Country of antiquity – story of Mrs. Liao and her family

Mrs Liao is selected as a representative of the Chinese peasants living in the rural areas in China. For generations, her family has lived in Longsheng village and worked in the rice paddies. Her world is one of hard physical labour in an agricultural setting, with which “a city type could not cope.”²³⁴ She and her husband stand in the muddy fields and work arduously with a hoe every day. The images of Mrs. Liao and her husband fit right into the Western conception of Chinese peasants cultivating rice.

In early medieval times, the ancient land of the Middle Kingdom was seen as a

234 Quoted from the narration of Mrs Liao’s sequence of China Revealed

fruitful and fertile land with a rich and abundant supply of natural resources, as described by Polo. In the nineteenth century, the land lost its previous appeal in Europe and was considered a poor country with a limited supply of resources. We might perhaps recall the Good Earth; the hero can only take one shower a year, and even then is accused by his father of wasting water. Thanks to this best-selling novel, in the early 1930s the image of Chinese peasants became particularly popular and sympathetic in American society. The perception of Chinese peasants living in a state of poverty and adversity was set in Western minds thereafter. The novel was even made into a Hollywood film.

The sight of this pure physical work with buffaloes in paddy fields generates a comparison with the arduous farming life in the United States just after the country was bestowed with national independence and sovereign integrity, when living conditions in America were relatively poor. The young nation was rather weak in both political and economic aspects. Farming work, in particular, “meant the hardest sort of long physical toil”²³⁵, with no farm machinery. Thus, the portrayal of China’s agricultural society has retained its grip on the Western imagination, evoking as it does the special emotional connection with the land in the American cultural consciousness. Images of Chinese peasants and their primitive land draw much Western attention. Despite the tendency in China towards urban expansion, Chinese peasants still account for more then fifty percent of the whole Chinese population.

Therefore, the representation of the peasants’ life must be a necessary element in creating an authentic picture of Chinese people’s way of life. Hence, in almost all China-themed documentary films, the peasant figures or images related to peasants or rural landscapes are inevitably integrated in the film.

5.2.2. Sequence protocol

(1) Pan shot of Long Sheng paddy field

(2) Close shot of water-logged paddy field, a pair of legs standing in the field (3) Close-up of a pair of muddy hands holding a hoe

235 Adams,James Truslow 1941:97

(4) Close-up of Mrs. Liao’s face

(5) BCU of Mrs. Liao’s face in an interview (6) Full shot of women working in a field (7) Crane shot of a water buffalo

(8) Close-up of a pair of feet

(9) Close-up of rice plant in a field and peasants planting rice (10) Dolly shot of the paddy field

(11) BCU of Mrs. Liao and her husband’s happily smiling faces

5.2.3. Sequence interpretation Scene of rice planting

The sequence started with an establishing shot of Long Sheng and its terraced paddy fields (Appendix 11). As the camera dollies from left to right, we see local women working barefoot in the water-logged rice fields. They are either carrying hoes or pulling buffaloes to plough the fields. Following this dolly shot, there is a close-up shot of a pair of legs standing in a muddy field, showing that this person is ploughing with a hoe. The next shot shows a close-up of muddy hands holding a hoe tightly to plough the field. The hoe, buffalo, muddy hands and dirty white clothes in these three consecutive shots indicate the intense physical work and harsh working conditions of Chinese peasants. In particular in these close-up shots of muddy hands and clothes, it is evident that they are all lowering their heads, facing the ground and devoting their full attention to their work. The agricultural codes symbolizing the farmers’ identities - muddy rice fields, hoes and buffalos - allow the film-maker to formulate the myth that Chinese peasants are still living a life of agricultural poverty, and that the Chinese agricultural industry is still at a primitive stage, and has remained unchanged for centuries.

In this sequence, the camera zooms in for a close-up of a rice plant three times. Rice is an indispensable main food in China, and was reported as such by early Western merchants and missionaries like Polo and Ricci living in the country. This perception of rice as the main Chinese food is also noted in Spader’s voice-over narration, “Mrs.

Liao and her family are planting one of the most staple foods in China, rice.”

The sound track accompanying this part of the sequence is a monotonous tune played on a Chinese pipe. The music is first rhythmic and slow, as at the beginning of the exposition sequence, and then switches to a cheerful tune when the narrator tells us that “this is the busiest season”, so that the whole montage presents a scene of busy rice planting in China. The dubbed voice for Mrs. Liao is an Asian lady who speaks English with a strong Asian accent, which indicates that the production team probably made an effort to find a suitable dubbing actress for Mrs. Liao on purpose, with an accent to indicate that Mrs. Liao and other Chinese peasants of her kind would not speak correctly.

