Retrotopia: At the Storm’s Edge

Writer: Shi Hantao

Translator: Kilian O’Donnell

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In the late 1970s, China instituted new policies granting rural households greater responsibility and autonomy while allowing them to reap the rewards of increased output. A little over a decade later, the country’s brief experiment with collectivization had all but died — swept aside by the rise of market economics and privatization.

But not everyone in China was ready to give up on socialism. In scattered villages — places like Huaxi, Nanjie, and Dazhai — collective economies persevered, albeit in different forms. Fudan professor Zhou Yi, who has studied Huaxi extensively, argues this “post-collectivism” is based on a belief in the “immortality” of collectives. “(Huaxi) responded to the market economy experiment without abandoning its original socialist redistribution system, successfully completing the transition from agricultural community to industrial community,” she writes.

In the face of external and local pressures brought about by marketization, privatization, and de-collectivization, Huaxi adopted a flexible approach to its economy, culture, and political systems. But at its core, according to Zhou, there was “no change to the village body politic, basically no change to the people in power or the structures that supported them, and basically no change in the collectivist system” — a trifecta that has made Huaxi a model for collective economy advocates in China.

The post-collectivism of Huaxi, alongside the private economy model and the neo-collectivist model, are the three primary social forms of the reform-era Chinese countryside. Although probably only a couple dozen of China’s more than 200,000 administrative villages could be considered “post-collectivist,” Zhou believes villages like Huaxi have special significance given the problems of Chinese modernization.

Shi Yangkun’s “Retrotopia” offers us a closer look at three of these post-collectivist experiments. Viewed through his lens, Huaxi is clean and affluent. There are villas, tall buildings, factories, parks, and public squares. Everything feels in order and well planned. The high-rises are handsome, the banquet hall suitably imposing, and the interiors by turns luxurious and refined. Its young people — a rarity elsewhere in the countryside — are attractive and animated. And everywhere you look glitters: gold roofs on skyscrapers, golden oxen, gold decorations — all of which speaks to the wealth of the self-proclaimed “#1 village in China.”

By comparison, Nanjie seems orderly but drab. There are no skyscrapers here, but a vast public square sprawling out from the feet of a marble statue of Mao Zedong and bordered by slogans, red flags, and portraits of Communist leaders. If Huaxi is drenched in gold, Nanjie’s defining color is red: from the red overcoats of village staff to the accents on its buildings and billboards — even the walls of the trash drop-off are red.

Then there is Dazhai. Located in the mountains, it feels old, even dilapidated. Everything, from its aging buildings in dire need of repair to the collector of Mao badges sprawled out on a sofa in its museum of red culture, feel out of step with the times. But even here one can find signs of life, such as in the arresting expression of one of Dazhai’s younger residents.

These images are at once both familiar and strange. Strange in their use of unrepentantly “red” content and visual elements — cues that have all but disappeared from China in the reform era. Yet the streets, buildings, and people we see are not noticeably different from those found in any other small Chinese town.

This contrast evokes complicated feelings. Beautiful villas stand next to self-built shacks, while lavishly appointed hotels contrast with severe meeting rooms. There are modern squares and parks, but also relics of the planned economy era like factory buildings. Some residents wear the latest fashions, others prefer duller colors and stiffer collars. New and old, China and the West, gold and red, a mock Eiffel Tower and an iron motocross cage, all coexisting.

Huaxi’s production brigade was founded in 1961. In 1993, the brigade set up “Huaxi Group”; in 1999, the group went public. In her book, Zhou argues that, while villages like Huaxi represent continuations of socialism, in practice they adopt a mixed approach. “Internally, there is a mix of socialist and market mechanisms,” while “externally they adhere strictly to market (capitalist) mechanisms.”

“(This combination) continues traditional collectivist experience and practice, while at the same time reflecting an acceptance of the experiences of modern reform,” Zhou writes. The result is a unique “mix of agriculture and industry, socialism and capitalism, public and private, unity and individual prosperity.”

That complex mix informs our understanding of Shi’s photographs. They reflect what Zhou might call the “ambiguous character of post-socialism.” This complexity — some might say abundance of forms — is a classic part of contemporary Chinese urban life: Diversity and vitality, and with them conflict, are the natural outcome of China’s ongoing experiments in reform.

