Text: Michael Guarneri
“Work makes you free” („Arbeit macht frei“) was a Bible-inspired phrase adopted by Nazi propaganda and used as a slogan above the entrance of Dachau, Auschwitz and other camps where extermination through hard labor and other types of industrialized extermination were carried out.
“Work is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism” was a Stalin quote used as a slogan above the entrance of the Soviet gulags in the Kolyma region, as narrated by Varlam Šalamov and others who survived extermination through hard labor in the far north.
Similar sentences appeared, and still appear, all over laogai and laojiao camps, the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet gulags, introduced in China around 1956–1957 by Mao, who was angered by Nikita Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin(ism) at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and decided to teach a lesson in obedience to the intellectuals of the Chinese Communist Party and to the Chinese people as a whole.
Totalitarian doublespeak aside, even in common language we generally say that “work makes man noble”. Well, maybe in a perfect world of fantasy. But what about this real world of ours? The documentary we are about to see, Behemoth by Zhao Liang, definitely proves common language wrong.
After immersing himself into present-day China’s coal mines and steel mills, Zhao Liang came to the same conclusion as philosopher Simone Weil and bourgeois saint Irene Girard in Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51: workers are doomed convicts on the assembly line. As we are about to see, Behemoth realizes Karl Marx’s dream of documenting the raw-matter-to-finished-product cycle to illustrate both its economic and human costs. And, just like Marx did in nineteenth-century Europe, Zhao Liang describes China’s twenty-first-century factory system by evoking a wide variety of monsters ranging from ancient mythologies to Gothic fiction: workers are prisoners in an underground, dark dungeon; they are exploited; their blood is poisoned; their life is sucked dry; their bodies are mangled and fed to a huge money-making machine, an industrial Moloch, or Behemoth, or Leviathan, or vampire, or whatever you want to call it. Yet Zhao Liang’s main reference is not Marx but Dante Alighieri, as Behemoth allegorizes the condition of the workers under “Chinese socialism” by adapting the Divine Comedy’s vision of a journey across Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. I leave the poetical side to the film images and sounds, and I will briefly focus on the more materialist aspects of the work.
In 2015–2016, I had an in-depth discussion with Zhao Liang, and what he said to me almost ten years ago is a lucid economic and political analysis accurately predicting the Evergrande crisis that has been going on for the past two or three years in China. It is often said that artists are prophets. They are, but not because they have supernatural powers to see the future. Artists are prophets because they diligently study the past, they carefully observe the present, and they draw the logical conclusions about the future.
This is what Zhao Liang told me back in 2015–2016:
There are hundreds of Chinese ghost cities like the one I portray in the Paradise section of Behemoth. […] The ghost city is caused by the blind development, by the unplanned expansion. It is a consequence of the economic model with Chinese characteristics, which is not following the economic laws, namely the regulation of price driven by the supply-demand system. As a matter of fact, the ghost city is the result of one of the many economic bubbles artificially created by the Chinese political system. In China, the price of property is manipulated to allow investors to make huge profits. The possibility of speculation nurtures a fever of real-estate investments, hence the flow of “hot money” in the sector over the past few years. Local governments actively encourage property developers to construct more and more new cities by offering them preferential policies. This way, the government can boast its land-developing achievements and Gross Domestic Product figures, and more plots of land and buildings can be sold under these circumstances. However, the bubble doesn’t last in the long run […] because of oversupply. Hence, all the failed mortgage repayments by the investors, the bad debts, the banks acquiring property, the ghost cities.
Economy is a bitch, just like karma. You can cheat for a while, you can hide the dust under the carpet and pretend that everything is going according to the great leader’s plan, but sooner or later the payday comes: where is the bright future of emancipation, happiness and wealth that is being promised to Chinese workers over and over again for more than a century now? Nobody knows. As documented in Behemoth, in less than a decade, millions of Chinese people got their lungs destroyed. The mountains of Inner Mongolia were razed to the ground and the lush green valleys below were turned into scorched black earth. The air and water were polluted to the point of no return. For what? So that in some carefully adjusted statistics China’s GDP could be bigger than that of the USA? So that some Chinese Communist Party yes-men, mafia thugs and land-developing sharks could buy Gucci accessories for their wives, mistresses and kids? Do you remember George Orwell’s fairy tale? “Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer – except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs”. (G. Orwell, Animal Farm)
To quote once again what Zhao Liang told me almost a decade ago:
In China, the so-called socialism is a “cheating product”: the current socialist system bears no similarity to the kind of socialism that Marxism theorizes. At the same time, it is not the capitalism that you have in the West either. In the current Chinese system, the original bad side of capitalism – its brutal exploitation of human beings and nature – is maintained, and there are none of the democratic characteristics to be found in Western capitalism, such as a minimum of protection for the workers. I would say that Chinese socialism is an extension of feudalism. Since I was a kid, I have been taught that communism is a society in which everybody is equal, a society in which there is no privilege – class or otherwise. In communism everybody happily works for his fellow people, for society as a whole, giving his/her little contribution: people do their share and get what they need in return, as the benefit of collective work is equally distributed when resources are abundant. However, for me, this communist ideal is impossible to achieve because egoism lies at the very essence of human nature, and it is very difficult to eradicate it. I think that in today’s China nobody believes that communism can be actually achieved […]. Nobody takes this lie seriously nowadays. We know it is a utopia, something that will never be there, something that can’t be done. The people in my films, most Chinese people… we are all aware that this is a lie. We probably always have been. It’s just like the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, I guess: the people see that the Emperor is naked, they just don’t say it out loud.
Thank you, Zeughauskino, for allowing this fundamental truth to be said out loud. Let’s never forget that in China, people face all sorts of harassment, including imprisonment, slave labor, torture and death for speaking out against turbo-capitalist exploitation and trying to bring about change.