The Quantum Generation

Since the turn of the millennium, China’s GDP has grown from $1.21 trillion to more than $17 trillion, at an annual rate of up to 14 percent. Deep inequalities persist throughout the country, but living conditions have improved dramatically. The amount of people employed in agriculture, traditionally China’s greatest source of employment, has halved, predicating the largest internal migration in history: some 300 million people have moved from the country’s rural areas to its cities in search of work, many in the export-driven factories that have led China to provide, at present, nearly a third of the world’s manufacturing. In 2000 bicycles outnumbered cars by about thirty to one; today the streets vibrate with the hum of domestically produced electric vehicles.

Many such statistics could demonstrate the rapid, disorienting changes China has undergone in the twenty-first century. None of them do much, though, to illuminate the inner lives of its citizens. How do you capture the emotional and spiritual dimensions of a societal transformation so expansive that, for example, a farmer who did not have ready access to electricity or running water as late as 2000 can now livestream their day to millions of people on a Xiaomi smartphone?

Perhaps no artist has taken on the challenge of representing this still-nascent century as directly as the filmmaker Jia Zhangke. Ever since he graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1997 and began making movies largely set away from the country’s cosmopolitan centers, Jia has been preoccupied with how China’s ordinary citizens experience the passage of time. Over ten narrative features, four documentaries, and a number of shorts, he has explored just how differently people living in the same country can encounter the same events, from the inhabitants of his hometown, Fenyang, a county-level city in Shanxi Province famous for its liquor, to miners in struggling coal towns, migrant workers in ever-expanding metropolises, and aimless youth throughout the nation. 

History, in Jia’s films, seems at once to take up everyone in the same movement and split into countless competing directions. Between those who propel themselves with anticipation into the future, those who resist and cling to traditions and habits, and those who are simply swept along, multiple chronologies emerge, overlapping across the same span of time. In his latest feature, Caught by the Tides, Jia takes this shapeshifting, indeterminate viewpoint still further, troubling the boundaries between past and present and even between his earlier films.

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Jia’s predecessors in the “Fifth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers, such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, belonged to the first wave of directors to graduate from film school after the Cultural Revolution, and they took advantage of the period’s newfound openness to revisit significant moments from the country’s modern turbulence. Often they worked in an epic mode: their characters bear the burden of national traumas, from the peasants who join the anti-Japanese resistance in Zhang’s Red Sorghum (1987) to the opera singers who survive the tumult of World War II and the Civil War before getting caught up in the Cultural Revolution in Chen’s Farewell, My Concubine (1993).

Jia’s films—the subject of a recent retrospective at the IFC Center in Manhattan and an ongoing series on the Criterion Channel—adopt a more intimate scale, focusing on the details and textures that both characterize a moment as it emerges and, when they vanish, carry the moment with them. Many of his earliest movies, such as Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000), and Unknown Pleasures (2002), used nonprofessional actors, local dialects, location shooting, and handheld or digital camerawork to portray characters not previously visible in Chinese cinema: people born in the Eighties during the “Opening and Reform” period, caught up in the excitement of imported pop culture; factory workers and farmers stranded by the collapse of previous social structures; the country’s non-Mandarin-speaking communities, its rural populations, and its precarious internal migrants. 

These early movies already intimate that history does not gather everyone equally in its progression. Xiao Wu, Jia’s debut, stars his frequent collaborator and classmate from the Beijing Film Academy, the extraordinarily charismatic Wang Hongwei, as a pickpocket who finds himself left behind by the transition from a control economy to a market one. While his former compatriots become official businessmen, he keeps picking pockets, dawdling about, and not doing much of anything productive. At one point he goes home to his parents’ place in the countryside, where his aged father, sitting on a heated kang, listens to opera on an antique handheld radio. (“We’ve been peasants for three generations,” he says.) Xiao Wu passes around his shiny new pager; his more successful brother, a cadre in the city, brings home a packet of Marlboros. 

