit room. While the camera positions itself among the masses, giving a voice to the usually voiceless, it refrains from highlighting any individual. Everyone is just one of many — an exemplar, a sample, a cog in the giant machine that grinds on, indifferent to its parts. This approach, akin to examining pieces of a mosaic for a prolonged period of time, allows each individual story its moment. Collectively they form a much greater image, one that impresses, provokes, and disturbs.