Analysis of Conflict Essay

Beijing Bicycle is a 2001 Chinese drama film under the joint venture of the Taiwanese Arc Light Films and the French Pyramide Productions. Staring first-time actors Cui Lin and Li Bin, This film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and won the Jury Grand Prix and New Talent Award. This film is a perfect example of the generation the director Wang Xiaoshuai grew up in. The people that comprise Beijing as well as the lifestyle they lived are well portrayed in this film. The social status along with the primary characteristics of the movie such as the bicycle (an extremely common use of transportation during this period in China) and mail delivery were great facets to portrayal of Sixth Generation China. The conflicts faced through the two primary characters are symbolic of the issues Wang attempts to express, and leaves an important impact on the difference between stereotypical China and the collection of unique rough life experiences that needed to be expressed with the Chinese people. Through this film Beijing Bicycle I will investigate the work of Wang Xiaoshuai, a famous Sixth Generation director, and explain the particular social, economic, and political trends that Wang expresses through this film while exploring the historical periods that brought culture to these issues as well the socio-economic divisions of change. The emergence of the â€Å"Sixth Generation Directors† in the global film market was closely connected to the political currency attributed to their films’ ‘underground’ production in China. The early films directed by Zhang Yuan, Wan Xiaoshuai, and Jia Zhangke, for example were often referred to as ‘underground’ films by festivals and the media because of their taboo subjects, production outside Chain’s official studio system and censorship bureaucracy, and their illegal submission to (or screening at) international film festivals outside China (Chris Berry 2003,35). The underground phenomenon in new Chinese cinema from mainland China is a result of global and local politics. However, underground cultural production is not unique to China and has great importance of historicizing China’s ‘underground’ cinema. This in part can be accomplished by avoiding the pitfall of assuming that underground film in China is a product of an absolute dichotomy between legal and illegal film production, official sanction versus official censure, and market availability versus proscribed access. The Cultural Revolution and its lasting effects Organizationally, the Cultural Revolution was an assault on the middle levels of the Chinese bureaucracy, in an attempt to make them less bureaucratic and more open to mass participation. The idea was to enforce communism in the country by removing capitalist, traditional and cultural elements from Chinese society, and to impose Maoist orthodoxy within the Party. Economically, revolutionary pragmatism represented pursuit of some Cultural Revolutionary goals, but not others. Essentially most economic activity was halted, with â€Å"revolution†, regardless of interpretation, being the primary objective of the country. Equalization of economic differences between city and countryside remained an operative goal, with vigorous efforts undertaken to provide machinery, fertilizer, and construction materials to agricultural communes and to extend educational and public health services deeper into rural areas. (HARRY HARDING 2009, 70) Ironically, the ten years of the Cultural Revolutio n brought China’s education system to a virtual halt. Many intellectuals were sent to rural labor camps, and many of those who survived left China shortly after the revolution ended. The Cultural Revolution also brought to the forefront numerous internal power struggles within the Communist party, many of which had little to do with the larger battles between Party leaders, but resulted instead from local factionalism and petty rivalries that were usually unrelated to the â€Å"revolution† itself. Because of the chaotic political environment, local governments lacked organization and stability, if they existed at all. Members of different factions often fought on the streets, and political assassinations, particularly in predominantly rural provinces, were common. There was a definite struggle in local authority, with a tremendous need for population restructuring. Social, Economic, and Political Trends in China since the Cultural Revolution The imprint of the idealistic goals of the Cultural Revolution is misleading. China since the Cultural Revolution has seen the redefinition of policy in social and economic ideals as well as the re-allocation of political power. Many changes were made and equalization of peasant incomes within communes was no longer actively sought. For instance, in the beginning of 1970, Peking announced that the production team (the smallest collective agricultural unit within the commune) would remain the basic unit of accounting (HARRY HARDING 2009, 71). This meant, in effect, that no effort would be made to redistribute resources from richer to poorer production teams. It was now viewed that egalitarianism would only lead to weaken peasant motivation and morale. There contained a highly volatile combination of unspecified policies mixed with fragmented power that allowed proper pursuit of proper leadership in a more systematic and realistic way. Important shifts occurred with restoration of organizational discipline, acceptance