Description
A Life Worth of 30,000 Yuan: Labour Meets Money on the Postsocialist Chinese ScreenIn Chinese cinema at the turn of the century, the lives and deaths of peasant workers provide striking cinematic experiences of being a labourer. One brutal yet prevalent scenario is when a labourer’s life has a money value placed on it. My paper studies how labour meets money on the Chinese screen. My case studies are The World (Shijie, Jia Zhangke, 2004) and Blind Shaft (Mangjing, Li Yang, 2004). Both films feature lives and deaths of migrant workers, and in both films, the compensation for their death is 30,000 yuan. In The World, a pair of rural parents travel to Beijing to receive the 30,000-yuan compensation for their son’s death in a construction accident, whereas in Blind Shaft, two coal miners make money by killing their fake relatives in ‘accidents’ down the mine.
Film scholars have studied the figures of the migrant worker in Chinese cinema and their experiences of the postsocialist condition. However, while migrant workers take the risk of leaving home to make money, no research has scrutinized how workers experience the tangible object of money itself. In political economy, money’s exchange-value originate from labour, such as Marx’s ‘socially necessary labour time’. Labour is the true source of value and wealth, but how is the process of abstracting labour’s time, toil and life into economic value experienced? And when money becomes a tangible object on screen that stands for a labourer’s life and death, is it still ‘money’ or does it become something else? While money and its function of abstracting everything into exchange-value contribute to the making of a market-driven society in PRC, my paper shows that labourers’ personal and bodily experiences of money as mediated on screen have affective qualities and social significances beyond calculation, exchange and economy.
| Period | 3 Apr 2024 → 5 Apr 2024 |
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| Event type | Conference |