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Wang Bing's Documentary Po/ethics of the Maoist Chaos and the Paradigm of Western Testimony: Unwitnessing, Victims, Collaborators, Followers, Cadres and Dissidents

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This essay aims, first, to expose the failure of post-Holocaust cinema, as well as Western trauma and genocide research on the Age of Testimony, to take into consideration non-Western survivors' accounts of twentieth century's collective traumas. Second, and consequently, it aims to analyze Chinese independent director Wang Bing's 2007-2018 (mostly documentary) hexaptych - He Fengming (2007), Brutality Factory (2007), The Ditch (2010), Dead Souls (2017), Traces (2009), and Beauty Lives in Freedom (2018) - on the still taboo issue of the re-education-death-camp Jiabiangou and the Maoist chaos. Wang represents the subject positions of victims, collaborators, followers, cadres, and dissidents as well as the extraordinary form of un-witnessing (my term) Jiabiangou. The hexaptych constitutes a major epistemological-cinematic breakthrough by depicting the inevitable negation of all forms of working-through, while simultaneously proposing unique cinematic memorialization-based mourning rituals. Hence, it paves the way to re-theorizing the ethics entailed in current trauma cinema studies.

Keywords: Documentary Po/ethics ; Jiabiangou hexaptych ; Maoism ; Non-Western testimony ; unwitnwessing ; Wang Bing

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Wang Bing's Documentary Po/ethics of the Maoist Chaos and the Paradigm of Western Testimony: Unwitnessing, Victims, Collaborators, Followers, Cadres and Dissidents
Intellect , 236 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1386/9781835950685_16
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References

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  2. Bergstein, Avner (2013), ‘Transcending the caesura: Reverie, dreaming and counter‐dreaming’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 94:4, pp. 621–44.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Böhm, Peter (2015), ‘Judging “privileged” Jews: Holocaust ethics, representation, and the “grey zone”’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 29:3, pp. 489–92.
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  4. Çağlayan, Emre (2018), Poetics of Slow Cinema: Nostalgia, Absurdism, Boredom, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
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  5. Cai, Shenshen (2016), ‘The Chronicles of Jiabiangou (Jiabiangou Jishi): An analysis of contemporary Chinese reportage literature using the theory of totalitarianism and power’, Modern China Studies, 23:1, pp. 121–34.
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  6. Caruth, Cathy (2014), Listening to Trauma Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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  7. Davoine, Francoise and Gaudillière, Jean-Max (2004), History Beyond Trauma. Whereof One Cannot Speak, Thereof One Cannot Stay Silent, New York: Other Press. Kindle Edition.257
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  8. Didi-Huberman, Georges (2012), Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (trans. S. B. Lillis), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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  10. Felman, Shoshana (2002), The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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  11. Felman, Shoshana and Laub, Dori (1992), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, New York and London: Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
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  16. Guarneri, Michael (2014), ‘I am just a simple individual who films what he loves to film’: Interview with Wang Bing’, La Furia Umana, 22, http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/48-archive/lfu-20/186-michael-guarneri-i-am-just-a-simple-individual-who-films-what-he-loves-to-film-intervie. Accessed 26 December 2022.
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  23. Langer, Lawrence L (2006), ‘Hearing the Holocaust’, Poetics Today, 27:2, pp. 297–309.
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  30. Pollacchi, Elena (2017), ‘Extracting narratives from reality: Wang Bing's counter-narrative of the China dream’, Studies in Documentary Film, 11:3, pp. 217–31.
     [Google Scholar]
  31. Pollacchi, Elena (2021), Wang Bing's Filmmaking of the China Dream: Narratives, Witnesses, and Marginal Spaces, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  32. Przylipiak, Mirosław (2021), ‘On the margin of Satantango. Some remarks on slow cinema’, Panoptikum, 26, pp. 257–74.
     [Google Scholar]
  33. Smith, Patrick Brian (2015), ‘Workings/slow: Cinematic style as labour in Wang Bing's Tie Xi Qu: West of The Tracks’, in T. de Luca and N. B. Jorge (eds), Slow Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 180–91.
     [Google Scholar]
  34. Veg, Sebastian (2012), ‘The limits of representation: Wang Bing's labour camp films’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 6:2, pp. 173–88.
     [Google Scholar]
  35. Veg, Sebastian (2014), ‘Testimony, history and ethics: From the memory of Jiabiangou Prison Camp to a reappraisal of the anti-rightist movement in present-day China’, The China Quarterly, 218, pp. 514–39.
     [Google Scholar]
  36. Veg, Sebastian (2019), Minjian: The Rise of China's Grassroots Intellectuals, New York: Columbia University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  37. Wang, Bing (2004), Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, China/Netherlands: Bing Wang Film Workshop and Hubert Bals Fund.
     [Google Scholar]
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     [Google Scholar]
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  41. Wang, Bing (2010), Jiabiangou, Le Fossé (The Ditch, also called Goodbye Jiabiangou), Hong Kong/France/Belgium/South Korea/Netherlands: Wil Productions, Les Films de L'Etranger, Entre Chien et Louup.
     [Google Scholar]
  42. Wang, Bing (2018), Beauty Lives in Freedom, China/France: Wil Productions and Galerie Chantal Crousel.
     [Google Scholar]
  43. Wang, Bing (2018), Les Âmes mortes (Dead Souls), Switzerland/France: Les Films d'Ici.
     [Google Scholar]
  44. Wang, Ning (2017), Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness: Political Exile and Re-Education in Mao's China, Vancouver: UBC Press.
     [Google Scholar]
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     [Google Scholar]
  46. Wieviorka, Annette (2006), The Era of the Witness (trans. J. Stark), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  47. Wu, Harry and Wakeman, Carolyn (1994), Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag, New York: John Wiley & Sons.
     [Google Scholar]
  48. Wu, Yenna (2020), ‘Cultural trauma construction of the necropolitical Jiabiangou Laojiao Camp’, American Journal of Chinese Studies, 27:1, pp. 25–49.
     [Google Scholar]
  49. Yamagata International Film Festival Catalogue (2007), ‘Fengming: A Chinese Memoir’, https://www.yidff.jp/2007/cat011/07c014-e.html. Accessed 25 December 2022.
  50. Zeng, Jinyan, (2017), ‘Visualizing truth-telling in Ai Xiaoming's documentary activism’, Studies in Documentary Film, 11:3, pp. 184–99.
     [Google Scholar]
  51. Zhang, Xianliang (1986/1988), Half of Man Is Woman (trans. M. Avery), New York: W.W. Norton.
     [Google Scholar]
  52. Zhang, Xianliang (1993/1995), Grass Soup (trans. M. Avery), Boston, MA: David R. Godine.
     [Google Scholar]
  53. Zhang, Xianliang (1994/1996), My Bodhi Tree (trans. M. Avery), London: Secker & Warburg.
     [Google Scholar]
  54. Zhang, Xianliang (2019), Mimosa: The Revelation of the Materialist (trans. G. Yang), Paramus, NJ: Homa & Sekey Books.
     [Google Scholar]

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