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“River Elegy really captured a moment in China,” says Michael Puett, professor of Chinese history at Harvard. “It was huge. Everyone was talking about because it was very controversial, which is something that can go both ways. Certainly among students I was talking to there was incredible excitement.” Inside the party, the picture was more complicated. Some factions were supportive. People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP, published the transcript of the first episode as an editorial in its pages and River Elegy spawned party-sponsored debating societies and symposia. General secretary of the CCP, Zhao Ziyang, loved it so much he would hand out VHS copies to visiting dignitaries. For the more authoritarian factions in the CCP, however, the documentary was an attack on the core values of a party, led by premier Li Peng, to which they and millions of people had dedicated their lives, and which would lead to its very abolition. Following Tiananmen, the official discourse on the show shifted to outright condemnation.

River Elegy made the argument that periods of success in China’s long history as a civilisation always coincided with policies of openness and exploration, such as the expeditions of the legendary Admiral Zheng He, a Ming dynasty-era Muslim eunuch, who led China’s fleet on voyages to the Indian subcontinent, South East and Western Asia, even as far as East Africa. During these periods, the series argued, China was the golden dragon ascendant, a world leader in science and technology, whereas periods of decline and regression coincided with isolationism and a turning away from the world, restricting or closing trade links with the outside. Such was the case with the Ming dynasty’s later decision to ban sea trade and make China a land-based empire, extending the Great Wall to hide behind. By inference River Elegy painted the recent past of high Maoist isolationism as a period of decline. The documentary was a rallying cry to continue and deepen Deng’s reforms. Indeed, it implied that they hadn’t gone far enough, and advocated further openness to the world that would in turn require a more open form of governance.

Puett emphasises that this was an internal debate inside the CCP and not, as it was painted in the West, a confrontation between the party and the people. The topline strategy was set by Deng Xiaoping and by 1988 the only real debate was about the extent and speed of the reforms and specifically if economic reforms were to be accompanied by political opening and Western-style democratisation. The question remained, was it necessary to be free as well as rich? As historian Karl Gerth, professor of Chinese history at the University of California San Diego, told me: “It highlighted one of the rare occasions when the disagreement among the ruling Communist party’s leaders was aired in public.”

The programme’s title refers to the Yellow River, over 5,000 kilometres long and known both as the cradle of the Chinese civilisation and also as its sorrow. The river has symbolic significance in both Daoism and Buddhism as something without beginning or end, representing nature’s eternal cycles, something akin to destiny but also a source of wisdom and knowledge. The Yellow River’s frequent flooding provided early Chinese civilisation with sediment-rich soil suitable for plentiful rice harvests multiple times in a given year, yet these floods also brought in their wake regular and massive destruction and loss of life. There is a saying that every time China would build a house and climb a ladder to finish the roof, the floods would come and knock the ladder away. River Elegy made the river a symbol of how China was stuck in the mud of backwardness, destined to repeat the same mistakes of the past. 

While the introduction of limited free markets had brought sudden and unprecedented wealth to certain classes of nouveau riche such as small farmers, by far the most stunning beneficiaries were the members of the CCP elite. As social safety nets were withdrawn and inflation picked up, broad sections of the population faced impoverishment. Mass migrations emptied the countryside as the young and productive moved to cities often hundreds of miles away to work in newly built factories. Early indications were that the capitalist paradise was nearly as bad as the communist hell these people were escaping from. Add to that endemic CCP corruption and access to information about the outside world, and you had the creation of newly politicised generations.

According to Puett, Deng Xiaoping was initially unconcerned about the student movement; he had always been and remained committed to the central authority of the party. He did want a vibrant economy, but wanted it controlled, which was seen in the West as an attempt to square the circle. Not so: because Deng had a pathological fear of chaos partly thanks to his own bitter memories of the loss of central control during the Cultural Revolution (his home had been ransacked by Red Guards and his son thrown out of a window and left paralysed). He finally came down on the side of those who called for the suppression of the students.

George H.W. Bush’s policy, which largely continued as US policy until President Obama’s second term, assumed that the US would remain the sole global superpower. China would open its manufacturing to American industry to transform the country into a subcontractor for US corporations. This would lead to the gradual development of a Chinese middle class that would naturally ask for Western-style democracy and a new democratic China, subordinate to US hegemonic power, would eventually emerge in good time. In other words, another Japan or South Korea. Needless to say, this was a big strategic mistake. The future didn’t resemble the past. A middle class was created, but the CCP ensured that no movement for democratic reforms could ever take root. China would remain strongly authoritarian.

