In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Xuesong Shao about her article “Restoring and Reimagining Socialist-Built Cities: Wang Xiaoshuai’s ‘Third Front Trilogy,’” from Telos 197 (Winter 2021). An excerpt of the article appears below. In their conversation they discuss the history of the Third Front Movement in China; how migration is depicted in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Third Front trilogy; the article’s approach to the issue of nostalgia; the relationship of nostalgia and ruination in Red Amnesia; the ways in which Wang Xiaoshuai uses the male gaze to reinforce gender stereotypes; the personal versus the historical in Eleven Flowers and how elusive personal recollections align with the master narratives of the nation-state; and the different ways that Wang Xiaoshaui and Jia Zhangke depict places of memory and places of history. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 197 are available for purchase in our online store.
Restoring and Reimagining Socialist-Built Cities: Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Third Front Trilogy”
Xuesong Shao
Introduction
During the last twenty years, a growing body of films about China’s socialist-built cities and neighborhoods, both as full-fledged urban ecosystems in their prime and in the form of present-day remains, have gained popular and scholarly attention alike.[1] Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Third Front Trilogy,” consisting of Shanghai Dreams (Qinghong, 2005), Eleven Flowers (Wo 11, 2012), and Red Amnesia (Chuangru zhe, 2014), is exemplary of this emerging cinema. The bulk of this trilogy is set in Guiyang, a city in China’s landlocked southwest that was developed as a military-industrial base during Mao’s Third Front Movement. By restoring this socialist-built city’s past and documenting its ever-changing present, Wang brings to light the locality, history, and lived memory of the Third Front.
With the polysemous word “movement,” the English translation of the Chinese term sanxian jianshe encapsulates this event’s twofold nature: it is at once a massive relocation and a political campaign. In 1964, Mao initiated the Third Front Movement to move China’s military and heavy industrial bases from coastal cities to the mountainous hinterlands in anticipation of a hot war with the United States or the Soviet Union.[2] Over the next fifteen years, thousands of factories were moved to inland provinces, and millions of engineers, skilled workers, and rural laborers were recruited to build the Third Front. Wang Xiaoshuai’s parents joined in the campaign just months after his birth, and the whole family was relocated from Shanghai to the then newly built socialist city Guiyang.[3] Anchored in the director’s childhood memories, this film trilogy attends to the rarely represented Third Front and grapples with the dynamics of this massive relocation and industrialization project.
Wang’s trilogy captures the shared experience and sentiments of Third Fronters in different historical situations over the span of half a century. Taking place in the early 1980s, Shanghai Dreams engages Third Fronters’ mixed feelings of hope, betrayal, and anxiety in the wake of China’s market reform. This film’s core story revolves around three characters: Old Wu, a relocated worker who is eager to move his family back to his hometown, Shanghai; Qinghong, Old Wu’s late-teen daughter who has grown up in Guiyang and is content with her current life; and Xiaogen, a local boy who is in love with Qinghong. The second installment in the trilogy, Eleven Flowers, pushes the time frame back to the Mao era. Through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy, Wang Han, this film represents the everyday life of the Third Front during the final years of the Cultural Revolution. This semi-autobiographical story juxtaposes Han’s curiosity and confusion during puberty with his first exposure to crime and state violence. Finally, alternating between present-day Beijing and Guiyang, Red Amnesia represents former Third Fronters’ lives at the (t)here-and-now after the bankruptcy of state utopianism. With a horror-like beginning, this film creates a haunting atmosphere around recently widowed Old Deng, whose mundane urban life is disturbed by harassing phone calls, trespassing incidents, and a mysterious boy stalker. As the film progresses, a backstory about an unpaid historical debt reveals itself: in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Old Deng had snatched the only back-relocation quota from her colleague Old Zhao, who had a paralyzing stroke upon hearing the news and remained in the Third Front ever since. Old Zhao had passed away recently, and his grandson came to Beijing to seek revenge on Old Deng. Together, these three films offer a glimpse into the everyday of (former) Third Fronters from the Maoist to the post-Mao eras.