Viewed from this perspective, Shi’s photographs can be placed in the lineage of post-1970s Chinese documentary photography, as he zeroes in on a handful of post-socialist villages as a way to tell the broader story of China’s market transition. While they may appear to have taken a very different path from the rest of the country, we can understand these villages as merely one face of socialism with Chinese characteristics. It is his methods, not his content, that set Shi apart from other Chinese documentary photographers.

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Shi’s photographs are possessed of an unusual frankness and quietude. His subjects — mostly everyday scenes and ordinary people — are photographed head on, in even light, with little in the way of narrative events or description. The villages themselves feel calm, their residents tranquil and dignified. They look directly at the camera, but their faces are unreadable.

The generation of documentary photographers that came up after 2000 have generally shied away from using their cameras to directly depict conflict, preferring instead to construct quieter images. They seem to intentionally hold back their own emotions and they are careful not to reveal their impressions of their subjects.

Of course, not choosing is itself a choice, and neutrality is its own kind of attitude. When a photographer seems to remove themselves from the frame, it often allows the subject of their lens to speak for itself.

Take Shi’s portrait of Huaxi Party Secretary Wu Xie’en, for instance. Dressed in a white shirt and dark suit pants with a neat haircut and a cleanly shaven face, he is the classic picture of a mid-level Chinese government official, but his cloth slippers signal his identity and background. Likewise, his slight paunch, oversized seat, and lavish wallpaper offer plenty of information to the observant viewer.

The first photograph featured in this book likewise holds special significance. The viewer will immediately notice that it is a conceptual rendering of the town. In the foreground are villas and tall buildings scattered among trees — the picture of prosperity. Further away, in the lush green foothills, stands an arch, a capitol hill, and European-style cathedrals mixed with Chinese upturned eaves. Moving upward, there is a cable car linking the village to a far-off Tian’anmen Gate, barely visible in the mist.

It’s a perfect encapsulation of the ambiguity found in Shi’s work, reflecting Huaxi residents’ wealth and pride in their home, as well as their political aspirations. But Shi does not present only the concept image; instead, he includes the flowers that frame it. The sweet dream promised in the poster is thus intruded upon by reality — though because the flowers are out of focus and over-exposed, they seem blurry and pallid.

The true highlight of Shi’s work is his portraiture. Take for example that hotel worker, dressed meticulously all in red, standing straight, her eyes bright with excitement. Yet the creases and veins in her hands speak to a hidden power; they seem out of place with her otherwise unimposing figure. The room is bright but bland. Just outside the glass and metal windows lies a heavy fog; she has nowhere to go. That feeling is reinforced by her expression: She projects a hollow sort of confidence, a hesitation like a voice that dies in the throat. 

Many of Shi’s subjects express a similar ordinariness, but if you scratch just beneath the surface you will begin to see his timing is impeccable. A motorcyclist dressed in denim may seem at ease, but his expression hints at hidden worries. A factory manager manages to look simultaneously calm and unsure of himself. A young farmer appears unperturbed yet weary. Even Nanjie’s Party Secretary Wang Hongbin, for all his assumed majesty, is captured in a moment of uncertainty: his brow furrowed, his eyes almost moist.

All of these people seem caught between two experiences, their calm demeanors belying the anxiety within. Gone are the bold, thrilling lines and heroic confidence of collectivist era photography. These are mere mortals, unimposing, though still possessed of a certain spirit. By pairing them with empty vistas and a mix of new and old architecture, Shi achieves an effect that is ordinary and true to life — directionless in a way that leaves the viewer unmoored.

A photograph is merely a slice of time and space. Its ability to record a moment in full detail and fidelity exists in tension with the broader world outside its frame. And yet, within that tension lies the beauty of photography, as it corresponds to the difficulties we all perceive in the face of life, reality, and history. We can feel the joys and pains of existence, even as we know we’ll never understand it in its entirety, much less our own place in it. A moment can be extraordinarily clear, even as our reality is at its core dim and fuzzy. The complicated nature of Shi’s photographs reflects this tension; his calm, detailed images are his way of using photography to document reality and history in all their complexity. You could call it symbolic, but this is photography imbued with the responsibility to express the fates and lives of modern people.

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The name of this book, “Retrotopia,” comes from a term coined by Zygment Bauman. As Bauman notes, the word utopia was coined 500 years ago by Thomas More to describe a specific place or city society ruled by a benevolent, wise individual. But after the “emancipation” and “progress” of the last several centuries, our societies are privatized, individualized, fragmented, and highly fluid.

