CHINA, ENTERTAINMENT, MOVIE REVIEW: Ke Ke Xi Li

By Leslie Sun



In 2004, the Chinese movie industry gained its pride both with film critics and at the box-office. Director Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers, Feng Xiaogang's A World Without Thieves, and Steven Chou’s Kung-fu, all won respect and a lot of money. Among them, however, another movie also captured people's attention. It has no visual effects nor movie stars, but Ke Ke Xi Li shocked every viewer's heart.

In this his second movie--about the slaughter of rare, endangered antelopes in the far west of China--director Lu Chuan showed great abilities in controlling the movie and in casting the actors. Instead of professional actors, Lu chose local mountain patrols to play themselves. Lu said it was because the shooting condition was extremely severe, and that real actors could not have breathed normally on the Qing-Zang Plateau. But I believe there's another reason: professional actors can't restrain their desire to 'act.' They don't know how to underplay a role. No movie star in China could play a poaching patrol member in the movie Ke Ke Xi Li. I don't mean that there are no good actors in China. There are a lot of them. But I don't see one who could play such roles as those in Ke Ke Xi Li.

As an art form, movies are larger than life. It may be close to reality, but it can't be exactly real. Acting is not living. Actors, especially movie stars, have the air of attackers. They are always there to attack your nerve. If you look deeply into their eyes, you can find "the light." Actors have a subconscious need to show their light. They just can't hide it. Even Morgan Freeman in the Shawshank Redemption couldn't hide it completely. In a movie it's a good thing, but in a docudrama acrors can't make viewers believe that the characters in it actually live their lives that way.

Ke Ke Xi Li is a movie based on a true story, and the director didn't want to make believe. He didn't want to tell a sad and beautiful story to the viewers. He wanted to tell them what was really happening there in Ke Ke Xi Li. He knew very well if he chose super stars (and he could have—in his first movie, The Missing Gun, he had Jiang Wen), the box office would be much higher, but he could never have controlled it. Even the actors themselves couldn't have controlled it. I mean "the light." It's hard to explain further. The patrols have done an excellent job of limiting the wanton killing of antelopes in the western plateaus. The film shocked me. If it was played by real actors, it may have been no more than just another "good movie," but as it is it is a "classic movie."

CHINA, SOCIETY, Opinion: Facing the Unemployment Problem of College Graduates

By Jenny Dan

In an employment market in Guangzhou in late January, a college graduate burst into tears when she learned the employment market had closed ahead of schedule. The girl came all the way from Shanxi Province to Guangzhou to take part in the employment market in the hope of getting a job, and was now faced with the unemployment pressure again.

Among college students, especially seniors, "graduation equals unemployment" is a very popular saying. According to recent statistics, 750,000 college graduates in China are now faced with the same problem as the girl I mentioned, which sets people to thinking much more carefully and seriously about the unemployment problem of college graduates in China nowadays.

The Chinese government adopted the policy of enlarging the enrollment of universities 5 years ago. Apart from the growing opportunity for high school students to get a college education, we should also realize that this burdened the unemployment problem as well. The growth of our country's available positions does not match that of new college graduates, which results in a serious social problem.

For us students, it is very important and necessary to seize every opportunity to promote ourselves when we are in college. Whether we treasure and make full use of the four years' time in college is crucial for a promising career. Besides, when graduates are looking for a job, they should drop the notion of "finding a job just to earn money." They should regard the job as a kind of life experience and contribution to the society. Only by this outlook can they accept the job which has a comparatively lower pay but a more promising future.

And for the government, they also ought to realize the serious problem and take serious actions to help solve it. Many employers now require candidates to have certain kinds of working experience before offering them a job, which means that social practice is now playing an increasingly important part in students' college life. The government should provide college students with more opportunities for them to make contacts with society, to get trained in their professions, and to gain the necessary working experience.

For instance, newspapers and TV stations should accept college students majoring in journalism as interns during summer holidays and winter vacations; the law offices should encourage students majoring in law to come and learn from them. The unemployment problem is so complicated that a totally satisfactory solution can never come about; what needs to be done regardless is for everybody in society to face the problem and contribute what they can to solving it.

CHINA, SOCIETY, Analysis: Facing the Population Problem

By Julia Zhu

To China--a country with a population of more than 1.3 billion--population is a hot, controversial, heavy topic. Peering into the present population situation of my country, we are worried as well as happy. Of course, it is exciting and encouraging to find that, thanks to the birth planning policy and the strict application of the one-child rule, China has brought its population under control with unprecedented success and speed.

It is also an acknowledged miracle that with only 7% of the world's farm land, we are able to feed 22% of the world's population. But in spite of these achievements, new and even more fierce problems exposed themselves during the population control process and are now waiting to be settled rationally in the new century.

According to the State Family Planning Commission, the population of China will continue to increase by more than 10 million a year over the next ten-plus years and is likely to reach the peak of 1.6 billion in the middle of the 21st century. Meanwhile, the labor and aging population will reach their peak in this period, too.

