By Wifak Gueddana | 19 Nov. 2024 | Film Essay |

Lina Yang’s Spring Tide (2019) is a delicate interplay between the traditional elements of intergenerational conflicts in China, and modern women identity, power, and self-fulfilment. The result is an atmospheric dark film, where family is a narrow two-bedroom crammed apartment. The physical confinement acts in the film, stifling the agency of its female occupants like a suffocating prison- even more in the absence of men. This is not patriarchy, but, a portrait of matriarchal dominance. Matriarchy is linked with paternal absence. It reflects the social pressure on single mothers to maintain order and the family reputation in the absence of older family males. Outside home, Guo’s mother (fifty-plus old lady) smiles and acts naturally as a community leader; however inside, her facade crumbles and she often curses and cries. Her tight control over the household is increasingly making Guo struggle. she is unable to communicate and sits alone in her room. Outside, she keeps her spaces separate and cautiously protects them from her mother’s control, her dormitory room, her lovers, and her journalistic projects. The shreds of her life are too dispersed; and she is gradually growing apart from her own daughter. Later, she fails to create a safe home for her. She suffers knowing that Wanting, the third-generation family child is torn between a secure life in the grandma’s home and her affections. Like in a pendulum, swinging between guilt and anxiety, the characters’ erratic behaviour reveals their emotional scars and a portrait of deeply wedged family trauma.

With its familiar family setting, critics have labelled Spring Tide a family melodrama. And yet, I am not convinced that family melodrama suffices to describe Lina Yang’s film. Also, melodrama is not exactly the same as family film in China – a mainstream genre defined by its own cinematic conventions[1]. Whereas in western culture, family film is a space for family audience , i.e. movies, which are suitable for all ages and even for younger audiences[2], in Asia and China particularly, it is primarily family-themed. Family films are about the daily life and feelings of family members. They explore family ethics and delve into issues of intergenerational kinship, and filial piety. The standard is to present a family as ‘a collectivity in crisis’[3]; hence, filmmakers avoid the filmic tropes that amplify the trajectory of one member, or make it about her conflict with the family. This way, it’s harder for audiences to empathise with anyone individual, but relate instead with the values of the family unit (Ibid) – a product of historically embedded Confucian codes, generational and gendered hierarchies. Hence, Family films’ characters are often stereotypes that stand for China’s patriarchal culture[4].

While Spring Tide is modelled on the basis of the normative Chinese family, its narrative depicts a realistic account of modern women struggle that does not abide by the conventions of mainstream family films in China. As an independent production, it does not have a feel-good finale. The mise-en-scène succeeds to sustain an arm-wrestling tension throughout. Furthermore, the film voices the perspective of Guo, the second generation mother and elicits audience identification with her -as her silence treatment vis-a-vis her mother is a loss of speech resulting directly from the latter non-stop nagging. Indeed, the film’s strong mother-daughter theme taps into a powerful relationship that for many women, evokes memories, longing and anger, as well as exerts an enduring influence on their sense of gendered self in China as elsewhere. Guo is Lina Yang’s surrogate and a depiction of her own family story. Hence, many women can relate with Guo’s feelings of disconnect and with her desire to be a ‘different kind of mother’ than the one who has brought her up.

In a sense, Spring Tide is also part of a broader change in the family narrative in recent years. With the rise of feminism and discussions about the worsening of women’s living conditions on social media, now family films show more the gendered aspects of family relations and their influence on women identity and social status. Beyond a heartfelt personal story, Spring Tide is a proxy for a a society-level family malaise. Not just Guo and her mother, or future Guo and the grown Wanting, evidence shows that the Confucian family in China is in crisis.

Women, and families are indeed interconnected in the ‘reproduction space’ of the home. On the one hand, home is a functional space for female expression; on the other, it is symbolic, and a set of restrictive relations that constrain her behaviour. For instance, Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess (1934) is the classic melodrama that portrays typically a mother’s fall when she’s no longer able ‘protect’ the family space – the film being about a devoted mother who sells herself by night on the streets of Shanghai to support her son.

