Sandy Shen
Throughout Chinese history, the question of what makes humans, for lack of a better word, human, and how they can differentiate themselves from animals found solid footing in Confucian and Buddhist circles. As Xunzi 荀子 believed, “Fire and water possess vital breath (氣) but have no life (生). Plants and trees possess life, but lack awareness (知). Birds and beasts have awareness, but lack a sense of morality and justice (有義). Humans possess vital breath, life, and awareness, and add to them a sense of morality and justice. It is for this reason that they are the noblest beings in the world” (Knapp, 2018). Moreover, because human morality and sense of justice are unique to humanity, people are able to separate themselves into social classes and exist in a state of social harmony.
Yet in Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, a collection of four vignettes loosely tied together but with an overarching theme of violence, the line between human and beast dissolves. Taking four stories from mainland China’s ever-changing news cycle, Jia reexamines the nature of structural violence in a now-industrialized China against the lost values of social harmony, cohesion, and virtue that once differentiated humans from beasts.
Jia addresses how China’s shift from its communist roots to its current capitalist economy impacts its most vulnerable social classes. The first vignette featured Dahai, who was drawn from Hu Wenhai’s village massacre from 2001; San’er, who was drawn from Zhou Kehua’s robberies from 2004 to 2012; Xiaoyu, who was drawn from Deng Yujiao’s self-defense case from 2009, and Xiaohui, who was drawn from the Foxconn worker suicides from 2010 to 2013.
By drawing directly from news items typically relegated to smartphone headlines, Jia translates the brutality, injustice, and emotionality of each case into a medium that viewers can viscerally understand: film. These deaths are no longer something to scroll past passively, but symptoms of structural and political violence where social hierarchies and power abuse drive people to desperate measures or behave animalistically. Two examples of this base behavior are most clear with Boss Jiao of Shengli Group and San’er the murderer who exist on the most extreme ends of the social stratum.
With respect to Boss Jiao, he failed to follow through on fourteen years’ worth of dividends to the village community after receiving their support in receiving the state-owned coal mine. After the failure of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, some of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms included privatization of various state enterprises but also exacerbated income inequality thanks to a healthy mix of corrupt public officials, profit-driven foreign and domestic investors and entrepreneurs, and a renewed worship of wealth (Kobayashi et al., 1999).
In A Touch of Sin, Boss Jiao and Dahai grew up together, but Jiao has been deified by the village and is regularly worshiped upon arrival home in his private jet. Instead of condemning him for diverting profits from the village and bribing government officials, the villagers conflate wealth with hard work, merit, and ability. The villagers are all well-aware of Jiao’s wealth-hoarding and the village chief’s corrupt practices, but they are willing to overlook these inequities if they too share in on the wealth, whether that be an Audi 6 for the village chief or a bag of rice for those who welcomed Jiao’s plane. The villagers do not have the energy nor political influence to collect their missing dividends and profits from Jiao – they are too preoccupied surviving day by day trying to put food on the table or find work. To avoid interference with his work, Jiao uses his wealth and influence to buy people’s consciences and trust, but when Dahai continues to criticize his greed, he has a lackey beat Dahai with a golf stick unconscious and promptly pay him off in the hospital. Time and time again, Jiao exhibits none of the virtue and morality that supposedly differentiates humans from beasts and becomes an object of envy and imitation that others aspire to. Through Jiao, Jia criticizes how modern society values financial power at the expense of human and collective interests.
San’er, too, cares for nothing but his self-interest, acting on his desires to murder for money and power. While he may have begun killing to support his family back home, it is clear that he is more interested in firearms and money, as he is more interested in traveling to Burma to buy more guns over buying a cell phone to communicate with his wife. After he guns down a glamorously dressed woman for her handbag of cash, he rides a motorbike behind a truck full of cattle. The expression San’er has staring at the cattle on their way to the slaughterhouse is the same as the way he looks at potential victims: commodities, or a means to money, power, and sustenance. There are rare moments of human connection between him and his family, but on the whole, San’er is a predator. His predatory instincts are clear by the way he selects his victims, where he assesses their monetary value. Near the Chongqing bank, he identifies a woman in a dense fur coat and glamorous handbag full of cash as desirable prey. He also exploits the bystander effect – when bystanders disengage in situations where people are at risk since it “isn’t their business” – to shoot her point-blank and run away mid-day.
