The Wild East

As sixty years of revolution comes to an end, a nation faces stability for the first time in three generations.  Artists and dreamers, born into a world of change, live out the last days of the ‘wild east’ as they struggle to find their place in the ‘Chinese dream’.

Introduction

I arrived in Beijing in the fall of 2011, on a ship from Korea full of Chinese merchants returning home with their wares.   During the twenty-five hour crossing, women spent their days in the lounge, out of the sun, watching subtitled Korean soaps, while the men squatted outside on the deck in the sweltering heat, smoking cigarettes, playing cards, and drinking baijiu.   As we crossed a Yellow Sea contested by naval vessels from North and South Korea, China and the United States, I had no idea I was heading toward a country on the brink of a great tipping point. 

The Beijing I arrived at was in the middle of a renaissance.  A hundred and fifty years after the event the British described as ‘cracking the Chinese melon’ and what the Chinese still call ‘the great humiliation’, referred to by historians as The Opium Wars, the generation of Chinese who had lived through war, revolution, famine, and the end of Maoism found themselves basking in a moment of success, victory and prosperity.  The Long March had reached its terminus.  

The first generation born into an open China had just come of age, and were rediscovering their classical culture and fusing it with a global sensibility.  The atmosphere was joyful.  Foreign educated Chinese were returning home and a small cohort of westerners had arrived.  An unfocussed creative energy pulsed through the country.

What I saw refuted the certainties of the world I had come from and punctured its sense of inevitability.  I was seduced.  I met a girl, learned to speak Chinese and started documenting the Beijing rock scene.   The endless possibilities of a revolutionary spirit permeated everything.  Business was booming, fortunes were being made overnight, criminals were becoming executives and Mongolian folksingers becoming rock stars.   In the imagination of the nation’s poets, nothing was impossible.

I didn’t know it at the time but I had arrived in time to witness the end of what people now refer to as ‘the wild east’.   Sixty years of revolution was coming to an end and like the cowboys of the American western, the revolutionaries were living out the glory of their last days.

The Wild East is a film about my seven years in China.  It’s about a people – artists, musicians, soldiers, workers, nomads - who’ve known nothing but change for three generations, grappling with stability for the first time.  About revolution giving way to empire.

THE FILM

During my seven years in Beijing, I shot over a hundred hours of footage and 36000 stills.  These include underground and sanctioned concerts, and behind-the-scenes material with some of some of the top acts in Chinese independent music, and daily life inside the Second Ring Road as Old Beijing absorbed a massive influx of migrants drawn to the capital city of the fastest growing economy on the planet.  Characters profiled include, Cui Jian (China’s first rock star), Dawei (Cui Jian’s protégé, an anti-establishment hip hop artist and party boss’s son), Lao Huajia (Korean war veteran turned street painter, talisman of the revolutionary spirit loved and supported by the neighborhood artists); Xiao Bu Dian  (Yunnan folk singer who became one of China’s biggest musical exports, and whose courtyard became the epicenter of the local cultural scene), Lao Shu (Nomadic beekeeper on the Tibetan frontier).

When I left China in 2019, Beijing was quiet.  The government was at the tail end of a campaign to rein in the energies that had been the city’s lifeblood.  The footage I have documents these people through the highs of ‘the wild east’ to this big chill.  To make this film, I propose to return to Beijing and discover where these and other friends have landed in the New China.

In addition to these elements, I have access to hundreds of hours of archival footage, including seminal concerts.

The film itself will weave a past and present, over a twenty year period.  Interviews and my own voiceover will give structure to a poetic film that takes the viewer on an expressionistic journey through the alchemist’s cauldron of the last days of the ‘wild east’.   Moving through dancers in squares, into rock venues and through the winding hutongs of old Beijing.  The distinct sounds of street chatter and Chinese waltzes will be woven with the rock, folk, and hip-hop that are together classified as Yaogun, to create an enveloping soundscape of the city’s past and present.