Those who made the arguments in River Elegy would later find their way to Western universities, think tanks and policy forums. For them, Tiananmen was a confrontation between authoritarianism and democracy, a perspective Puett regards as a dangerous fallacy. He confirms that while for many intellectuals and students involved in the protests, democracy was an issue and an objective, the goal of the majority, including the workers who took part, was party reform and an end to corruption.

If the protesters had been successful, their plan wasn’t an overthrow of the party, but its reform. After the Tiananmen Massacre the trickle of Chinese elites who stored nest eggs in the West became a torrent. Increasingly, they would send their children to elite education institutions in the West. Chloé Zhao, for example, came to the UK to attend Brighton College, a boarding school based in the East Sussex countryside, where the fees for overseas students are currently £17,640 a term. From there, she continued her education at similarly well-appointed institutions in Los Angeles and Boston, before ending up at New York University’s Tisch School to study film.

In the two decades after Tiananmen, the outcome of economic liberalisation in China was similar to neoliberal policies elsewhere. While China’s economic growth was pulling huge numbers of people out of absolute poverty, it was simultaneously generating massive inequality and producing rampant corruption. There were inherent political dangers in emerging large-scale public discontent, which manifested itself in ever-growing numbers of demonstrations, particularly over corrupt land grabs by developers and environmental issues caused by unregulated or corrupt manufacturing methods or shoddy workmanship. In 2008, a primary school in Xinjin collapsed after a mild earthquake; that same year baby food adulterated with chemicals hospitalised over 50,000 infants. Meanwhile the global financial crash of 2008 dented China’s export markets. In the West, President Obama decided to bail out the banks without much support for the ordinary homeowners affected by the crash; 2010 saw an all-time record of 3 million foreclosures in the US. The UK and the EU followed with policies that combined government support for financial institutions and budget cuts to public services.

These policies in the West led to political upheavals such as Occupy, the Euro debt crisis and eventually Brexit and Trump. While the effects of neoliberal policies eroded the social contract in the West, China developed an alternative direction. Many in the West paint a revision of pure neoliberalism in China as a decision of a party that, like the leopard, had never really changed its collectivist spots. In her book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate, Isabella Weber, a professor of economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst, demonstrates that China chose a more gradualist market reform approach, mostly thanks to the Communist party’s limited experiments with market economics going as far back as the 1940s. As a result, even though, as Puett observes, China observed the tenets of liberal market-orientated economic models in practice, the hand of the CCP never left the steering wheel of the economy and continued to set its direction.

At this point Xi Jinping became vice-president, promising to put an end to corruption and reduce levels of inequality. His anti-corruption campaign allowed the politicians in China to take a firmer grip on the economy, while in the West those running the economy had politicians in their grip. As Puett explains, while it’s true that the Chinese government strongly supports the efforts of a series of Chinese companies to become global powerhouses, and even if the US likes to claim that there is a radical divide between statecraft and a free and open economy, if anything, the US government is closer to big business interests and far more controlled by global corporations than China. Xi is using the modern levers of power, including big business, to deliver the goals Mao had promised through revolution, made possible by a strong and well-organised, if increasingly authoritarian, state.

“Huang’s book is popular because it seems to confirm – with elaborate statistical analyses – a common understanding of what is happening in Chinese society today: wealthy and corrupt officials are lording it over a hard-working population,” writes Joel Andreas, a sociology professor at John Hopkins, in a withering review of Huang’s book for the New Left Review. “This understanding is not altogether wrong. Corruption is rampant, and party and state officials are lining their pockets, while most people are struggling to survive. The biggest problem, however, is that these officials are allowing increasingly powerful capitalist companies to run roughshod over their employees and smaller competitors. Huang’s advice – to loosen the reins – would only make things worse.”

If anything was at fault for these levels of exploitation and official corruption, it was the driving pro-market principles that stymied village-level enterprises. From the beginning, market liberalisation aided and abetted by foreign capital veered towards big business with the clear aim of emptying the countryside in order to fill factories making American goods. The US consultants, bankers and middlemen never had any problems with the involvement of the state, nor the corruption and repression. Or as Ho-Fung Hung, an associate professor of sociology, also at Johns Hopkins, put it in an article for Jacobin recently: “Today, there is a lot of talk about a ‘New Cold War’ between China and the United States: a Cold War between authoritarianism and liberal democracy. But we all know that China did not become authoritarian just two years ago. The whole establishment of the United States has been very happy about Chinese authoritarianism for a long time.”

