Hello, this is Klaus.
Censorship and indoctrination have intensified in China.
The Chinese will be increasingly divided in terms of ideology.
Patriots will only be more loyal and dissidents more anti-China.
Those wanting to bury their heads in the sand will have to pick a side eventually.
The division has manifested itself in many ways,
such as the reaction to a recently released hit film, Return to Dust,
set in a poor and backward rural village in Northwest China,
which tells the tragic love story of a peasant couple.
The film has a simple plot line. There aren’t many twists and turns.
You don’t need to have seen the film to understand this video.
A viewer said, “The film doesn’t talk about love but is full of love.
It doesn’t talk about bitterness but is full of bitterness.”
The film is positioned as a niche film:
a little-known director, non-professional actors,
a small budget, and no massive marketing campaigns
enjoyed by Wolf Warriors or The Battle at Lake Changjin.
The film earned only about 300,000 RMB on its opening day,
but then over 10 million RMB in a month
and over 100 million RMB in two months.
It’s rated 8.5 on Douban, the first Chinese-language film in 2022 to exceed 8.
It’s the NO.1 trending topic on all Chinese video platforms,
and has won several foreign film awards.
However, the film was shelved in China shortly after its box office sales exceeded 100 million RMB.
The film has been questioned by many people
who criticized the film for being unrealistic,
“It relies on depicting the poverty and backwardness of China’s rural areas
and portraying the Chinese as indifferent and selfish to pander to Westerners.”
Is China’s countryside really that backward?
Are people at the bottom of China really that selfish and indifferent?
I myself grew up in the countryside in China.
Today I will share my personal experience.
The film is set in a rural village of Gansu in 2010 in northwest China.
I was born in the ’90s in a rural area of Shandong, a coastal province.
Shandong is the 3rd largest province in China in terms of GDP.
Even I find the film’s depiction of rural areas realistic.
I grew up in a hut like this.
Our village started out with huts like this.
Later, as China’s economy grew, the huts were slowly replaced with red bricks and cement.
In winter, countryfolk in northern China indeed sleep on these earthen beds.
Heating comes from burning coal in a stove like this.
This way of heating is very dangerous
because the winter is very cold in the north and the doors and windows are closed tightly.
The coal can easily burn without sufficient oxygen and produce a lot of carbon monoxide.
Every year, people in the village die from poisoning, especially the elderly.
One of my elementary school teachers lost her parents that way.
I’d had to work in the fields since I was a child.
During the busiest seasons, the whole family had to be in the fields.
That is how primitive farming is in rural China.
Our family also plowed and sowed like this.
But we used to pull by hand at first,
and it wasn't until my teenager years that my family bought a cattle.
The fall harvest was harder than the spring plowing.
We also harvested corn and wheat by hand.
The wheat was stinging, causing the heroine to have a rash on her body.
The man took her to the river to bathe.
In our village, the river was still clear only when I was very little.
Many people would bathe in the river.
By 2010, I'm pretty sure the river had become too dirty to bathe in.
But the film is set in the northwest, so it's possible that their river is clean.
In fact, it's not just wheat that stings. Most crops do.
The corn field was the worst.
I had to be deep in the cornfields for seeding, fertilizing, or harvesting.
Afterwards, I would feel itchy all over.
Besides, the corn plants would fall over easily, damaged by storms,
and need to be restored one by one like this.
The harvested grain would need to be dried and peeled
before it could be paid as tributes or sold for money.
This was also extremely tedious and exhausting.
The scene of the hero saving bricks in the middle of a rainy night
reminds me of how I used to do the same thing when I was a child.
The harvested crops had to be dried for days, but the weather was unpredictable.
Even in the middle of the night, my parents would wake me up to collect the crops.
Just like that, farming went on and on throughout the year.
Most peasants would spend their entire lives guarding their few acres of land,
day after day, year after year.
In terms of standard of living, I didn't have any dairy products until I was in junior high school.
A classmate living in town gave me a box of milk.
At that time, I was fascinated by the square packaging.
When I was in high school, a classmate in the county gave me a handkerchief.
I can still clearly remember that it was the "Heart to Heart" brand.
Growing up in a rural village,
I had never seen anything so delicate, and it was fragrant.
I couldn’t bear to use it, so I stuck it in my diary.
Growing up, I rarely had the opportunity to eat meat,
even though my family raised pigs and chickens.
We needed to sell them for money to pay for school.
I could only eat fish and red meat when I visited my aunt.
My aunt's husband was a village clerk in the neighboring town.
Every time I visited them, I could not only eat good food but also take some back home.
The film’s portrayal of the poverty and backwardness of rural China is absolutely realistic.
Mo Yan told a story about himself and his mother harvesting wheat at the Nobel Prize ceremony,
and was called a liar trying to smear China.
Mo Yan is over 60 years old.
Even I, born in the ’90s, have harvested wheat. So how could Mo Yan be lying?
After the autumn harvest, there would be some grain left in the fields.
I would go to the fields with other children to collect the leftover grain.
At the end of that day, everyone would go home with a basket of grain.
Are people at the bottom of China really that selfish, indifferent and heartless as depicted in the film?
I believe that most Chinese people do believe
and also want to believe that ordinary Chinese people are simple and kind,
just like what our textbooks say,
“Chinese people are hardworking, brave, simple and kind.
Peasants are the most respectable and lovable people.”
My grandpa was a local road worker for decades,
but the money owed to him was never paid.
What was worse, he was afflicted with femur necrosis.
