China: Xiu Xiu The Sent Down Girl

Xiu Xiu The Sent Down Girl is unsettling, ethereal, brutal film about the life experience of a 15 year-old girl during the latter days of China’s Cultural Revolution. I think the film asserts three major themes: the submission of the individual to an ideology, the loss of innocence, and the exploitation of women.

Mao's little red book

Chinese society was completely under the iron fist of the Chinese communist regime. As we read in the unit material, Chinese society was aroused by this propaganda to absurd magnitudes. The success was largely due to the prevailing passivity of Chinese society, though fear and threats were factors, too. There was little instinct to rebel or second-guess the regimes plans. In the event that one did, the repercussions were severe. In sum, this was a fearful society without any control over individual outcomes, without personal choices.

 

Xiu Xiu



The norms were well presented in the film. After completing a primary education, Chinese youth were shipped to work camps for a year, and then perhaps sent on for additional six months of rustifiction training to remote parts of the China. These practices were not questioned. As we saw in the film, this rite was actually regarded as not only honorable, but a cause for celebration. The individual was to submit to the ideology with no individual input about one’s needs or preferences.



Lao Jin



In the latter days of the Cultural Revolution, the system was disintegrating. Xiu Xiu was an unfortunate victim of the collapsing system. She was promised a city job after completing her rustification education in remote China, but then forgotten by the regime’s dissolving bureaucratic system. She was left to languish away int the Chinese steppes without any hope for rescue, to pick up the pieces of her life and find a way out.

The disintegration of the Cultural  Revolution had a tragic effect on the film’s main characters. Xiu Xiu allowed herself to be seduced, and then later sexually exploited with the hope of earning her way out of the grasslands. She used sex as currency. Xiu Xiu’s innocence and expectations were totally corrupted which culminated into her death—a death she chose.

Lao Jin, her father/protector and mentor, watched Xiu Xiu’s progressing corruption, but lacked the personal power to oppose or intervene. He turned a blind eye, though it wounded him very deeply.

In the end, the only available choice  left to them was death: homicide/suicide. Sadly, these characters could not imagine any other way out of their circumstances. I think this speaks volumes about their lack of self-worth, personal power, and individual choice.