Hung points to a secret letter George H.W. Bush sent to Deng a few weeks after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, in which the US president told the Chinese leader that the US would not let the situation get in the way of their two countries’ commercial relationship.

Xi Jinping rose to power after spotting the political opportunity of an anti-corruption campaign. More specifically, he saw in this campaign a way to re-establish CCP control over the business elites. At the same time as Xi was becoming first secretary of the CCP, Barack Obama came to power in the aftermath of the 2008 crash and gave the bankers who had caused the crash a free pass, further weakening federal governance over large corporations with excessive leverage over the legislative and executive branches through the system of lobbying and political fundraising. Today, the difference couldn’t be more pronounced: in China, oligarchs and large corporations are policed by the government, whereas in the US well-funded lobbyists pressure and police the representatives of the American people.

Li Ziqi is China’s Martha Stewart. She has 30 million followers on Weibo and a Guinness Book of Records entry for her YouTube channel’s 14 million subscribers, making her the most influential non-English-speaking YouTuber. Her success owes much to a rising culture of nostalgia for nature and the simplicity of a rural way of life among urban Chinese 30-somethings. It feeds on a sense of loss caused by successive ruptures in the social and generational fabric. The once common extended multi-generational families working the land in rural China are now far and few. Li provides an escapist fantasy for the young Chinese, who live in often-polluted urban sprawls thousands of miles away from their families, uprooted from social continuities and estranged to their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

In her videos, Li undertakes the laborious efforts of preparing various kinds of dishes, often showing the growing of the crops from seed. They culminate in a beautifully presented feast. Critically, when it comes to tasting the feasts, it is her ancient but radiant grandmother who, as tradition dictates, is always served first. There is a form of experiencing the sublime within Chinese culture. To labour hard and watch your parents and elders enjoy that fruit of your labour is the very definition of valour and a source of great honour. For Chinese generations feeling guilt at having abandoned their grandparents either in the countryside or in suburban retirement homes far away from their rural roots, this filial piety and sense of guilt at shortcomings in that duty are conditioned by cultural values assigned to old age.

By contrast, the USA’s winner-takes-all culture of equating success with virtue is rooted in the worship of youth. The communities featured in Nomadland are predominantly of retirement age, isolated and estranged from their younger kinfolk. The US mainstream is still modelled on the nuclear family. Li Ziqi’s pull is the dream of a pre-capitalist harmony between generations and life of simple village of self-sufficiency, craft and industry, the late capitalism on offer with Nomadland is that of atomised families fitting in best they can with the ruling market dictate and withering at the edges of life learning to use a bucket in the back of a van for a toilet.

The American romance with landscape portrayed in Nomadland is in line with one of the key features of the globalisation myth: that you can escape from your economic situation by escaping your geographical situation; but please don’t try it if you are an immigrant from Latin America. At one point Fern, the character played by Francis McDormand, is told by her sister that she is an American pioneer, evoking the myth of “Go West, young man!” This appeal to manifest destiny echoes a thousand Westerns and road movies but rings bitterly hollow here. If the original pioneers were people in extended families looking for somewhere to live, the characters in Nomadland are isolated and lonely old folks looking for places to die.

Many commentators have compared Nomadland and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. This too is a painful reference. Famously adapted by John Ford for the screen, the latter story tells of the Joad family, who are uprooted by a combination of financial crash and environmental collapse and seek the new frontiers promised by one of the agencies set up by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In Nomadland, Fern is driven off her property after the town she lives in is erased by the 2008 financial crash. Her search is mapped by the offer of seasonal work by Amazon, which exploits the plight of Fern and similarly dispossessed or desperate seniors. Whereas FDR offered the Dust Bowl escapees a New Deal to revive the economic prospects of tenant farmers, Amazon only offers insecure employment in form of unskilled casual labour as a form of palliative care.

As many critics have noted, Amazon gets a free pass from Nomadland, its warehouse conditions a blessed reprieve for the jobless Fern. She is not only grateful, but happy with what Amazon offers. McDormand has time to float about the factory mingling and making small talk, tucking into great meals at the canteen. She never suffers from repetitive strain injury even though we know that Amazon demands 12-hour shifts in most of its facilities in the US and offers no health insurance. While Nomadland presents a fair amount of reflectiveness and discussion, none of it grapples with collectivity or politics. Fern’s searching is to do with the soul, not society. There are no traces of workers suffering from heat exhaustion or having to wear nappies while they work to avoid the need to visit the toilet, or any of the myriad other horror stories of Amazon’s working conditions as recounted by many journalists in recent years including Jodi Kantor, David Streitfeld and Michael Sainato.