In the whole montage of rice planting, based on metonymic signs, we see that the agricultural life in China is being presented as stagnant, without any progress towards modernization. The succession of images constructs the impression that Chinese farmers undertake hard physical labor, using only buffaloes and hoes instead of advanced farming machines. The ideological context of these shots suggests that China is still an agricultural country of ancient farming. As a matter of fact, according to the official statistics, 2.06 million large and medium-sized and 1.62 million small-sized tractors have been implemented in the agricultural industry across the country.²³⁶ However, in this sequence of Chinese farmers, there is no sign of such modernization. Instead of a buffalo as a ploughing tool, bulldozers, tractors or any other modernized machine could have been chosen to be filmed, which would have depicted a more industrial and modern image of the Chinese agricultural industry. As it is, the film leaves the audience with the impression that Chinese farmers had experienced none of the progress or improvements of modernization.

Scene of Longsheng landscape

The film presents a succession of spectacular natural landscapes from various camera angles of aerial shots and wide shots. The fields were used as background setting in the previous sequence, but in this part of sequence, the image is more artistic and aesthetic. In these shots, you do not see muddy clothes, hands, feet or

236 National Statistics Report, National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2008, http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2008/indexch.htm

buffalos, but rather, mountains standing in mist, and clouds floating above the mountains and vast green paddy fields stretching away like a dragon’s back. The aerial shots and wide shots of green mountains, the winding river and the bamboo present the full grandeur and magnificence of China’s natural wonders.

The frame composition of this landscape montage is well-balanced and aesthetically pleasing, giving a harmonious natural atmosphere. The mountains, white clouds and river are intentionally placed in symmetry. When we see these shots of landscapes, we situate ourselves in them. This image of terraced rice paddies has been familiar to Westerners since the reports of the early missionary hundreds of years ago, and has become increasingly recognizable thanks to photographs in travel guides in the past decades. As shown in the above shot, the presence of one or two peasants working in rice fields suggests the harmonious balance of nature and human beings in a picturesque landscape.

Scene of family union

(1) Close-up of pouring rice into a pot and stirring it (2) Tilt shot of an aged lady putting rice into a bowl

(3) Close-up of two bowls of steaming rice next to a stone pot

Following on from the emphasis of rice in the first rice planting sequence, the cooked rice is once again filmed in an impressive aesthetic manner. Two bowls of heated rice are juxtaposed with a stone rice pot on a wooden table in a setting of mise-en-scene. Chopsticks are laid on the edge of the bowl. In the shot, we can clearly see the steam going up in the air. The whole montage delivers a message of an exotic and ancient oriental tradition preserved for thousands of years, as we are brought back to the Chinese dinner banquet portrayed in Ricci’s journal.

The camera starts from a wide establishing shot of the family scene at the meal, and then zooms into a close-up of the dishes on the table. Following these camera movements, an interview of the family members is conducted. The scene of a large Chinese family getting together and eating around the table always appears in

Western documentaries about China. The Chinese tradition of four generations living and eating in the same house has been known to Westerners since the seventeenth century, thanks to the reports of the missionaries. The profound impact of Confucian philosophy has made family relationships, the foundation of a collective culture, of great importance in Chinese society.

The tradition of eating rice dumplings shown in this montage indicates that some Chinese customs have been passed down from generation to generation. The preservation of this social custom and traditional food therefore reinforces the idea that China is a country possessing antiquity and tradition. In addition, the rice dumpling is not prevailingly cooked in the West, making it an exotic food for Westerners, and hence a symbol of Oriental culinary exoticism. As has been established as a stereotype since Ricci’s times, the rice plant represents all other Chinese crops, and rice is once again presented as the primary food in China, whereas in fact people living in northern China eat more wheat than rice.

After Mrs. Liao says, “Ever since the land was privatized, life has been getting better and better. Now it is much better. We now eat better and we have better clothes.

Now we have even bought a fridge and a TV”, the montage cuts to a shot of the sun covered by dark clouds at dusk. Eventually the sunshine manages to break through the shadow formed by the clouds. This metaphoric shot signifies that the life of Chinese peasants is heading in a better and richer direction thanks to the implementation of land privatization in the 1980s. The more income they have generated, the more their primitive way of living has improved, particularly as they can now afford modern household appliances such as a TV and a fridge.

Mrs. Liao is the first character shown in the documentary film, which implies that Chinese peasants are of particular interest to Western audiences, especially Americans. The country of antiquity is what first appears in the documentary. On the one hand, the primitive beauty of the rice paddies and the ancient traditional foods such as the rice dumplings are fascinating, but on the other hand, agricultural life is shown as remaining harsh and tough, although it has been greatly enhanced by land

privatization. Chinese peasants are still leading the agricultural life known to the West for such a long time, and so we are lead to conclude that the ways of working on the field are as ancient and stagnated as the historical images would suggest.

5.3 Country of transition – story of Sun Feng (SF)