The birth-control policy not only slows down the rate of population quantity but it also has the same effect over the quality: in the city where the population quality is high, the birth rate is plunging; in the countryside, where people are less educated, it is just the opposite. The quantity problem has slipped into the quality one. In addition, the "floating" population and too many extra laborers are a double-scale challenge: difficult supervision + high pressure of employment.

According to the statistics, in 2000, the number of laborers between the age of 15 and 64 was more than 800 million, covering 70.15% of the gross population. It is estimated that in 2020, this number will reach 940 million, accounting for 65% of the population.

Faced with such a harsh reality, the government is now attempting both to continue to limit population quantity and to further improve population quality. This is easier said than done. Poverty, insecurity, and ignorance cause high growth rates, therefore to promote education on the scope of the problem to the whole nation is quite urgent now.

As we can see, coercive measures can have an impact. But social change that improves conditions of life, levels of education, economic security, and freedom of choice for women would be more humane and essential. In my opinion, it shall be very effective if we take this path, what we can call the "Kerala (a state of India) model" of controlling population. It, like China and unlike the rest of India, has high levels of basic education, health care, female workforce participation, and so on. To reach this stage is never an easy task and we may run into many difficulties in the process, but steps should be made before we come to the final, unfortunate conclusion.

CLASSIC BOOK REVIEW: The Catcher in the Rye

Growing pains

By Linda Lin

The whole story is told in flashback. Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old prep school student, has failed out of school again. He goes back to New York before scheduled and idles around the city instead of going home. There, he meets various people and experiences many things, and his mental condition becomes worse and worse. Finally, he breaks down, and the novel ends with him retelling the story in a mental hospital.

Holden is a typical adolescent undergoing an identity crisis; unfortunately, he is overwhelmed and defeated by his growing pains. Here, I categorize the growing pains that accounts for his mental collapse into four kinds.

The first is academic failure. Holden fails out of Pency, but it is not the first school that has kicked him out. The constant academic failure and the lack of recognition have, of course, destroyed his confidence. Moreover, academic performance is closely related to his relationship with his parents. Holden is from a wealthy family. His parents devote lots of money to his education. However, their expectation is beyond Holden's reach. His poor academic performance disappoints them again and again until at last he becomes afraid of even contacting them -- he idles around the city instead of going home, he dares not call Phoebe for fear of his mother picking up the phone, and he sneaks back home without letting his parents know. He has no courage to face his parents' inevitable wrath. Thus, academic failure is a key factor to his ultimate breakdown.

The second is sexual frustration, or rather failure in romantic relationships. Holden is a typical hormonal boy for he's always thinking about sex. However, though he has had romantic relationships with several girls, he is incapable of having sex with them -- he doesn't even have sex with the prostitute when she offers. His sex life stinks. Meanwhile, Jane is the girl Holden truly likes, thus he feels deeply hurt and betrayed when the "sexy bustard" Stradlater dates her, and he keeps imagining whether they will have sex. The relationship with the opposite sex plays an important role in one's growth. Dealing with it unsuccessfully will, of course, add to growing pains.

The third is interpersonal relationships. Though Holden has many friends and acquaintances, he cannot form meaningful and lasting friendships with them. He feels that no one understands him and everyone is a "phony". Therefore, he is constantly feeling lonely and helpless. Moreover, the most painful struggle is that part of him wants to connect with people on an adult level (by imitating them, like smoking, drinking alcohol, paying bills for strange ladies and calling a prostitute), while part of him wants to reject the phony adult world, and to retreat into his memories of childhood. In the end, the only solution he found was to run away and live as a deaf-mute who will not need to communicate with anyone. Of course, that cannot be realistic. Thus, Holden is trapped in a desperate struggle and feeling helpless because of his unsuccessful interpersonal relationships.

The forth is unstable moods. Holden is constantly possessed by unexplained depression and nervousness. Meanwhile, because of his excessive sensitivity and sentimentality, he is always surrounded by a sense of emptiness and loneliness. Thus his state of mind is unstable and it leads to his odd behaviors and isolation. He easily becomes impulsive or out of control. Thus people find it hard to communicate with him and it results in an unsuccessful relationship, and this will in turn add to his gloom and cause the instability of mind. In this way, Holden's life goes into a vicious cycle.

Till the end, Holden does not become really mature. He actually regresses back to a child-like state of mind, only feeling comfortable with Phoebe. He resents the phony adult world and wants to protect innocence. However, regarding everything in the adult world as phony is prejudicial, and escaping from reality cannot save him forever. Everyone has to face his growth and growing pains are the inevitable costs. Holden describes growing up as falling off the cliff, but one thing we should know -- it may be safe and comfortable to stay in the rye field on the cliff, but only when we have the courage to fall off the cliff can we learn to fly. And that is the day we really grow up.