Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks – Revisited

In 2003, Wang Bing released the tremendously in-depth, 9 hour documentary, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks. Bing selects a small corner of an average Chinese city, Shenyang, to capture a distinctive period of Chinese history, as it pulls away from traditional Maoist communism, and enters into its Chinese interpretation of capitalism. We see factories become empty, workers not being paid for months on end and lots of standing around. Bing opens doors into groups of people who are never even acknowledged, let alone given a voice. In return, they allow him into their homes, work places, and extremely personal conversations. We see young man crying hysterically because he has missed his Father so much, workers taken to ‘hospitals’ on the outskirts to try and remove some of their high levels of lead poising that they have received at their work place and people forcibly driven out of their homes. Bing does this all with a simple, small digital camera, and captures the most beautiful and startling images. We are regularly placed at the front of trains or work equipment, and are swung around the tracks or factories. These factories are nearly always empty, and the train tracks are nearly always covered in old dirty metals and snow. The workers, Shenyang, and China all find themselves in a strange purgatory where life is day-by-day, everything looks stale and the same, and distinctively grey.

Shenyang, however, has an extremely personally connection to me. In 2012, 10 years after the filming of Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, I spent 6 months living in China, 5 of which were in Shenyang as an English teacher. I went to Shenyang completely blind. I knew nothing of the city, and nothing of its history, except that it was extremely cold in the winter, and had a small population for a city in China (only eight million), and the Japanese invasion during World War 2. Upon arrival the city, I was welcomed with a mixture of huge sky-rise buildings, empty six lane roads, and bustling, dirty markets all covered in snow. Like most things in China, things have both changed rapidly, as well as remaining strangely the same, meaning contradictions and huge contrasts are a common occurrence. Modernisation was a key feature in Shenyang, however this meant a lot of the stuff we saw were in a constant state of half-built building sites, often just left in the same way for weeks. This modernisation was focused on the centre of the city, with shopping malls and supermarkets being frequently dotted around, however these places were never too far from someone trying to sell baskets of junk.

The longer we stayed in Shenyang, the more the gulf between the growth of the country, and its people, seemed further apart. In Tie Xi Qu, we see a whole village being kicked out of their homes in the pursuit for modernisation, with little government regard for the people there. Many people seem to just accept this, which can seem startling to the viewer, but perhaps shouldn’t be. It was extremely hard to get close to people while living there, mainly due to lack of language skills, but often when conversation did start, in a mix of broken English and Mandarin, the idea of acceptance became clear. Whatever the government wants to happen, will happen, and we just have to work around it. For every big, new building in the centre of Shenyang, around the corner there is a street full of dirty children playing in piles of dirt that reach as up as tall as they are. In the pursuit for modernisation, as we see in Tie Xi Qu, and still see in modern Shenyang, the people are pushed into the background and left behind the façade of modernity.

Piles of rubbish, just like in Tie Xi Qu, were a regular site, even next to our local noodle restaurant.

The Shenyang skyline in all its grey beauty,

Being held up on the way to school, by a man and his donkey.

As seen in Tie Xi Qu, its never a bad time to play a game.

The new Underground system, extremely clean and efficient.