Jia Zhangke's neoliberal China: the commodification and dissipation of the proletarian in The World (Shijie, 2004)

Abstract

This article explores the under-theorized subject of migrant labor and its precarious socio-economic position envisaged by Jia Zhangke in his The World (Shijie, 2004). As discussions of this film have largely been reduced to broad assertions in their handling of developmental adjustmentsmainly, the country's entry into the WTO in 2001 and the reality of globalizationthe specificities that mark Beijing's continuous and unfettered modernization projects under neoliberalization, are largely left untreated, leaving the study of labor incomplete. I will argue that The World transforms the concerns of the marginalized into a dialectical process by challenging the local imagery and celebrated urbanization in Beijing (commodification), while at the same time the workers in Jia's film embrace newfound consumption (dissipation). The other aim of this paper will be to view new forms of Chinese identity (suzhi) that marks a sense and sensibility of the self's value in the market economy (Yan 2003). Put another way, consumptive habits are indicative of a new neoliberal identity that complicates how Chinese service and industrial workers view themselves in post-social Beijing and what is fictionalized in The World.