Youth (Hard Times)

Youth (Hard Times) is the second chapter of Wang Bing’s monumental opus on the diminished youth of China, who work seemingly endless hours and have traded life for financial exploitation. Making low wages, they view earning money as their sole horizon.

Here, Wang Bing broadens his exploration of lives in the garment district from the cramped, overcrowded workshops of Zhili to the Yangtze Delta region’s unique and complex economy. Drawing around 300,000 workers annually from China's poorest regions, the local textile industry is made up of thousands of small, self-managed individual or family enterprises. This system bypasses traditional banking and contrasts sharply with China’s formerly state-run economy. But it also creates a work environment beyond legal control, allowing for unchecked abuses.

These are hard times for Xu Wanxiang, who can’t find his notebook, without which his boss refuses to pay him; for Hu Siwen, with his experiences of police brutality; and for Fu Yun, who constantly makes mistakes and has to redo her work. We follow the protagonists through these difficulties, rooting for them, anxious to know what will be their destinies. Zhili’s system has left its young workers at the mercy of bosses made ruthless by a cyclical system of small loans bordering on usury, impoverishing both employers and workers.

Throughout, Wang Bing’s impassive gaze engages us in a tactile experience of life in the workshops filled with noise, pollution, and abuse, delivering an epic, unsparing — yet devoid of miserabilism — portrait of the indomitable spirit of youth.

GIOVANNA FULVI