客路青山 documentary

In Yunnan, on a holiday.  The live singing in the nearby bar kept us up. The  television played a random free documentary. It was a smart TV but the a lot of shows  requires subscription.  Some are free, mostly documentary and early episodes of c-drama. I wasn’t paying attention at first. On TV, they were speaking in Yunnan dialect that I couldn’t understand interspersed with the official Mandarin.

I perked up when the captions showed 云南。Serendipity!

They were interviewing a bunch of villagers.

The villagers described their village 攀枝嘎 （Pan Zhi Ga) as 山穷水尽.

It started off with  a bunch of people trying to get work with tourism development firms to get some revenue for the villagers. A man with a mustache and a shirt that said Tesla volunteer. 蔡润. ( Cai Ran – I googled him later and found he got some others in the village to buy Teslas and rent them to earn tourism revenue.)

He seemed very in touch with the business world outside of the village. They showed him speaking to someone and boom deal done. The firm promised money to the villagers  There was no impediment at all. It seemed very easy for the firms to open their wallet to these projects. They just basically said yes without having to go through very senior bosses. That intrigued me –  that will not happen in SG. Money is tight.

The next scene was Mr Mustache business guy 蔡润and he appeared to be scolding the town in a town meeting. “我们为何穷？” He started off, interrupting the village administrator, a govt appointed secretary who called for the meeting.

“穷的原因是什么？是没找到方法?”

Was it a lack of practical  solutions from outside parties ?

“实际上我们的村 混日子的人太多了。

做人还做不来，自己还以为自己高高在上。

这种坏毛病要改掉.”

I was shocked and intrigued. How could he just rapped the villagers like that and on camera! After saying his piece he up and left the meeting. Many others handle poverty with care and sensitivity. I think they don’t even bring up rhetorical questions like what is the reason for poverty. Mr Mustache just called them out for being lazy. He wasn’t angry. He spoke in a matter of fact manner.

Until then I had no inking China had much extreme poverty. I was shocked to learn that China only eradicated poverty in 2020! China is a super power trying to go head to head with US. With huge possible spend, economic might and incredible technological advancements. That didn’t gel with poverty and this level of scolding.

As the documentary on, we followed a bunch of outsiders trying to work with the villagers to get them to claim reward points. It appeared to be for very simple tasks – mainly keeping hygiene to set the stage of tourism dollars. This was general tidying up, removing pests with provided pesticides, keeping village clean. These tasks seemed rather reasonable.  

The more I watched, the more I feel the sense of helplessness of the group led by  陈圆圆 (Tencent’s Head of CSR or similar) trying to help the villagers. The villagers did not want to change much. 

陈圆圆 and team had to extend a lot of effort to personally talk to the villagers one by one to encourage them to get on the reward scheme to be able to redeem some money to support their earnings. It was near impossible to get the villagers to make any change. Even for their own benefit. Some couldn’t do it. They did not own a smart phone or were illiterate. Most rather not do it.   One household tried. The documentary focused some of the screen time on a seemingly hapless secretary who did not walk the ground but held meetings a lot. It did not portray him in a good light. He seems unwilling to talk to the villagers. His agenda was to get the team to fix a road which the village could not afford to do so. (One of the villagers had an accident on this road. His widowed wife was one of the more enthusiastic characters willing to learn to read to earn those extra money.) 

One of the more colourful characters, lamented to the crew about his debts, his being a single dad and his elderly mom. 蔡润 the hero for us, explained to the camera he was a gambler. And later on, when the same guy was trying to scam 陈圆圆 with his sob story and on the cost of building his Airbnb, 蔡润 explained to 陈圆圆 on camera that the building did not cost hundreds of thousands. He promised to pay a builder 35k+ in installments. Later, 陈圆圆 showed the camera a conversation on 蔡润’s phone. Sob story guy basically asked 蔡润 every other day for loans to tide him over. And, I think 蔡润 agrees to some of them.

Near the end 蔡润 said to 陈圆圆, “我来的时候也像你一样，以为缺方法，缺机会。 其实它不是这样的”.

The ending of the show tried to show how much the various similar villages were helped by the schemes to alleviate extreme poverty. Perhaps to pass the censors. However, the audience was left with no uncertain view that there is a giant gap. It’s not just money. It is illiteracy, it is the sense of hope and trust that things can be better, it is the willingness to do a bit more and slightly different from their normal.

Having seen this – the movie Dear You hits different. There was a strong opinion piece in the local 早报 that it was propoganda to link overseas Chinese to China’s political causes. 

All I could think of is that for overseas Chinese to send a total of so many billions back to China just to lift poverty of their families and yet China only eradicated poverty in 2020. That also led me to Google GDP  per capita in 1965. HK was US$674. SG was US$500 per capita. Thailand was US$141. China was US$98.7. Indonesia’s data was US$53.2  in 1967. Anecdote: the sending of monies (on occassions) still continued in the 80s to improve standard of living eg, building bridges, homes and so on. China continued to rely on overseas Chinese. The sending of money stopped in the 90s.   

How could it be a propoganda film when it show clearly how poor China was? Was I compelled to reflect on the connection with China? I wasn’t. Even if I did, I have worked with Chinese colleagues. The culture divide is vast. They experienced cultural revolution. We experienced being Chinese in a predominantly non Chinese SEA. We might have a same language but it takes serious effort to ensure we are actually saying something that we both understand in the same way. Perhaps there are those who romanticised the connection and imagined we are one and the same because we have the same skin and eye colour. Chinese is not homogenous. Different provinces have different languages, value systems and practices. Han ethnicity is used to describe Chinese but it is just a way differentiate between minority tribes or even Tibetians and  Mongolians. Erasing the differences makes it easy to make sweeping statements – any sweeping statement that you want to make really but you just have to ask a woman from a dialect group marrying into another if there are similarities. As one of many of such women in modern  Singapore, there are very few similarities.