In these conditions, predicting the future feels impossible, and beginning in the last century more and more people have determined that throwing themselves headlong into an unpredictable and uncertain future is less appealing that reminiscing about a vague, dimly remembered past. As a result, the dreams of a futuristic utopia that dominated the previous 100 years have given way to a “global epidemic of nostalgia.” Here, Bauman quotes Harvard professor Svetlana Boym, who argues that this epidemic is “an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world,” as well as a “defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.”

But the three villages profiled by Shi here do not seem to fully conform to Bauman’s thesis. Born in the era of People’s Communes, collectivism has been a feature of life in Huaxi since the beginning. The village has always been burdened with carrying the fate of socialism on its shoulders.  During the reform period, the village’s Party Secretary Wu Renbao led residents to resist the divvying up of lands by households and in the construction of new collectivist enterprises. The 1990s brought marketization and also slogans like “Use the power of the collective to compete with the market.”

The collective permeates every facet of life in Huaxi. In a sense, Zhou Yi was right when she wrote that Huaxi’s refusal to abandon collectivization was simply the product of residents’ practical interests. The land rents and associated capital growth provided key sources of revenue, while beginning in the 1990s the village collective’s corporate entity maintained steady growth, reinforcing villagers’ faith in the collectivist system.

But Zhou’s interviews with villagers also suggest a deep, almost primal identification with and love of the collective. “‘Huaxi natives are born here and they will die here; they owe it to the village to make a contribution,’ is something our old Party Secretary used to say,” the former leader of the village’s women’s production team told her. “The cadres at the time all believed in him and were willing to do the hard work of organizing with him.… I’m willing to do as they did and organize Huaxi’s villagers, to contribute to this patch of land, to do things that matter in this life.”

The beauty and the danger of collectivism lies in how it binds individuals to itself: Only within the collective can people achieve actualization. When the collective is in crisis, that identity becomes tenuous. Thus, Huaxi is perhaps better understood not as an example of Bauman’s retrotopia, but as something real that must be defended and rescued. Only by preserving Huaxi in its entirety can villagers find meaning in their lives.

When Huaxi’s old Party Secretary died in 2013, the local economy began to slow; more recently, there have been rumors of an impending bankruptcy. At the same time, more and more young people are choosing to leave the village, and complaints about the collective’s leadership, its clan-based system, and how the collective runs on the labor of exploited non-residents have grown louder.

Huaxi has weathered similar problems before and may do so again. But this new crisis feels more serious, and years have passed without sign of a successful retrenchment. In a preface to Zhou’s 2006 book, the scholar Ambrose Yeo-Chi King writes that the verdict on Zhou’s central question — whether Huaxi is a durable alternative to the current system, or merely a historical fluke — would have to wait until “the author can revisit the village 10 or even 20 years down the line.”

Bauman borrows Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Paul Klee’s “Angel of History” as the starting point and central metaphor of “Retrotopia.” In Klee’s drawing, an angel surveys the wreckage of history as the winds of progress bear him forward into the future. Now, Bauman believes the angel is changing directions: “His face turning from the past to the future, his wings being pushed backwards by the storm blowing this time from the imagined, anticipated and feared in advance Hell of the future toward the Paradise of the past.” It’s a metaphor that can also be applied to Shi’s vision of Huaxi. Although the village’s current difficulties may not correspond perfectly to Bauman’s framing, for the individual, fears of the future and challenges in the present must ultimately become personal.

Two photographs from this book, both of Nanjie’s Red Culture Square, reflect this fraught historical moment. In one, a woman stands alone in the empty square, face to face with a statue of Mao Zedong. The mist is heavy, and the viewer can just barely make out the two figures, their proportions surreally unmatched. The towering statue, though obscured, points the way, next to which the woman seems almost insignificant. In the second, the square is festooned with red flags, propaganda posters, and slogans. In the center of all this stands a security booth, inside of which an old man stands upright, silently looking out. They are individuals caught up at the edge of history’s storms, powerless to resist, but standing tall all the same.

Such is the contemporary Chinese countryside. Shi sets himself outside history and reality to coolly examine his subjects, not out of pride or aversion, but out of caution and a sense of independence. The photographers that stirred us in the socialist era have been carried away by the winds of history. They threw themselves into the storm and disappeared forever. Shi more closely resembles those Nanjie residents, standing at the storm’s edge, recording what it leaves behind.