by: Alysha Park
Yellow Earth is a Chinese film directed by Chen Kaige in 1984. The film takes place in the late 1930s and follows Gu Qing, a soldier of the Chinese Communist Party, who travels to the Kuomintang-controlled Shanbei town in Shaanxi province to collect folk songs of the peasants. During his time in Shanbei, he is hosted by a peasant family and meets Cu Qiao, a young girl who eventually begs Gu Qing to take her with him. In this post, I apply the philosophical concepts derived from Che Guevara’s excerpt in Socialism and Man in Cuba to Yellow Earth. I argue that Gu Qing’s presence in Shanbei represents what Guevara calls the Vanguard and thus the process of utilizing education as an instrument to mobilize the masses for the revolution.
In his essay, Guevara viciously emphasizes the vice of capitalism and argues that its law of value invades all aspects of an individual’s life without them knowing. While the success narratives such as that of Rockefeller are praised, individuals under capitalism do not notice that such wealth requires the persistence of prevalent poverty and are told that individual values are essential to achieving such success. This leads to alienation and a lonely but violent journey towards success at the cost of others. Although extremely relevant for the context of Guevara and the peasant struggles of Latin America, the concept of capitalist exploitation is not totally relevant to the town of Shanbei. For sure, poverty is entrenched in their lives, as seen by the fake wooden fish the town people brought out to “just get the feeling of eating fish”.
However, Shanbei is an extremely isolated town in North China, where poverty is not caused directly by capitalism or any sort of exploitation. In Shanbei, everyone is poor. Yet, we can still cater our focus on Cu Qiao, a very young female character whose labour is exploited by patriarchal traditions. She faces two different types of oppression – poverty and patriarchy – which is made explicit when her father forces her to get married to a man 40 years older than her in order to use the dowry to pay for her mother’s funeral and brother’s engagement. In secret, Cu Qiao sings in despair about her dire isolation in Shanbei and asks, “who will I speak of my hardships?”.
Eventually, the hardship sang by Cu Qiao is picked up by Gu Qing who argues to Cu Qiao’s father that she is not a commodity. In fact, in the South, Cu Qiao would be marrying by her personal choice with no rules imposed by the family or matchmakers. The dialogue reveals Gu Qing’s identity as what Guevara calls the Vanguard. The Vanguard are those in the revolution whose ideology is much more advanced than the masses who do not understand the new values of communism sufficiently yet. According to Guevara, the Vanguard is needed because the revolution necessitates the mobilization and participation of the masses led by an ideologically forward leader. In their duty of mobilization, they consist as individuals part of an institution who walks in communion with the masses to help them develop a new consciousness. This is exactly what Gu Qing exactly does for Cu Qiao. Through her interaction with Gu Qing, Cu Qiao achieves a new imagination of who she could be. She learns from him that in the revolutionary army, not only women sew – her everyday task that has been forced since birth - but also men sew and that she will be able to learn to read and write. This process whereby an individual recognizes their state of incompleteness Guevara claims is the start of the new consciousness building. Through the direct education from Gu Qing and her self-education on the incomplete state of her being, she represents what Guevara calls the born of a new man and woman that will eventually lead to the formation of a new economic form.
From the Cu Qiao’s subordination to her father to the attempt to escape Shanbei, the audience viscerally experience the consciousness raising of a young girl in the 1930s of China. Throughout the process, the audience also realizes the Communist Party’s emphasis on its method to mobilize – education. As the Vanguard, Gu Qing fulfills his role as an educator by collecting folk songs from peasant towns in order to replace with new words for consciousness raising of the communist agenda. He says in his dialogue with Cu Qiao’s father, “Solders of Cui Qiao’s age will sing them wherever they go. People will know why they’re suffering. And why workers and peasant should rise up. Chairman Mao also asked us to learn to read and write. To be able to eat properly”. Like Guevara, Mao, the ultimate Vanguard, emphasizes the need for the right instrument to mobilize the masses and suggests that “ society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school”. Through direct and self-education, the masses will spread their education to those who are not educated, perhaps through means like the folk songs collected by Gu Qing. What is important to note is that unlike in the capitalist society described by Guevara where one seeks individual success at the cost of others, the prize of educating each other is a new society where individuals can have different characteristics.
Finally, while it is easy to apply Guevara’s concepts of the Vanguard on the context of the Yellow Earth, we must push ourselves to be critical of Guevara. In the end of his essay, he claims that the Vanguards not only are the more advanced individuals of the society but also are the ones who go through a fundamental qualitative change that allow them to see the necessity of their sacrifice to the cause. However, the masses do not understand the big picture and thus require incentives and intense pressure to join the revolution; this is what Guevara calls, “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Under this narrative, does Cu Qiao want to join the revolutionary army not because she has gained a true form of consciousness raising but because she saw the revolution as a way to escape her own oppression as a young woman in rural China? In the bigger picture, one should ask, can dictatorship and manipulation of the mass consciousness be legitimized?
References:
Guevara, Che. “From Algiers, for Marcha. The Cuban Revolution Today”, Che Guevara Studies and Ocean Press, 2005.
Yellow Earth. Directed by Kaige. Che. 1984. China: Guangxi Film Studio, Film.