Broken Promises of Capitalism’s Wonderland: Representing Uneven Development in Contemporary China and Japan

Introduction

At the core of capitalism lies the idea of uneven development. This results in a binary system of opposing concepts driven by its spatial dimension and permeating social spaces: industrialisation/deindustrialisation, urbanisation/de-urbanisation, gentrification/abandonment, and creation/destruction. This unevenness itself contains the strength of capitalism (Berman, 1982; Brenner et al., 2010). The logic behind this is that capitalism always seeks expansion. In doing so, capital is in perpetual movement. First, it needs to underpin itself within a space to produce surplus value. Second, it degenerates that same space by moving on to a different location to re-start the same cycle, leaving behind a wasteland (Christophers, 2011; Harvey, 1990, 2010; Peck et al., 2010; Smith, 2008). Through this recursive, self-perpetuating cycle, capitalism soon renders obsolete the spaces that allowed its previous cycle of expansion—stage of destruction—while looking for new places to underpin itself again—the stage of creation (Harvey, 2001, 2012, 2014). This leads to a new global geography where centres of capital accumulation are surrounded by a declining hinterland (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Parnreiter, 2017; Smith, 2008).

Our goal in this article is to compare the similarities and differences between the effects and reactions to the creative and destructive stages of capitalism expansion. It follows Žižek’s (1999) statement regarding capital itself, “One should never forget that behind this abstraction there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital’s circulation is based, and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite” (p. 276). This paper takes a multidisciplinary approach by exploring the social consequences of this phenomenon from a cinematic viewpoint. Films, which are a “cross-fertilisation of disciplines” (Harbord, 2007), have the capacity to reveal social dynamics, moods, and other aspects which would otherwise go unnoticed by other kinds of surveys (Ortiz-Moya and Moreno, 2015, 2016), while at the same time, making them available to a universal and diversified audience. As cultural artefacts, films visually capture societal transformation over time to enhance our understanding of the (supposedly) invisible problems of our contemporary world (Ferro, 1988). Through cinema, this paper goes from the global phenomenon of creative destruction to its local consequences, particularly in how society experiences and reacts to this process. The analysis of artistic responses given by filmmakers allows an in-depth contextualisation of the popular and extended ramifications of the consequences of capitalist processes.

Understanding capitalism as a “project of sociospatial transformation” (Peck et al., 2010: 95), the concept of the creative destruction of space serves to show the interdependencies between uneven processes of geographical and social development and their experience at the ground level. The growth of economic inequality, social instability, marginalisation, and social polarisation are several of the by-products of the global restructuring of the economy and its subsequent re-spatialisation (Cassiers and Kesteloot, 2012). By exploring the response given by contemporary filmmakers to this process, we argue that the ill consequences of uneven development are not only affecting places undergoing destruction but also those experiencing a stage of so-called creation.

To comprehend this global interrelation and how it locally affects society, we focus on Japan and China, which despite apparent socio-political differences, are similar in the ways in which capitalism operates in society, along with its social aftermaths. Japan was at the epicentre of surplus capital accumulation from the end of the Second World War until the late 1980s—the stage of creation. Yet, the rise of new centres, such as China, absorbed the global surplus of capital and, as in Japan, shifted many places undergoing creation to the destructive stage (Harvey, 2009). Since the end of the 1970s China has emerged as one of the new booming centres for capital accumulation (Hudson, 2016). Although Japan and China have experienced the stages of capitalism expansion at different periods, the filmic representations of its consequences are simultaneously happening in both cinemas. First, Jia Zhangke’s Tian zhu ding (A Touch of Sin, 2013) digs into the disparity between the expectations of China’s economic boom and the population responses towards that reality. Second, Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s Kaitanshi Jokei (Sketches of Kaitan City, 2010) shows the effects on the social landscape of a deindustrialising Japanese peripheral city. Whether growth or decline, both films explore the broken promises of modern progress revealing the complex social reality of processes of spatial restructuring.

The remainder of this article first establishes the analytical and methodological framework to evaluate the two film-texts. It continues by discussing each film-text in detail, focusing on how they depict spatial restructuring processes as experienced by the characters. Finally, it concludes by highlighting how cinema can become an important tool in critical geography due to its ability to show aspects that, even though they might have seemed obvious, are passed by unaware.