Despite being the most expensive industrialization campaign and a major relocation project during the Mao era, the Third Front receives little attention in English-speaking academia.[4] Before the publication of Covell F. Meyskens’s Mao’s Third Front, historical studies on Mao’s China generally considered the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution as the two milestones of the 1960s. Perceiving the cultural disputes between Mao and his colleagues after the failure of the Great Leap Forward as the single cause for his initiation of the Cultural Revolution, this narrative “underappreciates that the commencement of the Third Front campaign brought about a monumental change in Mao’s disagreements with his colleagues over economic policy.”[5] The historiographical blind spot of the Third Front in turn affects the way cultural productions are perceived. Despite Wang Xiaoshuai’s serious effort in representing not only the history but the physiography of the Third Front, existing scholarship on his trilogy has leaned on stock narratives about the Cultural Revolution, including the fractional violence of the Red Guards, struggle sessions, and the sent-down youth, thus glossing over the geopolitical specificities of the Third Front. As such, these analyses either misclassify relocated workers as sent-down youth[6] or adopt a preconceived “catastrophe thesis” that dismisses any event during the Mao era as yet another instance from “a series of never-to-be-repeated totalitarian crimes.”[7] Departing from the paradigm of exposing the traumatic past of the “People’s Republic of Amnesia,”[8] this article focuses on the real and the imagined Third Front so as to look into Wang’s spatial configuration of mnemonic resources. Drawing upon Pierre Nora’s theorization of sites of memory (lieux de mémoire), on the one hand, and Svetlana Boym’s conceptualization of nostalgia, on the other, this article analyzes the dialectics and dynamics of history and memory in Wang’s characterization of socialist-built cities, probing the potency and limitation of the cinematic medium in commemorating the past. By investigating the interactions and contradictions of historical vestiges, directorial recollections, and audiovisual images, this article will reveal the ways that Wang’s films and filmmaking function as hybrid sites of memory and at the same time mediate both physical restorations and critical reflections of a bygone era.
Continue reading this article at the Telos Online website. If your library does not yet subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page to let them know how.
1. Such films include West of the Tracks (dir. Wang Bing, 2002), 24 City (dir. Jia Zhangke, 2008), and The Piano in a Factory (dir. Zhang Meng, 2010), to name but a few.
2. As Sino–Soviet tensions kept escalating in the early 1960s, Mao was worried about China’s national security in the event of war because most heavy-industry factories were in coastal cities prone to air raids or nuclear strike. In response to this international vulnerability, he came up with the Third Front initiative, which divided up China into three war zones: a First Front in the northeast, northwest, and along the coast; a Second Front behind the coast; and a Third Front in the southwest mountains. The Third Front was considered to be China’s military safe haven. For details about the Third Front initiative, see Covell F. Meyskens, Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020), pp. 4–5.
3. According to Wang’s memoir, his mother received a relocation order first, since her work unit belonged to the military defense sector. His father, then a professor at Shanghai Theater Academy, had to give up his career and move to Guiyang together with his wife and newborn. Wang lived in Guiyang until he was thirteen, when his father accepted a wengongtuan (The League of Literary and Artistic Workers) job in Wuhan and again the family was relocated. See Wang Xiaoshuai, Bobo de guxiang (My Slim Hometown) (Chongqing: Chongqing Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 15, 47.
4. Published in 2020, Mao’s Third Front is the first book-length study on the Third Front. Before that, the subject of the Third Front was first broached by Barry Naughton in a 1988 article. Jeremy Brown’s monograph City versus Countryside in Maoist China devotes a chapter to Tianjin’s “Small Third Front.” See Barry Naughton, “The Third Front: Defense Industrialization in the Chinese Interior,” China Quarterly 115 (1988): 351–86; and Jeremy Brown, City versus Countryside in Maoist China: Negotiating the Divide (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012).
5. Meyskens, Mao’s Third Front, p. 18.
6. The sent-down youth refers to the millions of educated urban youth relocated to the countryside during Mao’s “up to the mountains and down to the villages” (shangshan xiaxiang) campaign. Unlike the sent-down youth, who are compelled to integrate themselves into local living, the relocated Third Fronters largely live and work in a self-sufficient socialist factory ecosystem that is both isolated from and better off than the local conditions during the Maoist years.
7. Jie Li, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2020), p. 4.
8. This term is borrowed from the title of journalist Louisa Lim’s award-winning book The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015). Not only does Lim’s title share the trope of amnesia with Wang’s Red Amnesia, but the two works came out in the same year. In addition, it is noteworthy that “red amnesia” is not a literal translation of the film’s Chinese title, Chuangru zhe (Intruder) but more of an allegorical interpretation of the film’s otherwise politically ambivalent narrative.
