There is no doubt that China’s economic development over the past 30 years has achieved significant success, but the problems it has brought may be more troubling than economic construction for a long time to come.
The movie “A Sea of People” tells the story of an ordinary farmer who, after his younger brother is robbed and killed, faces the helplessness of the police investigation and embarks on a journey across the country to seek revenge.
The story takes place in Guizhou, the poorest province in China. While the reform and opening-up policy has brought tremendous development to the eastern coastal areas, ordinary families in the mountainous regions of Guizhou still live in a traditional agricultural society, with extremely scarce material resources and living conditions that remain very primitive. If there is any wealth to measure in an average family, a small color TV and a cheap domestic motorcycle almost constitute their entire property. The reason the protagonist’s brother was robbed and killed was precisely because he owned a motorcycle that could be used for rural transportation.
The movie spends a significant amount of time realistically depicting the local scenery of Guizhou—it is almost hard to believe this is China in the 21st century, yet it exists in large numbers. Compared to the mountainous regions of Guizhou, the areas the protagonist, Tie Ge, passes through while chasing the murderer in Chongqing are also very typical “slum” scenes. Old, unsafe buildings are crammed with countless small families, creating a chaotic and disorderly environment. Drug addiction, drug trafficking, gangsters, and fraud are rampant, forming an extreme irony compared to the achievements of the former leader of the region.
In an era of material scarcity, since everyone was very poor and there were hardly any valuable items at home, it was possible to leave doors unlocked at night and not pick up lost items on the road. Logically, if the mountainous regions of Guizhou were simply poor and remote, the robbery and murder at the beginning of the movie would not have occurred. The key issue is that the young people in these poor and remote areas, influenced by the primary information medium, the television, can no longer stay in the countryside. The lack of cultural education, coupled with the fact that most of them can only engage in marginal labor and low-paying jobs in the city, leads to economic dissatisfaction, making it unsurprising that they resort to crime or simply do not understand the law.
The movie contains many seemingly psychologically acceptable but clearly illegal criminal acts, which are easily overshadowed by the overarching theme of robbery, murder, and revenge. For example, Tie Ge being tricked into “transporting drugs,” even though it was sugar, still constitutes the crime of drug trafficking (attempted); Tie Ge “borrowing” someone’s motorcycle to go to Shanxi also constitutes the crime of theft or robbery; Tie Ge breaking a child’s arm constitutes intentional injury, and so on. At the end of the movie, the local police frankly admit that Tie Ge is a legal illiterate—such people exist in large numbers. If Tie Ge’s actions are seen as part of his revenge and not considered problematic by the general public, then the anti-Japanese protests that erupted across the country on September 15th, involving looting and car smashing, truly verify the reality that legal illiteracy is everywhere.
The key to Tie Ge’s revenge is finding the murderer’s trail, but his search is aimless, which is actually a true reflection of our migrant workers: their purpose in coming to the city is to make money, but what is the purpose of making money? No one can say for sure. Children left unattended and lacking proper upbringing develop extremely extreme personalities; the workers themselves cannot improve their labor skills or cultural level, always remaining on the fringes of the city; after seeing the crowded world, returning to the countryside leaves them with a severely unbalanced mindset. The end of the movie clearly validates this line of thought: the black coal mine is blown up by Tie Ge, and after the older generation of migrant workers retire, their children are left with broken arms, a blank look, and a lack of education, destined to become a new generation of laborers relying solely on physical strength.
Tie Ge’s journey of revenge is a concentrated exploration of the polarization and numerous social contradictions that have emerged in China’s economic construction. How the most simple and honest class of farmers in traditional culture copes with this polarized world of money and adapts to a legal system that lags behind criminal phenomena becomes a very thought-provoking question. The movie’s answer is: they can only adapt in the most brutal way.
Tie Ge wants revenge, but in the end, he can only watch the murderer escape at the black coal mine, leaving him to take a desperate and tragic suicidal approach to end his dissatisfaction with society.
Fortunately, the movie still retains a glimmer of hope: the murderer is eventually caught by the police, and Tie Ge is rescued after blowing up the black coal mine—but this does not change Tie Ge’s fate.
Tie Ge still swings a sledgehammer like an iron man, breaking stones on a rocky mountain. The sea of people has nothing to do with him.