Indeed, women’s identity has always been linked to domestic labour, which takes place at home through the tasks of care and social reproduction. The Victorian ideal of the middle-class woman as the angel’ in the home, the creator of the ‘home as haven’ is for instance well documented and contrasted with the working-class woman as domestic labourer[5]. Today, the ideal of the Victorian woman is still apparent behind the society belief that technology can set housewives free[6], the concept of smart-homes and related cyborg-romanticism[7]. In China, women are still seen as naturally responsible for bringing up children and creating a safe home. While discussions about gender transformations and women’s changing social position have featured prominently since the Mao era, the relationships between mothers, daughters, and the household are often overlooked in gender scholarship[8].

Back then, …

Chinese women had suffered as the result of their extremely low status. The most systematic, institutionalized and deep-rooted sexist ideologies and practices in China originated from the philosophy of “filial piety” of Confucius (551-479 B.C.). The three components of “filial piety” stipulated that women must obey men, citizens must obey their ruler and the young must obey the elderly. For thousands of years, the rules of these three obedience helped maintain the patriarchal social order in China.

The May Fourth Feminist movement during the 1910s and 1920s (when mostly intellectuals protested against the corruption and incompetence of warlord government and against foreign invasion in China) was the first feminist movement in China that challenged the gender stratification of Chinese society in an open and systematic fashion. Women’s lack of education and bound feet, the male activists argued, prevented them from bearing and raising a healthy Chinese population. This movement, however, did not impact the lives of the majority of women who lived in the countryside. It’s only after the 1949 revolution, that the new government of the People’s Republic made a firm commitment to guarantee equality between women and men.

The famous quotation by Mao Zedong: “Women hold up half the sky”  reflects the determination by the government to raise women’s status. The Chinese Communist Party hence adopted two of the most important legislative documents in 1950: the Marriage Law and the Land Law. The first Marriage law meant that prostitution, arranged marriage, child betrothal and concubinage were outlawed. Marriage was to be based on love and mutual consent. Free marriage, free divorce, economic independence and other concepts that were foreign to the majority of the population became the advocated codes. There were constant and intensive campaigns by the government to educate the population about the Marriage Law. Many women who were not happy about their arranged marriage sought and were granted divorce. A popular phrase at that time to justify the high divorce rate was that it was to dissolve “feudal” marriages. According to the estimated figure, the divorce rate in China during the early 1950s was as high as 1.3 per 1,000 population (Stacey 1983: 178). Efforts to implement the Marriage Law were planned within larger-scale campaigns to mobilize women participation across the country. Women labour force was demanded by the restructuring of the economy and the heavy tasks of rebuilding the cities at the beginning stage of the People’s Republic of China. Tremendous numbers of women were recruited for various occupations. Newly established institutions such as cafeterias, kindergartens, and nurseries mushroomed and were mostly staffed by women. According to one source, “there were estimates that 4,980,000 nurseries and kindergartens and more than 3,600,000 dining-halls were set up in rural areas by 1959” (Stacey 1983: 214).

Although the Great Leap Forward Movement ended as a disastrous failure, it did bring women’s labour force participation to a nearly saturated level, and women’s economic role persisted during the Cultural Revolution period (1966-1976) and after. Also, changes in women situation and family role are not necessarily linear (from good to better) or even. While the country’s history brushes the progressive reform of women labour in big strokes, it stays insensitive to the lived experience of those who have undergone these changes (oral history and microhistories). In the introduction of her book, the subject of gender (2008, p.7) Harriet Evans writes about the Chinese women she interviewed who were in their late forties and fifties. She argues that many shared ‘bitter memories of mothers who were frequently away from home due to work or political demands. As daughters, they were schooled early on in lessons of independence and initiative, left at home to look after themselves without parental supervision, working as sent-down youth in the countryside or in the army during the Cultural Revolution’ (Ibid).

This sentiment is echoed in the memories of others from this generation, as the cultural revolution has left complex emotions of appreciation and loss. Many scholars believe more radically that ‘the socialist revolution in China was patriarchal’ replacing Confucian patriarchy ‘first by new democratic patriarchy, and then by patriarchal socialism’ (Stacey 1983, 253). It is also argued that women were multiply disadvantaged. Less likely to be soldiers or graduates they had little chance of being promoted from worker (工人) to cadre (干部), and therefore they were weakly placed when it came to matchmaking, housing allocation, surveillance of family life, and family planning, all of which were responsibilities of the work unit (danwei 单位) leadership (Ibid). Furthermore, the land reform movement reallocated land to men not to women, while Liu (2007) adds that the work unit, the workplace and source of wrap-around occupational welfare, created a Confucian-like family with the leadership as patriarchs.