of certain economic inequalities, an accommodative and conciliatory foreign policy, and even signs of intellectual and artistic liberalization. Thus, the long-term success for the campaign by the Cultural Revolution to reduce bureaucratic ideals (red tape, duplication of function, overstaffing, and inefficiency) is uncertain. Every prominent theory of organizational behavior, as well as the history of China’s own organizations, suggests that organizational problems have not been completely solved. Arguable, the rapid rate of economic development is impeded by the lack of systematic knowledge about managing in highly valuable dynamic contexts. Not only is competition immensifying in China, but the rules regulate competition are also changing. These conditions raise fundamental economic, sociological, and organizational questions about management during periods of transition (Anne Tsui 2004, 134). And yet, at the foundation, mass participation in governmental affairs is still very much in evidence with attempts still being made to reduce disparities in income between city and countryside (HARRY HARDING 2009, 76). China today is simply not the same as it was before the Cultural Revolution. The formulation of moderate social, economic, and organizational policies has been accompanied by explicit repudiation of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. What guided the Director’s experiences and expressions emerging from post-cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution has often been described as a decade of turbulence and catastrophe in cinema. Insomuch as cinema is concerned, feature production was suspended from 1967 to 1969. A total of 598 features and over 1,000 documentary, animation and educational titles that had been produced in the proceeding seventeen years, as well as 883 foreign features, were sealed and stored. (Yingjin Zhang 2004, 217) However, rising from this revolution, heroism, collectivism, and optimism characterized socialist cinema, which functions primarily as a historical discourse designed to legitimize the CCP regime and its political hegemony in the PRC. As discourse, socialist cinema reconstructed a utopian revolutionary or socialist family in which individuals are given critical moments to discard their own private fantasies, discipline and reform themselves by voluntary participation in collective work. The acceptance in individuals in the grand family, most often symbolized by their hard-earned CCP membership, is often projected as a group ceremony. Narrative structures of ‘obstacle-fighting-victory’ and ‘ordinary folk-revolutionary-hero’ are simultaneously filmic ingredients and key components of the new post-revolution. To get away from political constraints and to probe beneath the ideological surface of Chinese films, a number of scholars shifted their attention to film’s aesthetic effect, narrative structure, and thematic concerns from the mid-1980s on, and the result is what I call the history of film art (Yingjin Zhang 1999, 9). Other issues the director was directly impacted by as seen through the film Beijing Bicycle is the societal movement to take on a police perspective. Discoveries show that with each passing year, the number of criminals tracked down in Beijing from within the ranks of the immigration increases. From 18.5 per cent of criminals in 1986, it increased to 18.6 per cent in 1987 and then jumped to 24.6 per cent in 1988 (Michael Dutton 1992, 89). The films expression of China through Cycling A primary expression that the Director Wang Xiaoshuai uses in the film is the appropriation of cycling as a cultural technique for travel and inter-relations. China, even today, is known to contain one of the largest fleets of bicycles in the world. To assess the degree to which the introduction of modern technological products challenged Chinese society at the end of the 19th century and later, one has to take into account the continuous action toward industrialization and modernization in China. In the 1930s, the Chinese cycle industry came into being. Nearly synchronously, the three largest importers of bicycles Tongchang Chehang (Shanghai), Changcheng (Tianjin), and Daxing (Shenyang) established their production lines. Starting around 1929/1930, with the assembly of manufactured and imported cycle parts, the enterprises grew rapidly. The combined output of the Chinese bicycle industry reached 10,000 units annually between 1937 and 1945. By the mid-1930s, Chinese cycle history reached a stage comparable to that of Western Europe around the turn of the last century. A rapid increase in numbers of cyclists in the larger cities can be observed shortly after mass production was taken up. Prices now finally reached a level, which brought the bicycle within the reach of a wider population. The number of bike owners in Shanghai (3.5 million inhabitants) constantly increased to 230,000 in the late 1940s. China-wide, there may have been half a million bicycles in 1949. The year 1949 marks the pivotal year in Chinese national history in both cycle history and the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The bicycle soon found a strong advocate in the communist government. The bicycle received strong support by the government in three principal ways: the cycle industry, urban street planning, and financial subsidies. The nascent bicycle industry thus was able to accomplish growth rates of 58.7% annually -ambitiously charted out in the first Chinese Five-Year-Plan (Esfehani Amir 2012). The level of one million bicycles was reached in 1958. It seems that economic and modern infrastructural reasons, rather than cultural preconditions explain China’s development into the bicycle nation of the 20th century. Today’s ubiquity of the bicycle in China has led to the widespread assumption of a cultural inclination of Chinese to bicycling. The films expression of China through Education The Cultural Revolution led to a temporary decline in educational homogamy in urban China, which was eventually reversed when the Cultural Revolution ended. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76), radical de-stratification policies reversed the social order and weakened educational value in urban China in three extreme ways. First, the impact of education as an intra-generational stratification mechanism decreased. Second, the significance of education as a reproduction mechanism of stratification also declined. Lastly, the traditional cultural status of education as highly valued was attacked. Formal education was disrupted in urban areas. In the aftermath of this decline in enlightenment, the post-Cultural Revolution era (1977-94), Educational value regained its strength in urban China. To achieve market-oriented economic reform, the government resorted to education and honored intellectuals. In 1978 the new Chairman Deng Xiaoping stated, â€Å"Intellectuals are part of the proletariat† (Lijun Song 2009, 259. Education became increasingly prominent as a criterion for selecting a mate. Consequently individuals, especially the college education were more likely to meet potential partners in school than would have been possible during the Cultural Revolution. Also, an upsurge of divorce appeared in the early 1980s, due to the reestablished importance of education. The household registration system continued to enhance urban educational homogeneity. After the abolition of the examinations in 1979, the curricula of many schools were modernized to include training in science, mathematics, and foreign languages (Patricia Ebrey 1981, 254). Evidence of Social and Economic Change How one sums up the particular balance of social and economic change in culture is up to the individual. The formulation of moderate social, economic, and organizational policies has been accompanied by an explicit repudiation of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution (HARRY HARDING 2009, 76). China today is simply not the same as it was before the Cultural Revolution. While some central and provincial radicals have been purged, political power in China is still fragmented, divided among provincial representatives, second-echelon military leaders, the civilian bureaucracy, and a few â€Å"respectable† radicals. The second legacy of the Cultural Revolution has not yet been overcome. The amount of attention China places on economic statistics at the beginning of the year indicates a new confidence in the health of the Chinese economy. Moreover, findings provide evidence that both the cultural reproduction model and the cultural mobility model have applicability to the Chinese ( Yuxiao Wu 2008, pg 201). Since the economic reform in 1978, China has been one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. However, this growth has not shared equality across China, and regional inequality has become an important topic of academic inquiry and government policy. Rural-urban inequality is the major component of country-level regional inequality in China. It should not be forgotten that China is still a large agricultural nation. According to the 200 Population Census, rural population accounted for 63.91 per cent of the total (Hui Liu 2006, 378). This reflects not only the income level (per capita income) but also the economic development level or gross value of rural social product, and economic structure (agricultural output, and non-agricultural output). It is interesting the lack of acceptance by urban dwelling people, as this distinction between inter-regional and intra-regional inequality is important to government organizations as these are the focus of both regional problems and government policies in China. It is well known that regional inequality has a close relationship with regional development. Rural-urban migration is â€Å"pushed† by rising agricultural productivity and â€Å"pulled† by the increasing demand for the industrial products and services with the rising income of the national population. In the demo-economic model of rural-urban migration, it is assumed that the demand and supply of urban and rural labor are balanced in the process of industrialization and urbanization (Jianfa Shen 1998, 33). The problem lies in the rapid urbanization process in recent years caused by a liberal migration policy and rising agricultural productivity. It appears that the huge problem previously hidden in the rural a reas is now being shifted to the urban areas. Migration was tightly controlled by the government in the pre-reform period. This was effectively achieved by the use of residence registration, grain rationing, hob allocation and housing control. Government policies regarding urbanization and migration have changed in the reform period: urbanization is now regarded as a positive process which can stimulate socio-economic development, and the control of rural-urban migration has been more or less relaxed. 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