Wang returns in Platform, one of Jia’s few explicitly historical films. It follows the members of a theater troupe in Fenyang in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, from the Seventies to the Nineties, but it documents less the momentous changes China underwent after Mao’s death than the material experiences of those decades: its characters get their first perms, listen to the Taiwanese pop singer Teresa Teng on shortwave radio, see a train pass by for the first time. As the troupe privatizes and some of its members, like Wang’s Cui Mingliang, pivot from performing revolutionary opera to rock music, other characters seem stuck in time. On a visit to his hometown, Cui meets his cousin (played by Jia’s real-life relative Han Sangming), an illiterate coal miner who hands Cui a grubby five-yuan note—half a day’s salary—to help pay for his sister’s college tuition. 

Xiao Wu and Platform were some of the most remarkable examples of what came to be known as Chinese cinema’s “Sixth Generation.” The filmmakers gathered under that rubric, among them Lou Ye and Wang Xiaoshuai, largely worked without state approval; their gritty camerawork, nonprofessional actors, and guerilla tactics reflected their focus on the anonymous and the everyday. Jia, too, initially relied on unsanctioned screenings and international distribution, but by 2004 the state was allowing his films to be screened domestically. By now he has become an elder statesman of the Chinese film industry, having founded the Pingyao Film Festival and supported younger filmmakers through his production company, Xstream Pictures. His work has continued, however, to focus on characters who contribute to China’s economic ascent even as it leaves them behind, from workers at an amusement park of miniaturized world treasures—the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower—in the globalization parable The World (2004) to laborers assembling electronics at a Foxconn-like factory in A Touch of Sin (2013). 

Jia often moves between fiction and documentary—several of his narrative features, like Unknown Pleasures and Still Life, began as nonfiction—and constantly collects documentary footage, whether alongside a shoot or simply for the pleasure of it. Two of his nonfiction features take up some of the most contentious periods of China’s past. I Wish I Knew (2010) records the memories of elderly Shanghaiers who lived through the Battle of Shanghai, when the Communists claimed the city from the Nationalists; Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (2020) profiles three writers (Yu Hua, Jia Pingwa, and Liang Hong) as they make sense of their lives in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and the reform period. 

His fiction features of the past decade, on the other hand, have used familiar genre conventions to give shape to the inchoate twenty-first century. The romantic drama Mountains May Depart (2015) extends from Y2K to a near-future, diasporic Australia; the gangster film Ash Is Purest White (2018) follows roughly the same timeline, viewing China’s transformations through a woman’s relationship with her gangster boyfriend, from the height of his influence to his fading days. To an extent these films render recent Chinese history legible by packaging it in received genres. And yet they also demonstrate that doing so is, in another sense, impossible—that there’s no satisfyingly realistic way to narrate this century’s discombobulating effects. 

When I interviewed Jia in January 2023, during the final phase of China’s stringent pandemic lockdowns, he argued that “traditional genres” belong to a “Newtonian physics era” of film, in which “the internal relationship and narrative logic is very clear: which events lead to which others, which causes lead to which results.” He was trying to move past that model, he said, toward the “quantum entanglement era” of the medium: “We can see the mutual influence between two things,” he said, “but we can’t tell what kind of logical relationship they have.” A frequent experimenter with new technologies, from animation and special effects to virtual reality, Jia often uses them to capture how jarringly the past, present, and future can collide. In Ash Is Purest White, at a moment when the protagonist is especially adrift, she disembarks from an express train bound for Urumqi and sees a UFO flash across the sky. 

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During our interview Jia mentioned that he was revisiting material he had shot over the past two decades and figuring out how to give it a new shape. The film in question, Caught by the Tides, premiered at Cannes in 2024 and had its US release this month. It draws on a diverse range of images—sequences that never made it into his previous work, clips from his existing films, and some newly shot sequences set in the present—to create an alternate story for one of Jia’s recurring characters and trace an alternate path through his oeuvre.

Caught by the Tides begins in Datong, a city in Jia’s native province, Shanxi, which he has been documenting off and on for the past twenty years. A former coal-mining center, Datong has gone the way of much of China’s industrial heartland, as state-supported industries have ceded ground to private enterprises and the communal structures previously provided to workers—housing, meals, a social life—have correspondingly fallen apart. But in 2001, when the film begins, some semblance of the old communal life remains. A group of women trade songs for International Women’s Day, first shyly and then with bravado; miners gather for a group portrait, then play drinking games after a shift, their faces still covered in soot. 