Cinematic Readings of Uneven Development

The range and scope of the current crisis pose a problem of interpretation in that the socioeconomic mutations resulting from capitalism’s expansion are calling for up-to-date tools to explore them (Sassen, 2014). Cinema here bridges the gap between global socioeconomic processes and everyday life spaces due to its capability, on the one hand, to track the issues that preoccupy society, and on the other hand, to serve as archives of the concerns of a certain epoch (Berlant, 2011; Clarke, 1997; Penz and Lu, 2011). Cinema opens avenues to critically engage in the way capitalism operates and survives through uneven development. This can help to unravel experiences of the ordinary that would otherwise be unnoticed if we were only looking at other standard measures such as economic growth, while also highlighting the relationship between politico-economic systems and urban spaces (AlSayyad, 2006; Ortiz-Moya and Moreno, 2015; Sargın, 2013).

Films help society to understand and express itself thanks to their inherent power to visually document change over time. The cinematic gaze’s control over the spatiotemporal dimension connects the filmic medium with broader politico-economic questions (Denzin, 1995; Mulvey, 1989). The way cinema depicts capitalist processes successfully produces the above-mentioned social knowledge in parallel, but not in tandem, with expert discourse. The filmic media works by “dissecting reality” (Kracauer, 1926) in order to show the relation between economic mechanisms and social and spatial consequences over time. Although the lives and experiences of the people depicted usually connect capitalism and its cinematic depictions, more recently the spaces where the economic changes occur are increasingly gaining prominence in filmic narrative. Films, therefore, are proving to be a powerful tool to interpret the way contemporary capitalism works upon society.

Based on this framework, this paper focuses on two film-texts from two different politico-economic contexts and stages of capitalism’s development. Both film-texts, A Touch of Sin and Sketches of Kaitan City, are composed of different episodes that bring together multiple situations portraying processes of expulsion insofar as they represent a dissociation between external processes—economic, political, urban, etc.—and their personal experience resulting in social, economic, and affective abandonment. In this conceptualisation, the individual does not belong to the system; instead, he or she is a disposable element merely producing surplus capital in the form of labour. The multiple viewpoints allow for an exploration of the ways socioeconomic processes of uneven development permeate ordinary lives, and the social dynamics of people living at the edge of capitalism. Zhangke’s and Kumakiri’s filmmaking styles resemble a kind of postmodern neorealism cinema in their documental-like treatment of the subjects they portray. In their films, the problems of everyday life soon become tragedy with the inexorable progress of the expansion of capitalism.

Both films tell sequential stories. Their episodic structure is not only a narrative tool but rather a mechanism to stress how apparently “small” incidents, or events, in the everyday lives of common people belong to an everlasting cycle of creative destruction. Events within the ordinary then become “episodes”, which are “occasions that make experiences while not changing much of anything” (Berlant, 2011: 101). By focusing on episodes, it is possible to understand the penetrative work of capitalism and how it has entwined itself into the ordinary. The episodic narration reveals that the social consequences of the current stage of capitalism’s development are no longer temporal, as in a stage of crisis, but are interwoven with everyday practices into what becomes a “new normal”. Zhangke and Kumakiri construct a mosaic made from the assemblage of social and urban ruins consequential to capitalism’s course of creative destruction.

By reading the images shown in our two film-texts in conjunction with academic literature on the topic of uneven geographical development, we unravel a situation that is not only present in specialised academic debates dealing with contemporary capitalism, but that has also permeated through activities that are apparently dissociated from academic debates – reaching to wider and diverse social groups. We do so based on the facility of film to bring out situations regarding social concerns and crossing the limits of cultural, ideological, or national identities (McDonald, 2006). Historically, cinema has helped not only to make visible aspects that could have gone unnoticed by society but also contributed to defining and drawing attention to many social problems (Sorlin, 2001).

The Social Spaces of Uneven Development

Processes of uneven development permeate through all different aspects of human life, tearing apart social and cultural values, transforming political structures, and reshaping economic relations. At its sharpest, capitalism operates by creating new social spaces that respond to the emerging systemic trends enabling its expansion. These new spaces create a condition we refer to as “dysfunctional living”. A condition of dysfunctional living exists where there is a mismatch between the good life promised by the system and its ordinary reality, producing a distorted social space in which personal advancement seems impossible. Capitalism’s creative destruction is rendering a new world, as if reflected in a deformed mirror. The unequal distribution of the good and ills of modern progress results in growing segments of society enduring increasingly harsh living conditions belied by the promise of a better future. This promise was fundamental in creating a broad middle class in advanced industrial nations during the period of Keynesian capitalism that followed the Second World War (Cohen, 2007; De Grazia, 2005). Yet, the imperatives of contemporary global capitalism have knocked this promise down. As neoliberalism expands, it gives an entrepreneurial form to the lives of individuals, distorting ordinary spaces and everyday life practices (Fine and Saad-Filho, 2016). The oppressed have no option but to inhabit a liminal space at the verge of society itself.