Today, …

As a matter of fact, policies of gender equality pursued throughout the Mao era transformed the life experience of successive generations of women in employment and education. However, gender equality did not extend to the critical examination of women situation in the family and in relation to domestic labour. Today, the nuclear family model in urban cities and the individualisation of the market economy more generally, are the product of this legacy. Although they reflect a new stage in China’s socio-cultural transformations, they still bear the marks of the old tension between parental control and individuality.

On the one hand, there is a waning authority of the older generation; and yet, in the absence of state welfare, the individualisation of the market economy consolidates young families’ dependence on older family members for financial and non-financial support like childcare. This is so in the context of China’s internal migration for instance. Increasingly, migrant parents have taken their children to the cities while they seek employment. As childcare becomes more difficult with full time work, one (or more) grandparent(s) decide to join the household.

This extension of the nuclear family is meaningful. It also seems contradictory with filial piety, which continues to regulate families. In the past, traditional family obligations meant that adult children may not want to travel further afield when their ageing parents are still alive. But with a massive internal labour migration now, it’s the senior parents who are travelling. Some scholars call this ‘descending familism’ (Yan 2016) – that is the idea that families are gone from worshiping the ancestors at home, to prioritising loyalty to the government over family during the Mao era, and now with the focus on cultivating the grandchild, we see families deflecting attention away from the civic space[9].

In truth, the centrality of family values has always been an integral part of China and its political discourse. The term, which a majority of Chinese leaders and now Xi Jinping, refer to is the love of the Family-Nation ‘jiā guó zhi ai’ (家国之爱) – social harmony in the pursuit of national development and economic prosperity.  However, the meanings of family, and in connection, women identity are elusive. They have been unevenly changing for the last hundred years. When reading Lina Yang’s film, this context becomes important. It helps us to understand that Guo’s pursuit of individuality and struggle for self-affirmation, may be justified by her own motives and seen as the privileging of the individual subject over the family, but it’s not a newly acquired social independence. It is not necessarily in line with the familiar argument of Global-South modernisation, or helpful for backing up the idea that economic development and education generate nuclear units privileging the needs of individuals. The issue is much more complex. It needs to be explored in view of the country’s social and cultural history, as well as its current social changes.

Tags: #Spring Tide, #Mother and daughter, #women in China

[1] The family film started very early in China. From the 1950s there were many family themed TV productions, such as A Bite of Vegetable Pancake (1958)). See Zheng D. (2008). Family Film: A form of new mainstream Film. Film Literature, 2008, (04), 4 – 6 (in Chinese), in Fascinating Patriarchy: An Analysis of Family Roles in Chinese Films in a Patriarchal Society, Dissertation by Sijie Wang (2023), School of Media-Arts, Waikato Institute of Technology, New Zealand

[2] The Hollywood Family film, 2012.

[3] Berry, C. (2003) Wedding Banquet: A Family (Melodrama) Affair. In Chinese Films in Focus II, ed. Chris Berry, 235–242. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

[4] Zhao, Y. (2024). Analyzing Social Concerns in Contemporary Chinese Family Films: A Case Study of the Film Across the Furious Sea Directed by Cao Baoping. Journal of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences, 35, 753-759. https://doi.org/10.54097/5kvf8x93

[5] Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 90, xiv.

[6] Digital feminism is part of a larger conversation on technological determinism. Pasquale (2016) writes on the ubiquity of digital devices and the tech market hype: ‘Gig workers, especially women will knit Etsy scarves in the morning, drive Uber cars in the afternoon, and write Facebook comments at night, flexibly shifting between jobs and leisure at will’. See Pasquale F. (2016). Two Narratives of Platform Capitalism. Yale Law & Policy Review, Vol. 35, No. 1 (fall 2016), pp. 309-319 (11 pages). (see Pasquale 2016).

[7] Haraway, Donna J. (2016). Cyborg Manifesto. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=4392065.

[8] Evans H. (2008). The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China. Rowan & Littefield Publishers, inc. USA. ISBN 10:  0742554783  ISBN 13:  9780742554788.

[9] Yan, Yunxiang. (2016). Intergenerational Intimacy and Descending Familism in Rural North China: Intergenerational Intimacy and Descending Familism in Rural North China. American Anthropologist. 118. 10.1111/aman.12527.