Qiaoqiao, the film’s protagonist, is an emergent figure in this transitional and increasingly transactional world: she works as a model for impromptu fashion runways and as a dancing spokesperson for a liquor company. When her agent and boyfriend, a small-time gangster named Bin (Li Zhubin), mysteriously disappears to seek his fortune elsewhere, a plot begins to take shape. Over the course of the film Qiaoqiao pursues Bin through time and space, but also across Jia’s body of work: from the banks of the Yangtze River during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam to a radically changed Datong in the present. 

Along the way there are milestones like China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and the joyous street parades that greeted the success of its bid to host the 2008 Olympics, as well as more recent markers. A rather funny sequence about the market for TikTok influencers, including an elderly Guangdong man, was shot for the film; so was another, more somber one depicting the consequences of the lockdowns. As usual, Jia foregrounds not the events themselves but the way specific communities experience them. His camera often lingers on the faces and bodies of passersby and individuals in a crowd, recording how they sit on buses, wait for ferries, or dance at nightclubs. Many of these sequences capture the feeling called renao (“hot noise”), the multisensory life of the commons, which might include anything from singing and dancing to the cracking of sunflower seeds, the clacking of mahjong tiles, and the trading of gossip. (Someone who seeks to get close to this liveliness is often spoken of as cou renao, or “collecting hot noise.”)

In Caught by the Tides the documentary footage not only lends veracity to the fictional story but determines the shape of the narrative itself, which frequently detours for nonfiction vignettes and interviews with some of the people behind the settings of earlier films. At one point the proprietor of an entertainment hall for retired miners in Datong—a crucial location in Unknown Pleasures—discusses the origin of the building alongside an enormous, partially charred portrait of Chairman Mao. Then Jia cuts to a woman regaling a crowd with a folk song in the hall, as Qiaoqiao enters the frame. 

We have seen her before. Played by Zhao Tao, Jia’s wife and frequent collaborator, Qiaoqiao has appeared in several of his earlier films, each time embodying the vicissitudes of success and failure with the same physical assurance. She made her debut in Unknown Pleasures, Jia’s second collaboration with Zhao, which began as a documentary about Datong and was shot in nineteen days. The first film Jia set in the twenty-first century, it gave voice to an exuberant new generation of Chinese youth, who quote Pulp Fiction and boast about getting rich off of an American dollar; Qiaoqiao figures as the vertex of a loose love triangle involving an unemployed young man and her controlling and abusive boyfriend, also played by Li Zhubin.

Zhao reprised the role in Ash Is Purest White, now dating a character named Bin (played by a fantastic and tragic Liao Fan), and even wearing some of the same clothing—from a shimmering green blouse adorned with butterflies to a sheer pink shirt and a black top that she uses to shield her face from the sun. Ash Is Purest White revisits some of the same storyline as Unknown Pleasures and even recreates some of the same scenes, as when Qiaoqiao’s boyfriend drops a gun onto a crowded dancefloor mid-song. Caught by the Tides collapses them both into one kaleidoscopic experience. 

Both Caught by the Tides and Ash Is Purest White also transport Qiaoqiao through a wormhole, retroactively blending her with the protagonist of Still Life (2006), the remarkable feature that Jia shot as more than a million people were being displaced from their homes along the Yangtze River, which would soon be flooded by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Here once again Qiaoqiao appears, wearing what would become her distinctive yellow short-sleeved shirt and clutching an unlabelled plastic water bottle, which she wields alternately as a weapon and as an emotional support object.

Still Life follows two people searching for their lost lovers: Han Sanming, the cousin from Platform, and Zhao’s character, Shen Hong, who hears rumors that her husband, here too named Bin, has had an affair and become a corrupt real estate developer over the course of his absence. But we see Bin only briefly; when they finally reunite, Shen Hong asks for a divorce. Still Life focuses more on the searching than the finding; the loss of Shen Hong’s love comes to represent the loss of the community itself. 

In Caught by the Tides Jia shows us Bin’s story, resurfacing footage he left on the cutting room floor for Still Life that depict the character’s entanglement in the criminal underworld. Now that initial story of loss and reunion has a parallel in the very form of the film, which revisits the astonishing footage that Jia shot in the county of Fengjie as it was being demolished. Residents fan themselves atop crumbling houses; a man plays with a dog that may or may not accompany him when he leaves; evacuees say goodbye to neighbors they might never see again. Reiterating their losses becomes an act of recovery. Jia’s camera lingers on the artifacts of this time: an abandoned Barbie splayed against rubble, cassettes scattered across the ground, a newspaper clipping of the first Chinese astronaut to return to Earth.