A condition of dysfunctional living results from the mutation of the inner logic through which capitalism operates, which started during the 1980s and continues today. This new stage of capitalism’s expansion happened through growing global interdependencies between a variegated network of actors, processes, and regulatory regimes, and the increasing importance of the financial sector (Castells, 2010; Kumar, 2005; Sassen, 2001, 2014; Scott, 2012). Although this transformation has been understood as a crisis, its effects have transcended to take over the “ordinary”.

The creation of uneven social terrain is the driving force of the expansion of capitalism, the mechanism through which it de-territorialises and re-territorialises the global geography of accumulation and extraction of value, deeply rooted in its own inner dynamics. The concept of creative destruction acknowledges the transnational interdependency of contemporary capitalism and its overreaching effects. This article highlights how the social costs of uneven development are similar in spaces experiencing rapid growth and in spaces undergoing decline. This becomes a process normalising the effects of crises as they transcend to ordinary practices. The paper allows an understanding of the interplay between different social, cultural, and economic practices, and looks at deeper trends that are at work elsewhere. Yet, this interplay is historically underpinned. Current and future mechanisms to sustain capital’s expansion are based on previous politico-economic structures (Hudson, 2016), calling for a geo-historical viewpoint taking into account the intrinsic inseparability of history, geography, and socioeconomic change (Soja, 2000).

Japan and China here become instrumental to understanding the processes of creative destruction. In their transition to a modern capitalist economic model, both countries developed their own version of capitalism, which was adapted to their sociocultural context through the partial assimilation into local practices of Western economic principles. In Japan, the so-called “developmental state” distanced itself from the ideals of market self-regulation by embracing an active intervention of the government in economic and industrial policy (Johnson, 1982, 1995). Spatially, this created a megalopolitan system stretching along the Pacific coast —including the metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka— where capital over-accumulated to the detriment of the remaining areas (Miyakawa, 1980). This stage lasted until the 1980s, the years of the bubble economy. Its collapse, however, epitomised the inherent tendency of capitalism towards destruction and started pushing growing sections of its middle class towards a precarious condition (Gottfried, 2014, 2018). Conversely, China has created its own “socialism with Chinese characteristics” by adopting a free market approach at the global level while supporting socialist practices at the local one (Keith et al., 2014; Lim, 2014). Since Deng Xiaoping’s inauguration of the open doors policy (Cai and Treisman, 2006; Li and Wei, 2010), market-like reforms have reinforced already existing spatial differentiation through the uneven connection to global flows of capital, which have favoured accumulation in the coastal areas while dragging population and economic resources from the inner regions (Lim, 2017; Lin et al., 2015).

Despite their very different political economies, it is possible to find underlying systemic forces that ultimately are producing similar effects (Sassen, 2014). China may still be rapidly expanding and retaining some features of a socialist economy, but the causes of its rising inequalities and the exploitative form of labour supporting its growth might be rooted in deeper trends that are also affecting, for instance, Japan. Our focus is on these parallels and their consequences for people and places due to the uneven development through which capitalism survives.

China, the Epicentre of Global Urbanisation – A Touch of Sin

Jia Zhangke’s films to date have visually recorded the transformation of China’s spaces from the changes operated by the newly embraced free market economy. The country’s economic metamorphosis is altering urban spaces in line with the social readjustments demanded by the people building the “new” China. By depicting the country’s rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, Jia Zhangke’s Tian zhu ding (A Touch of Sin, 2013) represents China at the zenith of the creation stage of capitalist development. To portray the unstoppable processes of creation and destruction and their repercussions in society required Zhangke to use an aesthetic of immediacy, close to documentary technics. The film brings together four different stories, told in separate episodes, based on real-life events publicised in Chinese social media. Through these non-geographically interconnected episodes, Zhangke spotlights the lives of those who are fuelling China’s rapid economic growth but are excluded from its benefits due to growing social cleavages (Yang, 2006).