The details of San’er are not far removed from reality, as Jia merely brought Zhou Kehua’s armed robbery of customers coming from a Chongqing bank to film. Although San’er escaped unpunished, some ten thousand police officers and soldiers were put in charge of hunting Zhou down after he shot several people at a bank in Chongqing (Lau, 2012). The fact that A Touch of Sin is not a figment of Jia’s imagination but a brutal example of one man’s murderous urges highlights the social disconnect of modern-day Chinese society as well. Because of people’s apathy towards those around them, society’s overemphasis on wealth accumulation, and the invisibility of migrant workers like him, San’er is able to exploit the holes in the social fabric and escape the consequences for his murderous instincts. Ironically, society will even reward people like San’er, as Zhou Kehua himself was once a mercenary in Burma and earned a living killing people. It took thousands of law enforcement officers to hunt Zhou down, because he realized long ago that if he was clever enough, he could get away with his lucrative murders since people are too self-interested and focused on survival to risk their well-being for a stranger.
For those who actively try to work against the hierarchical system that devalues their lives, violence seems to be one of the only methods of escaping a fate of submittance. A Touch of Sin is also known as 天注定，which means “preordained” or “destined.” Although the new society shaped by Deng Xiaoping after the Cultural Revolution was supposed to promote socialist values, the existing corrupt political and economic systems ensure that the divide between the poor working class and the affluent bourgeoisie only widens. Only brute force and human mortality can force the upper class to step down (such as Boss Jiao), and even then another capital-seeking individual will rise to take their place. Still, people like Dahai, Xiaoyu, and Xiaohui try to change their fates to survive.
From the beginning, Dahai appears different from the rest of the villagers because of his lion-like spirit, flag, and insistence on justice. When he boards the bus to greet Jiao, he doesn’t go for the free bag of rice but out of a deep sense of injustice, only to be brutally beaten with a golf club by Jiao’s lackey. The final straw comes when, after arriving at his sister’s house injured, his sister criticizes him for not settling down and comparing him to Jiao: “look what he’s made of himself compared to us here. You have your own place in Wujinshan, while my husband and I don’t even have a home of our own.” Not only does she write off Jiao’s abuse and indirectly encourage him to be more evil and exploitative like Jiao, but she also utters a very individualistic and deterministic statement to Dahai: “Your life belongs to you. Stop caring what others do.” Unlike traditional Chinese ideas of social conscientiousness and relative social positioning, where interpersonal relationships are heavily emphasized, Dahai’s sister suggests a more self-centered way of living that neglects public welfare and the village local economy. These words are the final straw, as Dahai snaps back, “I can be more evil than the village chief or Jiao.” He promptly goes off on a vigilante’s killing spree, killing all the “animals” that were complicit in robbing the village of economic prosperity and those belittled Dahai, calling him “Mr. Golf.” Because all other pathways to justice – the Disciplinary Commission in Beijing, the Village Chief, the other villagers around him – are sources of corrupt political or structural violence, Dahai also resorts to violent methods. When his enemies include a depraved, inane system and greed-driven animals, Dahai recognizes that he can no longer counterattack like a virtuous human.
Hu Wenhai’s vigilante massacre resonated with people beyond Jia Zhangke: “according to several villagers, Zhang Koukou was seen holding a large knife on lunar new year’s eve… he told [a village] that he’d killed three people, that this time he was done for” (Jian, 2018). After twenty-two years, Zhang, a 35-year old migrant worker, had avenged his mother who’d been killed by Wang Zhengjun after a dispute where Zhang’s mother had failed to gift the Wangs watermelon escalated fatally. Because Wang was seventeen (a minor), the court shortened his sentence and Zhang was never able to move on. Two years before the murders, Zhang had shared an article about Hu Wenhai, the inspiration for Dahai, where he’d commented: “A hero. I salute you” (Jian, 2018). While murder is nothing to salute, Jia, Zhang, and many others on the internet lower social classes are forced to passively accept the circumstances and injustices society’s rules load onto them. Taken to the extreme, this powerlessness can not only lead to despair and stunted personal growth, but it can also generate apathy towards the plight of others or lead people like Zhang and Hu – for better or worse – to take matters into their own hands in order to survive.
