A review of Dimsum magazine / london

The price we pay for progress
published in 10 June 2010

Cecily Liu

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China’s ethical issue of forced relocation is no longer a secret. Despite the government’s encompassing system of censorship, most Chinese people know that grand projects like the Three Gorges Dam or the Beijing Olympics do not come without sacrifices. But most people choose to adopt a NIMBY attitude, accepting such issues to be the norm of what happen in China.

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University City Savages is a film that courageously revisits this familiar issue.In 2003, China launched its new University City in Guangzhou, covering 17 square kilometers of land where farmers and fishermen lived. The provincial government demolished their homes but the 10 universities built in five years only occupied half of the land cleared. People speculated that the left over space will be sold to property developers for profit.

   After Guolong Village’s destruction, the shanty towns sat up were rudimentary. The villagers dug wells from the ground, but the water did not undergo special treatment. Toilets were merely wooden boxes and the children’s shoes were made of torn cardboards.

 

The police took away the villagers’ possessions including cooking equipments. The villagers initially built huts with bamboo roofs which were so unstable that they had to hold the roofs during major storms. But the bamboo huts were destroyed over and over by the police. Eventually they had to build tarp shelters, and, according to one villager, they “slept on the dirt like pigs in a pen, night after night.”
Those painful memories were captured by the villagers into photographs which later pieced together the whole story. But what they saved were not just pots and pans, or photographs. They saved powerful memories through a series of small gestures, including visiting their ancestral burial ground and erecting signs with their village name at the original site of the village gate.
 

The villagers’ courage and stubbornness were empowered by their vulnerability. They fought back the police’s batons with bamboo sticks. A wife who spoke about her husband having spent 15 days in prison burst out crying at one point, condemning the provincial government as having no human blood. But moments later she courageously declared: “My husband was taken by them so I will never leave.”

But even more striking are the few instances of joy amidst the villagers’ gloomy lives. When the children played hide and seek, chasing each other in a shabby room, their innocent laughter is heart-wrecking. Another instance is when the villagers gathered for a large feast after returning from their annual visit to their ancestral ground, all putting up carefree big smiles in front of the camera.

The documentary had no narration. Puzzles were clarified gradually as the unnamed villagers told their own life stories – their painful process of recollection was as central to the film as the stories they told.
 

Because the documentary has made a heavy use of photographs, a key question arising is the extent it represents the truth. Reality has been filtered once when the snapshots of it were captured by cameras, and a second time when the best images are selected and to tell the story. Noticeably lacking are counterarguments from the government or even attempts to capture them. Instead, what started as an investigative film seemed to have slowly reduced to the villagers’ mouthpiece, going from photo to photo with the villagers’ voice explaining their understanding of the facts.

point where one suddenly realises this shift in viewpoint is when the full screen photo zoomed out to show the woman who was holding it. She pointed at herself in it and explained: “This is me. I was shouting ‘Kill me! Kill me!’ While I stood there holding a stick, a policeman broke my husband’s leg.” The authenticity of her previous narration was momentarily undermined as one realises that she is fulfilling the role of the commentator in the documentary when in fact she has vested interest in the way the story is told.

 

In fact, the villagers were rather active in putting out their views. They printed large posters describing the government’s cruel treatment of them again and again to show people that pass by.
 

Another question raised is the extent to which both the central and the local government are held responsible for the mistreatment. While the central government is infamous for slapping CPOs to facilitate the country’s progress, the local governments are often corrupt and keep a large proportion of the compensation themselves.

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When the farmers went to honour their ancestry, one of them explained: “We’ve done it for years even before the republics of China was formed”, suggesting that the communist government is liable for the disturbance. But another man whose brother was imprisoned said: “I am a communist. I don’t agree that we are all bad. The real communists are good. There is a long way to go to purse all the bugs in the corn”, suggesting that the communist ideology in itself is blameless but its execution on a local level is not.
 

The documentary ended with an interview with Tang Jinling, a human rights lawyer who was involved in the Guolong Village case until his licence was suspended in 2004. Mr Tang pointed out that a famous lawyer Gao Zhisheng wrote a lengthy report about the case which caused him to be taken by the police. He said: “The crime has been committed by the government, and also the courts are controlled by the government.” He expressed the despair of a human rights lawyer – if you cannot even sue for crime, how can you sue for human rights?

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Through an authoritative voice, he gave his warning: “If we stay in this paralysed condition, and one day something happens to us, it will be too late to realise how precious are our human rights and how important our dignity. We will suffer again because we failed to learn from the price the villagers paid.”
 

The villagers’ stories are also enveloped by the ignorance of the general public. The documentary started with a vox pop with students about the history of their University City - some had vague knowledge about the relocation while others were not too sure. The documentary ended with an interview with a geography student who has taken an active interest in the issue and went to see what the villagers’ lives were like, but has learnt the lesson that he can do nothing to help. He said: “Our professors told us that they went to evaluate the land but priced it with an amount that the government is happy with. That’s what the professors told us themselves.” Sure, he is concerned, but this may be a reflection of how Chinese youth grow disillusioned with their society’s problems and eventually stop caring.

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The documentary ended without an ending. None of the villagers has given up. They are waiting for the next opportunity to return to their land. But another ending is already portrayed by the film’s beginning – that the University City is beautifully constructed and that peacefulness will become the overriding atmosphere. The stories of the weak will always be known but never rightfully told.

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