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Qiaoqiao never speaks in Caught by the Tides, but the soundtrack provides its own biography of her generation. Jia has always been an acute observer of popular music, and Caught by the Tides is essentially a shadow musical. After those songs on International Women’s Day, new genres enter the mix: techno, punk, recent pop music. And yet many of these songs reach back into the past even as they push forward. A song by the Clash-inspired band Brain Failure references a line of Tang Dynasty poetry; an influencer lip-syncs to a cover of “Genghis Khan,” a disco track by the eponymous German group that became an anthem for a go-getter generation of Chinese citizens. (The original score was composed by Lim Giong, the Taiwanese musician whose moody ambient music has provided the soundtrack for many of Jia’s films, as well as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s nightlife odyssey Millennium Mambo.) 

Qiaoqiao’s physical appearance changes throughout the film as Zhao ages, but her character retains an indomitable adaptability. In a pivotal scene from Unknown Pleasures, reproduced here in its entirety, Qiaoqiao repeatedly tries to leave a bus only for Li’s character to repeatedly thrust her back onto a seat; it’s the occasion of their separation, and the only time we see her break down. Zhao was a dancer before she became an actor (she and Jia met shortly after she graduated from the Beijing Dance Academy), and in the absence of any dialogue her self-possession expresses Qiaoqiao’s ability to confront her surroundings: brandishing a taser as gangsters try to retrieve money from her, displaying a weary, silent smile as a checkout clerk at a supermarket during the lockdowns. Bin, however, has grown feeble by the end of the film. Having aged far more than Qiaoqiao, he can barely tie his shoelaces. After an aborted attempt to resettle in Guangdong, he’s returned to Datong, where he encounters Qiaoqiao at her workplace. Following their reunion Qiaoqiao melts into a crowd of runners adorned with neon armbands. Whether she’s being borne into the past, present, or future is unclear.

Meanwhile pagers, payphones, and computer terminals at an Internet cafe give way to smartphones; regional trains become high-speed rail and jet planes. An early shot shows a statue of an astronaut while the soundtrack suggests him blasting off into space, as if to announce the takeoff of the century. At other moments, such as a scene showing a group of passengers in a train carriage, some of the footage blurs and momentarily freezes, as if the film is trying to fix each image in memory before it passes by: a girl holding her puppy aloft, a woman carrying a branch of flowers, a man lost in thought. By the end of the film daily life is a far cry from the group portraits we encountered at the start; at her supermarket Qiaoqiao has a touching, eerie encounter with a robot attendant who notes her sadness and quotes Mother Teresa and Mark Twain to cheer her up.

The camera is not spared the passage of time. We see it shift from the handheld digital imagery and grainy 16mm film of Jia’s earliest projects to the increasingly smooth surfaces of his more recent work. There are even some experiments with VR and AI. (At one point Qiaoqiao watches a film about an artificial helper that Jia generated through a combination of live staging, special effects, and artificial intelligence.) Xiao Wu ends with the protagonist, arrested and handcuffed to a cable, looking at a crowd of curious onlookers as they gaze back at him. In the final sequences of Caught by Tides that experience of analogue surveillance has come to seem quaint: Jia includes a sweeping, almost balletic shot from the vantage point of a closed-circuit camera. 

It’s hard not to feel a sense of elegy in these last scenes, when we finally arrive at a linear fictional narrative. Gone is the renao of previous Jia locations. The melancholy stems not just from the rigid lockdown the film depicts but also from the entire paradigm of digitally mediated life that Covid-19 accelerated, which can seem to flatten time into an artificially continuous flow, far removed from the jerky and productive chaos of the earlier documentary footage. In Chinese, the original title of Caught by the Tides could be translated as either A Generation Swept Away or The Romantic Generation; the English translation sacrifices something both of the title’s emphasis on the collectivity and of the specific yearning it embodies. Qiaoqiao is not so much a character as an avatar for a searching generation, her presence both affecting and affected by her surroundings, a constant reminder that the things we lose define us as much as the things we gain.