Xiaoyu, too, also has to take matters into her own hands to survive. In the beginning of her vignette, Xiaoyu is a pathetic side-woman of Zhang Youliang who is violently beaten up by his wife’s goons. Once again, passerby view the cruel scene as entertainment and stand by idly eating sunflower seeds as she scrambles into another van that appears to provide medical supplies. While the van turns out to be full of snakes, snake oil, and a girl dressed as a snake fortune teller, it is ironically the only refuge for Xiaoyu, who has just been humiliated by her lover’s wife. Snakes often represent evil and false pretense but for Xiaoyu, they are the only helping hand in her time of need. Xiaoyu, like Dahai, is another example of people who are eaten and stepped on like animals and have to fight off, whether that be bitter wives, the apathy of strangers, or rapists that enter the sauna. Once again, Jia highlights the depravity of humans by comparing them to symbols of evil and temptation, or snakes.
In some ways, Xiaoyu is not unique; she runs away when she sees a gang of men beat up an airplane worker for refusing to pay a fake toll just as the women on the sidelines watched while she ran away from the men beating her. Therefore, when the men attempt to rape her, claiming that she’d be “well paid” and exclaiming, “not a prostitute? I’ll smother you in money!” Xiaoyu intrinsically knows that no one will come to her aid, so she slices her would-be rapist’s chest open in defiance like a valiant hero in a wuxia film. Her self-defense is particularly interesting, because this vulnerable, lovelorn woman has reclaimed her status and dignity by killing a man who felt entitled to her body and those of other service workers like her. Rather than film Xiaoyu as a victim of sexual assault overpowered by her rapists, Jia paints her as a woman capable of fighting back and does so to survive. After she runs away from the sauna, Xiaoyu is in a state of hysteria and paranoia, deathly afraid that she may be assaulted by some animals again. But when she encounters a man with a monkey, which are thought to drive away evil spirits and immoral behavior, and several cows, which represent the will of heaven, she almost stabs them but never does. Xiaoyu does not need to stab the animals, because, unlike the humans around her, they have some sense of morality and virtuosity.
Rape, as a form of violence, is especially charged because it implicates gender, power, and primal instinct. When the rapists first demand Xiaoyu to massage them, they say, “don’t look down on me,” and “I have money.” For them, sexual assault is a way for them to exert their dominance, undermine the victim’s individuality, and quickly fulfill their base, animalistic instincts. Yet when people behave without virtue or morality like animals, society does not guarantee a fair judgment. Xiaoyu is closely based on Deng Yujiao, a pedicure worker who also killed her assailants in self-defense. Although Yujiao immediately confessed to the murder, she was charged with homicide and refused bail while other culpable officials were unaffected. It was not until her story had permeated public forums and reached national attention that her charge was reduced and the other officials were fired. In China where rule of the party or those in power precede, civil and human rights are undermined at the cost of victims’ livelihoods and justice. Upon closer inspection of Yujiao’s case details, it becomes egregiously clear how money and wealth have deformed social norms and values: “Deng Guida [assailant] used a wad of ￥4,000 cash to hit her face while yelling:
‘Didn’t you want money? I bet you have not seen any money before. How much money you want, just say it, believe me or not, I shall smack you to death with money.’ Deng Yujiao [victim] retorted, ‘Yes, I have never seen any money before, if you have the guts, today you smack me to death.’ Deng Guida then replied, ‘I am going to smack you to death with money. I’m going to get a truck load of money to squash you to death’” (Beach, 2009).
By replicating the dialogue and violent assault between Deng and her assailants in A Touch of Sin, Jia attaches a face, a personality, and a life story to other service workers whose assault or rape cases have gone cold or unaddressed. Even the assailants are portrayed with great depth: after slapping Xiaoyu repeatedly, shouting the entire time about money, one can see how much these men have shaped their toxic identities and values around their wealth and power. Having seen how other rich tycoons like Jiao are hailed as rich and respected business tycoons, these men also wish to be revered and feared by their peers and lower social classes. But because they have not accumulated enough wealth and capital, they violently force the most vulnerable – construction and service workers – to submit to their perverted ideas of masculinity and social respectability.
