Sunday, January 07, 2007
China: Ghost World
A new UK film which shows the ghosts of poverty, corruption and racism that haunt British migrant workers
The crepuscular underworld of false passports, unearthly working hours and cramped, slum housing in which they were forced to exist is suggested to most people in the UK. But the ghosts of Broomfield's film are not these lives. The ghosts - "gweilo" in the Fujian Chinese spoken by most of the workers - are the everyday demons that beset the cockle pickers when they were alive, and that continue to bedevil hundreds of thousands of migrants living in the UK. The workers shown are troubled not by nocturnal apparitions, but by the daylight world of employment agencies, of landlords and immigration inspectors. Ultimately, it is the spectres of corruption, racism and unchecked capitalism which haunt this deeply felt film.
Broomfield, the promotor of "Ghosts" has also been to China and his comments are published in the Independent this week If you want to know about China, they are worth reading. He says "I still thought of (China) as a socialist economy; in fact, it's more like a capitalist dictatorship". "the whole infrastructure, in terms of roads, airports, train stations, mobile-phone communication, is far better than we have here (in the UK)" "all the subsidies that enabled a peasant economy to exist - like free medicine, free schooling - have gone" So people move to mainly to countries like UK where they can hope to benefit off the welfare state and to take money back to China to build 5 story mansions.
Broomfield says "The government there (in China) is no longer interested in having a peasant economy, the life of scratching a living, having a few goats; those people will have to find a new way of supporting themselves." Or starve, presumably.
India at least has no starvation yet though health services to the poor are anything but good, with 1440 people per lavatory not uncommon and so forth.
IMO: I do hope things will improve but NOT at the expense of the environment, the poor, the sick, the old, and children which is what is actually happening. The environment MUST come first as without an environment, we are all dead, and more trouble must be taken.
The crepuscular underworld of false passports, unearthly working hours and cramped, slum housing in which they were forced to exist is suggested to most people in the UK. But the ghosts of Broomfield's film are not these lives. The ghosts - "gweilo" in the Fujian Chinese spoken by most of the workers - are the everyday demons that beset the cockle pickers when they were alive, and that continue to bedevil hundreds of thousands of migrants living in the UK. The workers shown are troubled not by nocturnal apparitions, but by the daylight world of employment agencies, of landlords and immigration inspectors. Ultimately, it is the spectres of corruption, racism and unchecked capitalism which haunt this deeply felt film.
Broomfield, the promotor of "Ghosts" has also been to China and his comments are published in the Independent this week If you want to know about China, they are worth reading. He says "I still thought of (China) as a socialist economy; in fact, it's more like a capitalist dictatorship". "the whole infrastructure, in terms of roads, airports, train stations, mobile-phone communication, is far better than we have here (in the UK)" "all the subsidies that enabled a peasant economy to exist - like free medicine, free schooling - have gone" So people move to mainly to countries like UK where they can hope to benefit off the welfare state and to take money back to China to build 5 story mansions.
Broomfield says "The government there (in China) is no longer interested in having a peasant economy, the life of scratching a living, having a few goats; those people will have to find a new way of supporting themselves." Or starve, presumably.
India at least has no starvation yet though health services to the poor are anything but good, with 1440 people per lavatory not uncommon and so forth.
IMO: I do hope things will improve but NOT at the expense of the environment, the poor, the sick, the old, and children which is what is actually happening. The environment MUST come first as without an environment, we are all dead, and more trouble must be taken.
# posted by uv : 5:26 AM
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