In A Touch of Sin, the four stories and its myriad of characters allow Zhangke to analyse China’s current uneven development from multiple perspectives: migrant workers arriving to big cities looking for prospects for a better life; their families, awaiting the fruits of their labour; the remaining populations of the inner regions, unable to move forward; and the new middle and upper classes, who enjoy the benefits of the new system. The characters wander through China’s new spaces, disoriented between recognisable and new landscapes – the mining hometown or the rotting family house as opposed to the textile mills and new-born cities. A Touch of Sin is a state of the art portrayal of Chinese society. According to Zhangke himself, “There is no metaphor in this film; there is only reality” (quoted in Wang, 2015). Narration in Zhangke’s filmmaking becomes topographic. The ruins, the skeletons of new constructions, or the spaces of present-day consumption are narratively intertwined with the characters and their relation, whether dysfunctional or not, to these spaces.

Each of the four episodes portrays a situation of class struggle and social exclusion as a result of unequal development. The first episode takes place in a mining town in the northern province of Shanxi, Zhangke’s birth province. It looks to the social costs of the privatisation of state-owned economic structures through the juxtaposition of the lives of Boss Jiao, the new managerial capitalist who controls the village’s mine after its privatisation, and Dahai (Jiang Wu), an ex-miner seeking justice. The second episode explores the problem of rural areas remaining at the outskirts of cities and the tensions between tradition and modernity; it focuses on Zhou San (Wang Baoquiang), a migrant worker that returns to his village in a pause during his drifting around China. The third episode is the only one with a female protagonist. Xiaoyu (Zhao Tao) navigates a contemporary Chinese money-driven social space confronting the impossibility of simultaneously being faithful to old values while achieving personal realisation under the new socioeconomic conditions. The final episode—roughly originated in the infamous case of suicides in the Foxconn factories in Shenzhen—problematises the life experience of migrant workers, represented here by Xiaohui (Luo Lanshan), a young man navigating the imperatives of China’s new market economy in the southern coastal regions, seeking to climb the social ladder.

Our reading of A Touch of Sin revolves around the understanding of contemporary capitalism as a force that drives the character’s “destiny”—stemming from the original title in Chinese, “divine destiny”. The film’s four episodes reflect ordinary situations of expulsion that society accepts as their unavoidable destiny; the narrative articulates this through three ideas that explore the distortion of ordinary lives wrought by uneven development. First, the reorganisation of China’s own space through simultaneous waves of destruction and creation whereby the Northern industrial regions are sacrificed in the interest of economic progress while the Southern coastal areas rise as new centres of capital accumulation. Second, the characters’ pilgrimage through China’s liminal spaces—positioned between creation and destruction, wealth and poverty, illusion and disillusion—where they find themselves at the verge of being dismissed from social structures, thus becoming outcasts of the same system that they helped to build. Finally, the inevitable violent reaction in an attempt to recover control of their own destiny, which is either a direct attack on the system or a self-defence mechanism. Through these three thematic threads, A Touch of Sin portrays the uneven spaces of social manoeuvring of the increasingly oppressed population as a consequence of the permeated work of capitalism within society.

Read in parallel, episodes one and four convey human suffering from growing China’s interregionally uneven development. Since its opening under the Deng Xiaoping administration, processes of creative destruction within China have propelled the country’s own meteoric rise. Capitalism has shaped a new economic geography based on a North/South divide establishing a northern rustbelt of decaying cities and a southern sunbelt of booming megalopolises (Lee, 2007). This resonates with Deng’s famous “Let a few get rich first” slogan—based on letting a selected group of regions and people develop first, hoping that wealth would reproduce thereafter and pull the remaining of the country upwards (Chen, 1997; Fan and Mingjie Sun, 2008). China’s former industrial heartland, its countryside, and western provinces were left to languish waiting for their turn to climb whilst coastal and southern areas rapidly jumped to the top. Episode one reveals what happened to the workers of northern state-owned enterprises after their collapse and/or privatisation; episode four exposes the inhumane living conditions of the migrant labourers feeding the boom towns of the sunbelt. They construct a sharp contrast between the North and the South and also between the generation that came of age at the dawn of post-Mao China and the younger population who were brought up already under the imperatives of a free market economy.

