Representation of Chinese Women in 1990s Films Event

Representation of Chinese Women in 1990s Films

A Case Study on LI Shao-hong's Red Suit 红西服 (1997)

At the very end of the 1970s, China chose to embark on its socio-economic reform from a socialist centralised planned economy to a post-socialist market economy. Today, after another three decades of modernisation, China has become the fastest growing economy in the world, arising from the drastic social transformations accompanying miraculous economic growth.

The most profound transformation affected the situation of the socialist workers, those who worked in either the state-owned or collective-run enterprises of the industry sector under the old socialist economic system. Many became unemployed in the transitional years in the 1990s as a devastating consequence of the state’s dismantling of socialist enterprises or danwei (单位) [work unit]. With socialist factories closing down one after another, the number of workers facing redundancy soared at an alarming rate in the mid-1990s, “on a scale not seen since the industrial era” (Wang, 2007, p.1, in Mandarin)[1]. China has no recent history of coping with mass unemployment and with no system of redundancy payments or social security. Thus, the choice facing those previously in jobs for life is a stark one — particularly for women, who have suffered disproportionately from the new economic climate.

Representing the painful process of the bankruptcy of the socialist industrial sector, LI Shao-hong’s 1997 film Red Suit (红西服) provides a close examination of the unanticipated side effects brought about by China’s socio-economic revolution. The film focuses on a middle-aged female worker and her husband, both from the zhiqing (知青)[2] background, and depicts their anguish after the husband is laid off from a state-owned work unit. This paper asks the following questions:

1). how do women respond to, and cope with, the transformative circumstances around them?

2). why do the protagonists fall victims of China’s record-breaking economic performance?

3). what is the historical cause that pushes them to be marginalised in the urban scene historically reconfigured by China’s integration into the global economy?

My close reading of the film will reveal that the director expresses her profound sympathy for Chinese women of her generation, a generation who have to forever adjust themselves to the ceaseless political, social, and economic upheavals occurring to them. In Red Suit, LI Shao-hong makes an appeal on behalf of China’s unemployed and asks government as well as wider society to pay more attention to this “lost generation” (Liang, 1986, p. 5)[1] in particular.

1 WANG Yanzhong (王延中), “Zhongguo shehui baozhang shinian fazhan shuping ” (“中国社会保障十年发展述评”) [A Review of the Development of Ten-year Social Security in China] (中国社会学网)www.sociology.cass.cn/.../P020070921344096877... - [accessed 03/12/2012].
2  It refers to the urban educated youth who were sent down to the countryside across China to be re-educated by the “poor  and lower-middle peasants” between the year from 1968 to 1978.
3  Liang, Heng. and Shapiro, Judith. (1986). After the Nightmare: A Survivor of the Cultural Revolution: Reports on China Today. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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