When I was young, my grandpa's condition worsened and required surgery.
My grandpa had two sons, including my dad, and three daughters.
There was a family feud over the bearing of surgery costs and caregiving duties.
Later, when I was in junior high school, my grandma passed away.
According to local customs, the son should organize the funeral.
But my grandma’s passing came too suddenly.
My dad and my uncle were unprepared.
Her body lay there for days, until finally, after my relatives mediated,
it was agreed that my uncle would take care of my grandma's funeral,
and that if my grandpa were to pass away one day, my dad would take care of the funeral.
In 2017, my grandpa passed away.
My dad and my uncle once again started fighting,
this time over a hut, the only thing left behind by my grandpa.
Because of this,
later on when my family built a brick house, my uncle refused to let us fill the gap.
A one-foot gap remains even to this day between the two houses,
a symbol of the feud between brothers in broad daylight.
But that is normal in our rural area. It’s nothing new at all.
This is how I see the Chinese people:
There is no love between parents and their children.
People of my grandparents' generation usually have more children.
If the children are well-to-do, when they return home,
the parents will welcome them at the village gate, and chickens and sheep will be slaughtered for a feast.
Children who are not well-off are advised not to come back for the Chinese New Year.
When the parents are old and feeble, the children will find various excuses to avoid caring for them.
An old lady used to live next door to my grandpa.
When I was a child, I would go to her house for the Chinese New Year,
and she would always give me snacks.
Then I was away from my hometown for a few years.
When I went back home, I heard that she had died of starvation.
But she had seven children!
I heard an old man say to his children,
“If I have a serious illness in the future, don't treat it.
Medical treatment would be costly and painful.”
After all these years, now,
I’m beginning to understand his words from the perspective of human nature.
In fact, the old man must have known
even if he were to have a serious illness, his children would not treat it.
Nobody would willingly give up their own life.
But the old man said what he said,
so that before he dies, his children would treat him better.
The heroine of the film accidentally fell into the river and drowned.
The whole village was buzzing about it.
Only when the husband came back did they break it to him.
This plot point seemingly comes out of nowhere, which is more realistic.
Seeing a dead body is so commonplace in rural China.
A childhood playmate, 1 year older than me,
drowned in the reservoir when he was about 10 years old.
No one cared. His parents were working elsewhere.
His body wasn’t taken out of the water until a few days later.
A group of us kids looked at the body.
I was still young at that time. Like most people, I didn't feel anything.
A human life meant nothing.
Many adults left their village for work in the city,
leaving their children to the grandparents.
During farming seasons, the children were unattended.
Almost every few years, something would happen to a kid in the village or the next village.
Drowning and car accidents were the main causes of death.
Some were abducted and sold.
I went back home once in 2016,
and my family told me that my elementary school classmate had died.
He did not continue his education after graduating from junior high school.
He was driving a backhoe at a construction site and was killed in an accident.
His parents then bought a little boy from human traffickers.
I went to their home to offer my condolences.
The little boy was very cute. I gave him 200 yuan.
My mother said, "No need.
That one (my elementary school classmate) died and his family was paid 500,000 yuan.”
Speaking of human traffickers, I can't help but think of Xuzhou Mother.
I have not lived in the countryside for many years.
If not for Xuzhou Mother, I may have forgotten that there is human trafficking in China.
When I was little, I had a childhood playmate a few years younger than me.
His mother was bought from Yunnan.
His father was very short and couldn't get a wife.
I only met his mother a few times when I was very young.
Later, it is said that his mother fled domestic violence and was never seen again.
There are hundreds of families in our village, at least five of which bought daughters-in-law.
Trafficking in women is too common in rural China.
And I can responsibly say that
in the whole of China, over 80% of women are not freely married,
but were forced, semi-forced, coerced, and bullied into marriage.
Some were forced to marry by their parents.
In our village, there is something called “marriage exchange”.
I’m not sure if you have heard of it.
Some men cannot find a wife for various reasons.
Then his elder or younger sisters would have the responsibility to help him find a partner.
Two such families would do a “marriage exchange”.
“Your sister marries me, and my sister marries you.”
A daughter’s happiness can be sacrificed so that a son can carry on the family line.
My hometown is not far from Xuzhou. Both are relatively developed coastal areas.
What the rest of the country is like is unimaginable.
This is the man who chained up a girl and had eight children with her.
Look at his face. How simple and honest.
You can see the vicissitudes of life and hardships of a peasant.
It would look perfect on a promotional poster, captioned with “hardworking, brave, kind and simple Chinese people”.
I think it would be quite appropriate.
Some people want to believe that the CCP is evil but the Chinese people are good.
This may be a matter of opinion, which I cannot analyze.
But I think that if the Communist Party were overthrown and replaced by my relatives, my villagers,
I’m not sure if they would do better than the CCP.
People at the bottom of China are said to be “simple and kind”.
Perhaps they are simple to the throne and kind to money.
Maybe my rural village is special (not representative of all Chinese villages).
But what I’ve shared with you today is the truth.
So, is the film realistic or not?
Based on my childhood experience in rural China, I say it is very realistic.
The film is not “smearing China” at all,
but is actually sugar coating it, which is the only unrealistic part of the film,
that is, the glorified images of the hero and heroine.
The two live in a selfish, insensitive and heartless village.
But they have maintained love and pure kindness in their hearts?
That is not logically valid.
The love story between the hero and heroine takes place for the sake of the plot.
How could a bright flower bloom on saline grounds?
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This is Klaus. See you next time!