The first episode takes place in a mining community of Shanxi province, one of the many towns shattered by the aftermath of China’s opening forming the northern rustbelt. Under the ageism of free market policies, countless state-owned enterprises went bankrupt or were made into traditional capitalist companies. The episode juxtaposes the characters of Boss Jiao and Dahai, one of the workers falling victim to the privatisation. At first, Dahai returns to sue Boss Jiao for not sharing the mine’s profits as stipulated in the privatisation deal. The new landscape of the town attests to its decay: the abandoned industrial structures, derelict housing units, as well as the neglected symbols of the Mao era. To find support for his quixotic fight against the new capitalist system, Dahai navigates the social spaces of the town seeking support from other impoverished villagers who are reluctant to help because of fear of repression. Yet, through Dahai’s different encounters it is easy to grasp how the underclass feels abandoned by the new system. After losing their privileges, they have been pushed to a condition of dysfunctional living where the only possible response is a shrug of resignation. In contrast, unable to find justice through official channels, Dahai decides to take it on his own by murdering the local representatives of the new capitalist system—Boss Jiao and his accomplices—with the mine, the same place that should have been a source of progress for the villagers, as backdrop.

The fourth episode revolves around Xiaohui’s journey to fulfil his aspirations of moving forward in life and achieving personal wealth. If ruins and rusting buildings populated Dahai’s village, Xiaouhi cruises the booming cities of the Pearl River Delta dominated by glass towers and huge infrastructures. Through his different jobs—first in a clothing factory, then in an opulent nightclub/brothel, and finally in an electronic components factory—Xiaohui realises that China’s current structures of human capital built along capitalist lines to foster economic growth will impede his right of entry to the new spaces built exclusively for the rich. China’s new industrial structure relies on a new class of low-wage migrant workers lacking citizen rights since they do not have permanent residency, and therefore, are excluded from enjoying access to social services (Friedman, 2018). Zhangke contrasts the hedonistic life of the powerful politicians and businessmen of modern China to the harsh work in the factories where workers are living in a state of quasi slavery. Xiaohui’s life falls apart once he comprehends that despite his sacrifices, he will always be an outsider and will never meet social expectations due to the broken promises of the system for which he is just a tool to produce surplus value. The realisation that his place in society condemns him to a condition of dysfunctional living results in his suicide.

Episodes two and three revolve around characters inhabiting China’s liminal spaces. Liminality, understood as being “betwixt and between” (Turner, 1969), has temporal and spatial dimension as well as different subject levels (Thomassen, 2009, 2014). Furthermore, it helps to study “events or situations that involve the dissolution of order, but which are also formative of institutions and structures” (Szakolczai, 2009: 142). The idea of liminality opens a space to understand how creative destruction drives individuals and large segments of society to a condition of dysfunctional living. Here, liminality describes a socio-spatial situation in which individuals, groups, or society are trapped between two different worlds driven by capitalism’s politico-economic transformations and from where the only possible way out is to accept the new, worsened circumstances that were supposed to be temporary. The characters of episodes two and three navigate social situations and spaces in-between—rural areas at the edge of growing metropolises, brothels, and other places where illegal economic transactions occur. Since the characters refuse to accept the new social situation, these liminal spaces become the only possible places for them to inhabit.

The second episode tackles the urban–rural tension arising from the current politico-economic emphasis on urban areas, in contrast to Mao’s policies favouring rural ones (Fan, 2003). It is set in a ruinous village at the outskirts of a booming megacity. The village, a liminal socio-space in itself, is surrounded by high-rise buildings and modern infrastructures, and remains as a relic of the past that will soon disappear, engulfed by modern progress. Zhangke explores China’s simultaneously occurring geographies of growth and decline through the contraposition of concepts—past/present, rural/urban, communal/individual, and creation/destruction—epitomised by Zhou San’s relationship with his family and village. He travels throughout China robbing and killing wealthy people, sending the money to his family, who continue living a rural lifestyle threatened by the expansion of the city. The liminal condition of the village seems to have no possible solution except for the destruction of traditional lifestyles and values as modern development takes over. Zhou San, incapable of finding his own place in society and of fulfilling the expectations of his family, breaks his attachment to the village and embarks upon on a journey that symbolises the confrontation between the current socioeconomic system’s needs and traditional rural lifestyles.

In the third episode, two interconnected threads, both in the condition of liminality, structure Xiaoyu’s narrative: first, her desire to wed an already married man, and second, her work as a receptionist in a massage parlour that in reality is an undercover brothel. The impossibility of her aspirations moves Xiaoyu to migrate from her hometown in Hubei to a coastal town in order to rebuild her life in a more prosperous place. There, she starts working at a sauna/brothel where she is molested by two clients refusing to believe that she is “not on sale”. After Xiaoyu’s rejection, one of them slaps her in the face with a wad of bills while the other cheers, tacitly saying that she needs to accept his request just because he is wealthy enough to buy anything he wants, including her. The fighting scene is charged with tension and rage. Her refusal infuriates him, and he keeps pushing to achieve his objective. Xiaoyu then fights him back and kills him and his friend with a knife. She runs away and returns to her village, still believing in the possibility of achieving the promised Chinese Dream. Xiaoyu goes back to her original position to restart the quest for the Chinese Dream once again. In this manner, her life runs parallel to processes of creative destruction: after the ruination of her dreams she needs to find a way to provide a new meaning to her life and resume the journey.

