Wang Bing's Youth (Spring) offers an immersive, cinéma vérité portrait of young migrant workers in five garment workshops in Zhili, a rather grim-looking district of Huzhou City in China's Zhejiang province. The workers range in age from 16-34, with most between 19 and 20. The colorful items of children's clothing they construct include patterned pants and puffy jackets, some destined for domestic markets, others for export.
While they toil in boxy, windowless rooms, the workers joke, tease each other, sing along to the radio, smoke (and smoke some more), and compete to see who can sew the fastest. At times, it almost looks like fun. Almost.
Wang spent five years shooting the 334-minute film. As Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, whose own films defy standard documentary conventions, wrote in Film Comment, "The film is rather long, but you feel you can watch it forever." The director follows his subjects from the workshops to ramshackle dorm rooms, into the streets, and into the backrooms where bosses discuss their fates (though they don't pay rent, the workers' access to heat, water, and garbage removal appears exceedingly limited).
Li Shengnan, 20, for instance, may need time off to deal with a pregnancy. What might normally be a private matter becomes public as her bosses and parents attempt to hash things out. Hu Zuguo, 19, her boyfriend, believes they should get married, though they don't seem especially excited about the prospect. Another worker, Xia Wei, 24, labors alongside his mother, Sun Xiaoxiao. She describes their life of cutting, sewing, and carrying bundles of fabric back and forth as “killing ourselves for peanuts.” The workshops, which are essentially sweatshops, pay in cash and by the piece, so speed is of the essence.
Though Wang doesn't edit in order to generate suspense or melodrama, many workers worry about their romantic prospects. When they aren't working, they take to their cell phones to gossip and flirt. A few are married or dating, but most are footloose and fancy free, leading to other pregnancy scares among young people who, for the most part, aren't ready for parenthood.
If sewing is seen as women's work in many parts of the world, the young men in Wang's film don't appear to have a complex about it, though they can be disrespectful to their female colleagues by hassling them for dates, criticizing the hours they keep (claiming that late nights lead to bad skin), consistently impeding their ability to concentrate, or by engaging in roughhousing.
For all of their differences, moments of unity abound as workers band together to demand higher rates. Though their lack of success makes the bosses look bad, the pressure to keep costs down seems likely to leave them with inflexibly narrow margins. Further, since these are temporary assignments, job security and advancement are illusory concepts. It's a broken system.
An end credit states that Zhili's 18,000 privately run workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, most from rural provinces. Though Wang includes a sequence of Xia Wei and Sun Xiaoxiao at home, he avoids back stories or epilogues, so it's hard to say how many workers will simply segue from workshop to workshop, or what it takes to break the cycle. Though his film is never less than entertaining, there's the overwhelming sense that these young people are exploited, expendable--and stuck.
What public library shelves would this title be on?
Youth (Spring) belongs in Asian Studies, Chinese Culture, and Documentary sections in public libraries, along with other non-fiction features from Wang Bing, six of which have been released in the United States by Icarus Films.
What schools or colleges is this documentary appropriate for?
Colleges with programs on Chinese history and culture would find Wang's internationally-acclaimed documentaries of great interest. Crude Oil (2008), The Ditch (2010), and Dead Souls (2018) also deal with workers' rights and issues.
What academic subjects would this film be suitable for?
This lively, if lengthy documentary would be suitable for college courses on Asian Cinema, Business Ethics, and Labor Studies.