Dissent | Youth - Courtesy of Icarus Films
In public comments Wang has rejected the pretense (or accusation) that his films are a “political tool” with a broader agenda, anticommunist or otherwise. Even so, his projects circle China’s expansive people’s history. Youth, in particular, lays bare how China’s manufacturing settings have been subject to a Marxist paradox: a “withering away” and retreat of the Chinese state amid broad sociopolitical change.
As China has pivoted to international markets and free trade, thereby allowing industries to specialize in tech manufacturing, longstanding rural-urban inequalities have only increased.