In the four episodes, spaces of dysfunctional living stemming from the expansion of capitalist practices in China induce acts of violence. The savagery of the characters is a reaction to the supposedly justified destructiveness imposed by economic and industrial development. In order to move forward in life, our characters need to endure a systemic brutality that is creating a “new normal” life based on the uneven distribution of social goods. This can be regarded as “objective violence” insofar as it is “inherent to the ‘normal’ peaceful state of things” (Žižek, 2008, p. 2) resulting from economic development, which unravels into dynamics of violence (Wang, 2015). In A Touch of Sin, we find a cycle of cruelty in which each of the protagonists reacts to inflicted brutality in different ways. We refer to this as “mirrored violence” in the first episode, “anarchic violence” in the second, “reactive violence” in the third, and “self-violence” in the fourth episode. Mirrored violence is evident in that Dahai just gives back a fierce response equal to the one the system inflicts on him. Anarchic violence occurs because Zhou San’s impossibility of finding his place inside the system’s “new normal” results in indiscriminate acts of violence. Reactive violence results because Xiaoyu, sick of being humiliated, reacts with retaliatory violence. Self-violence becomes Xiaohui’s only way out from the system by turning to suicide. Destructive behaviour is the only available way to find justice for the characters. In turn, this leads the spectator to question if barbarity is truly a divine destiny. Hence, the violence committed by the protagonists is a human rampaging reaction against capitalism, a god-like system that controls their lives.

The four stories complement each other in portraying the effects of uneven development in China. The main characters feel that the system has excluded them from its alleged promises of material improvement—promises that people are constantly reminded of in contemporary China, where billboards referring to the “Chinese Dream” are everywhere from train stations to shopping areas. The lesson they have learnt is that those who became rich first will not help them to progress. As capitalism feeds itself from the widening gap between social strata, its expansion continues. Their condition of dysfunctional living is the structural damage that allows the system to replicate itself. They are nothing but easily replaceable gears of a machine whose sole objective is to produce surplus capital through dispossession.

Japan, Adapting to the Current Imperatives of Capitalist Production – Sketches of Kaitan City

Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s Kaitanshi Jokei (Sketches of Kaitan City, 2010) portrays the socioeconomic wasteland left behind after capital relocates to a different place to continue its expansion. Kumakiri takes five short stories from the book of the same name by Sato Yasushi, and turns his attention to the personal experiences that reflect the social aftermaths resulting from capitalism’s destruction stage—i.e. deindustrialisation, de-urbanisation, unemployment, and rising inequalities. Although shot in Hakodate, Hokkaido, the film takes place in the fictional Kaitan City. By creating a fictional city that is also a recognisable place, Kumakiri simultaneously generalises the social costs of economic destruction while allowing the spectators to identify themselves with the situation. Rather than particularising to one single geographical delimitation, the fictional Kaitan City helps to explore the universal suffering endured by society, notwithstanding its location. Kaitan City stands for all those urban areas and regions that have been disposed of by capitalism, as they are unable to continue producing surplus capital (Castells, 2002; Soja, 2013). The film’s close portrait of the characters allows the viewer to identify with them. These narrative decisions bring the global phenomenon of creative destruction to the ground level, showing how it affects ordinary, everyday life practices.

The five episodes, or sketches, focus on characters whose existence is shattered by the progressive destruction of Kaitan City’s socioeconomic structures. Kaitan City was once the centre of a prosperous industrial area propelled by the shipbuilding industry. Yet, waves of deindustrialisation have eroded its economic fabric. The downsizing of the dockyards and its social repercussions, followed by citizens’ responses, becomes the backdrop of the five sketches. Each offers different viewpoints to the condition of dysfunctional living in which Kaitain City is plunged because of the destruction stage of capitalism. Kaitan City’s uneven social space comes from the growing distance between the character’s standpoint, and the final goal of their labour to achieve “the good life”. The material wellbeing of the characters quickly vanishes with the ensuing destruction. Similar to the characters in A Touch of Sin, the characters in Sketches of Kaitan City endured harshness to reach the promised good life. In Sketches of Kaitan City, however, socio-spatial distortion occurs once that promise also collapses, and the population returns to their underclass position. This causes them to question the nature of the system and the reasons for their sacrifices.

