The Losers: Migrants and Margins

Chen Village covers the extraordinary changes occurred in a southern Chinese community from the early 1960s up to 2007. The stress upon community-level solidarity probably was necessary to protect the village from its slightly larger and stronger neighbors. The communist workteam's mission was to redistribute landholdings in the village and to demolish the power and influence of the rural elite. The former landlord and rich peasant households officially belonged to "bad" untrustworthy classes. Upper-middle and middle peasants were not considered politically suspect, but they were officially defined as being less trustworthy than the poor peasants and the lower-middle peasants. I think the lower-middle class people are easier to control because they have nothing to lose. If you simply give them the village officals' title and more profits, they will follow your order with greater gratitude. And the most importnat is that they are the majority. This idea was represented in previous movie, "To live". During the Great Leap Forward, the canteens allowed peasants to fed "each according to his needs" rather than "each according to his work". I have to say that this certainly decrease the efficiency and competitive power. During the Culture Revolution, young peole acceppted these ideals, but in trying to outdo each other, they pushed themselves to the point of exhanstion. They all wanted higher achievements. They did not want to be trapped as just ordinary peasants all their lives. I think they have being blinded by the power that couldn't do the right judgment among that period. During the seventies, the various new unworkable experiments that the state had demandede were severely taxing the teams' labor resources, at the very same time that labor had been drawn away from the fields to man the brigade's new factories. But because of the unstable government, they couldn't force that much. The effort to force them into factories highlights the precarious circumstances in which many of Chen Village's outsiders find themselves. Most of the people living in Chen Village are caught in these situations. and the contrast between their livelihoods and the middle-class lifestyle of the Chens is, striking.