While Xiaoyu evolves from a pitiful side-woman betrayed by her lover into an independent spirit determined to survive, Xiaohui is not as fortunate. Xiaohui, a transient teenage factory worker, is representative of one of the several dozen suicide attempts in Foxconn City from 2010 to 2013. Unlike the previous vignettes, he does not engage in any explicitly violent acts and appears like a normal, hopeful young man. However, countless obstacles and burdens threaten Xiaohui’s faith in the world and his will to live. When his employers force him to give his wages for his friend who was injured talking to him, Xiaohui runs away and works for another company. Why should he feel any loyalty or responsibility towards a company that sees him as yet another interchangeable, disposable employee? Moreover, why were no safety measures in place to ensure such simple accidents were prevented in the first place? Chinese regulators and companies have no incentive to provide reasonable hours, crackdown on use of child labor, or ensure reasonable standards of living for their employees. After all, there are massive incentives and profits to be had if they can meet consumption demands from the growing domestic upper class and developed countries, as evidenced by the land bureau chief who purchased over 130 luxury bags worth over 200 million yuan. While employees benefit from marginally higher wages and can provide more for their families, they miss out on creating or spending time with family, genuine social connection, educational opportunities, and mental and physical well-being. Miles away from his home in Hunan, Xiaohui understands this loneliness acutely after he recklessly falls for Lianrong, a hostess and fellow Hunan native at the hostess club where they work. Infatuated, Xiaohui asks Lianrong to run away with him, but she rejects him, saying, “There’s no true love in sex work. How well do you know me? I have a daughter.”
In an ideal world, Xiaohui and Lianrong could exist as two people in love with nothing to fear or hide, but reality is crueler to those with something to protect. To raise her daughter, Lianrong uses her body, her most profitable asset, to service rich older men and rejects any promises Xiaohui makes. She knows that Xiaohui is an impulsive young man who will utter sweet words without understanding the depths of his promises, and that if he knew she had a daughter, they may have never been together at all. What Lianrong seeks out of her intimate relations is not a life partner or lover, but money: her social media handle, “Fish Seeks Water,” and her habit of releasing goldfish into the river reveal her wish to be a fish, swimming freely in the water. In Mandarin, fish (鱼) is a homonym for wealth (裕), a Buddhist symbol of fortune, and a common New Year’s symbol is a fish holding up a lotus flower (莲蓉 lianrong) and a goldfish as a sign of wealth. Despite her upbeat demeanor, Lianrong wants to leave her life as a sex worker and do more than just survive day by day, but she needs water, or money, to escape with her daughter. After being rejected and seeing her later service a customer, Xiaohui finally understands that he cannot be the “water” she needs and returns to Guangdong.
Moreover, given the menial and labor-intensive nature of factory work, there are few opportunities for people like Xiaohui to advance to anywhere near managerial positions. So when one of Lianrong’s customers criticizes “young people nowadays [for having] no sense of direction,” Xiaohui feels deeply betrayed and mocked. For those born to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, they can only aimlessly search and hope for some stroke of luck or success, which invariably come in the form of money. After finding work in another faithless, dehumanizing factory and nearly being beaten up by the previous employee he owed money, Xiaohui falls prey to the same sense of powerlessness that led so many to attempt suicide at the Foxconn factories:
“车间，流水线，机台，上岗证，加班，薪水… / 我被它们治得服服贴贴 / 我不会呐喊 ，不会反抗 / 不会控控诉，不会埋怨 / 只默默地承受着疲惫 / 驻足时光之初 / 我只 盼望每月十号那张灰色的薪资单 / 赐我以迟到的安慰” (许立志, 4-10)
“Workshop, assembly line, machine, work card, overtime, wages… / They’ve trained me to become docile / I don’t know how to shout or rebel / Don’t know how to complain or denounce / Only know how to suffer silent exhaustion / When I first set foot in this place / I only wished for that gray payslip on the tenth of each month / to grant me some delayed solace” (Xu Lizhi, 4-10).
Like Xu, Xiaohui felt isolated and dissatisfied with the course his life was taking, but because his limited education and skill set meant that he would likely spend the rest of his life working repetitive, thankless factory jobs. From their perspectives, the weight of a lifetime spent trapped in a factory, assembling machines, and becoming an interchangeable part of a larger industrial process itself may have induced more dread than hope in living. In the end, each chose to commit suicide.
While Jia presents a faithless view of Chinese society as one full of corrupt souls, the distinction between humans and animals is minimal, where both respond to the structures of their environments to become more cunning and cruel or open and kind if their survival depends on it. A Touch of Sin is a bleak, brutal view of modern industrial China, but there are glimmers of hope in some of the stories presented. Deng Yujiao, the originator of Xiaoyu, was able to receive bail and a reduced sentence with the will and sympathy of the masses, contrary to the cold, disconnected society that Jia depicted. Her trauma and suffering, combined with Jia’s critical analysis of the state of Chinese civil and human rights abuses, brought valuable attention to the Chinese Weiquan Movement (维权运动). There are individuals that are as or even more beastly than those in A Touch of Sin, but there are many fortunate souls who can tip the scales in the opposite direction.