Although only in one of the sketches are the characters directly affected by the downsizing of Kaitan’s docks, the penetrative work of capitalism is present in the life stories depicted in all of them thanks to news reports regarding the employees’ struggles. The news reports are at the same time a distant reality to other people’s problems and a reminder of a possible future that can happen if destruction continues. This brings about a distorted socio-spatial condition in which capitalism progressively dismisses socioeconomic structures that have stopped producing surplus capital while retaining those that can still contribute to its own expansion. Three ideas interlink the narrative to reinforce the portrayal of this condition. First is the interdependency between global processes provoking uneven development and its effects and reactions at the local level. Second is “place attachment” and the need to remain in the motherland despite its destruction. Finally, there is the characters’ feelings of having been abandoned by the system they helped to build, which is pushing them to live in a phantasmagorical space, a shadow of what it once was and will never be again.

The film portrays Kaitan City as an archetypical example of a deindustrialising city, whose ageing manufacturing industries are too costly to sustain, triggering their relocation to other areas of the global economy where the same production continues but provides greater profits (Sassen, 2001). The first two sketches complement each other in exploring the scalar replication of creative destruction and its repercussions on ordinary lives; they establish a dialogue between the global forces behind destruction and the local response to restart creation. While the first sketch focuses on the streamlining of the dockyards, the second presents the local response to deindustrialisation. Kaitan City hopes to restart creation by building a new business area where capital can fix itself back into space (Weber, 2002). Creative destruction processes overlap at different scalar levels. At the local level, there is the creation of new economic spaces through urban regeneration, while global forces cause the destruction of existing economic structures.

Kumakiri brings this well-known process to the ground level by focusing on the personal stories of people enduring it. In the first sketch, the spectator watches the downsizing of the dockyard through the eyes of one of the dismissed workers, Futa Ikawa (Pistol Takehara), and the consequences it brings to his personal life and to his sister Honami (Mitsuki Tanimura). Although they lost their father to an accident in the dockyard, Futa follows in his footsteps and becomes a shipbuilder while his sister stays at home. He is proud of his work and his whole existence revolves around the dockyard. For him, the downsizing process is more than the mere loss of a job. Futa feels that his whole universe is being destroyed. He loses his will to live and commits suicide on New Year’s Day. In the second sketch, the viewer witnesses the struggle of Toki (Aki Nakazato) to avoid the razing of her house in order to allow the construction of a new business district. The local government pressures Toki to relocate by giving her an ultimatum. The sketch concludes leaving Toki’s future uncertain, still living in her house but surrounded by the new construction. Through the personal stories of Futa, Honami, and Toki, Kumakiri explores the experience of enduring the effects of creative destruction. All the characters feel abandoned by a system that disregards their suffering since its only goal is to sustain economic growth.

These two sketches also bring to the forefront the idea of place attachment. The characters of Sketches of Kaitan City try to find their home within the new economic order while remaining in Kaitan City, unable to depart from what is the centre of their world. Regarding the attachment to homeland, Tuan (1977) notes that

The city or land is viewed as mother, and it nourishes; place is an archive of fond memories and splendid achievements that inspire the present; place is permanent and hence reassuring to man, who sees frailty in himself and chance and flux everywhere. (p. 154)

Kaitan City is itself one more character of the film, the mother connecting people to a place and making them loyal to it. Landmarks of place reinforce this loyalty and forge people’s identity (Tuan, 1977). From the beginning, the film stresses the importance of the dockyards in the city’s social space. In the first scene, children look to their distant presence while in class. Then, the launch of a new ship becomes a public social event, where local authorities, shipbuilders, and the public gather to celebrate the accomplishment of the dockyards, portrayed as a collective achievement. The dockyards are not only a place to work, but also a source of pride for the community which reinforces place attachment.

It is place attachment to the dockyard and Kaitan City that impedes Futa and Honomi from moving forward with their life and finding new jobs in either Kaitan City or elsewhere. After being dismissed, Futa stays at home making paper boats with the letters he receives from the worker’s union. He questions why he has been left behind with nothing despite his loyalty to the dockyards and to Kaitan City. Futa feels alienated and oppressed by a global economic restructuring process that is foreign to him. Similarly, Toki refuses to move out of her house despite the pressures and eviction orders. She remains there, living with her cats while construction work surrounds her. Sketches of Kaitan City highlights the importance of place attachment; without it, Kaitan City would become an empty space in which the characters are trapped, unable to stop the destruction threatening them. The characters are resilient to that destruction due to their bond to the city.

The three final sketches present one more aspect of Kaitan City’s uneven social terrain, in which the feeling of abandonment by the system moves its inhabitants to live in a phantasmagorical space. This space is dominated by an “absent presence” of spaces and people – some have been erased while others have remained (Edensor, 2008; Gordon, 2008). These three sketches portray characters foreign to the dockyard but whose personal experience is also disfigured by the destruction of Kaitan City’s socioeconomic structure. Each of them depicts a dysfunctional family whose values and happiness are measured by “conventional good-life fantasies” (Berlant, 2011: 2). The growing harshness of Kaitan City’s living conditions are transposed to their personal and family lives and distorts their conventional good-life fantasy. In these three sketches, the “absent presence” is that of the promised happiness after one accesses the good life. The mismatch between life aspirations and reality renders a nightmarish world in which the impossibility of finding affection and personal fulfilment descends into a condition of dysfunctional living; the characters cannot but look to other happy families in wonder at what is inhibiting their own success. Although seemingly distant from their own reality, destruction permeates all levels of their lives.

The confrontation of Kaitan City’s current condition of dysfunctional living with the city’s past and future displays a hallucinatory space given way by the expansion of capitalism. This haunting of urban space inhabits the ground level of everyday life practices and the ordinary socio-spaces of Kaitan City. The dockyards, its physical structures, and many of its jobs are erased; however, their “absent presence” remains with the city’s inhabitants. Consequently, they become ghostly shadows from a past whose future was based on the promise of achieving the good life thanks to their own sustained struggles and suffering. The characters feel connected to Kaitan City because they were the ones who built it. Through that construction process, they acquired an emotional relation with the city based on their own sacrifices. Despite the fact that their achievements are becoming a distorted reflection of their successful past, the inhabitants of Kaitan City reject the idea of giving up. The criss-crossing finale brings together all the characters from the five sketches inside the city’s tram system. In doing so, Kumakiri emphasises the individual as the constituent of a process rooted in local social spaces. The losses imposed by destruction generate a condition of dysfunctional living in Kaitan City, where the achieved fruits of hard work vanish while the characters become powerless spectators of that process.

Conclusion

Using the ability of cinema to visually document change over time, this article has explored how capitalism operates at the ground level, generating new forms of inequality that exclude increasing sectors of society from enjoying the promised goods of economic development. We have stressed that film is a powerful tool to comprehend the socio-spatial effects of contemporary capitalism. The analysis of our two film-texts has revealed that the multi-scalar character of capitalism and its expansion through creative destruction produces similar social consequences notwithstanding the stage that a given place is undergoing. Despite their placement at opposite ends of the cycle of capitalism expansion, the social consequences endured by the characters in each film are similar. They portray a system that retrofits itself through uneven spatial and social development which occurs in synchronisation at the global, national, regional, and local levels.

Our two film-texts show how capitalism survives thanks to the silent participation of individuals who believe in the promises it made but has no intention of keeping. The system works towards normalising a state of broken promises, the consequences of which are the worsened living conditions and the distancing of the final goal. For capitalism, crises are nothing but the normalising mechanism of the necessary systemic deviations to continue the extraction of value. The outcome is the disruption of normal social relations, in which the hopelessness of achieving the good life creates a condition of dysfunctional living, a distorted social space from which it seems impossible to escape, since the limitations imposed by the system become insurmountable.

The characters of Sketches of Kaitan City and A Touch of Sin are part of a system that gives them no choice but to either take it or die. They cannot be considered passive observers of the process of capital’s expansion through the re-territorialisation of the economy; they are part of that system, which lures them with the promise of a better future. In A Touch of Sin, society as a whole understands that inequality is a necessary sacrifice since only a few are supposed to get rich first; they await their turn to climb the socioeconomic ladder. However, the protagonists of the four episodes have realised that they might never be allowed to progress themselves, and hence, burst into acts of violence. In Sketches of Kaitan City, destruction has not only destroyed productive and physical structures, but also social and personal relations. The characters try to reconstruct their ties to the city and to society to recover what has been lost through the process of destruction. A Touch of Sin reflects the injured people of the actions that bring capitalism to life; victimisation which is hidden under the label of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Sketches of Kaitan City reflects the casualties of the decadence of that system. In either case, they are the gears that allow capitalism to continue working while spreading inequality.