Director: Chen Chunquan
Running time: 1hr 13mins
Everyone’s heard the speech that opens The correct path. Never in this exact form, or directly from Chinese entrepreneur Li Wei, but we’ve all heard what he’s got to say a million times over. After detailing grand plans of how he will spend his first ¥100 billion – including giving each of his employees ¥5 billion – he details the secrets to success. What were the things that marked his company out from the competition?
“Because it worked hard, it is because it manages time more accurately.”
Of course. And how could we all be a little bit more like Li Wei?
“When you’re in trouble, don’t think that being broke is to be powerless. Make progress every day. Don’t give up no matter how many setbacks you encounter. It’s OK to fail, because we are still young.”
Yes, it’s the classic ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ talk! The one that sounds positive and idealistic, until you give it even a little thought, and realise it means everyone who is not a billionaire is a feckless, lazy loser who brought all their ills on themselves. It’s every bit as jarring and grotesque coming from Li Wei as it is from any other billionaire nepo-baby or internet grifter you’ve heard it from previously – until Chen Chunquan’s camera cuts away to deliver a sumptuous cinematic coup-de-grâce.
As Li Wei concludes, the lens pans around to reveal he is speaking to an empty auditorium.
Chen Chunquan’s cinematography regularly offers up these stunning visual juxtapositions. Possibly for reasons we have alluded to before about trying to say anything which could be construed as critical of the status quo. But also, possibly because this is a better way of telling us a story than simply bombarding us with a heavy-handed narration, or leading talking-head segments. The director repeatedly poses grandiose images against the latest ways in which aspiring billionaire/delivery courier Li Wei has been bamboozled.
Li Wei tells us multiple times he is “not afraid of hard work”. That sees him juggling a job as a cycling food-courier with late night ‘investment’ sessions, in which he reads and listens to alleged experts about stock-trading – and sinks most of his small salary into cryptocurrency. Often, his meandering statements about the idiocy of ordinary workers in contrast to his go-getting mentality are contrasted with images of him working like a dog for someone who evidently hates him, while living in what appears to be a broom cupboard at a factory, which he also moonlights in.
He explains that he crashed his moped six months ago, shattering his knee. He has not had necessary operations on it since because he spent the needed capital on Pi Coin – a digital trading platform he is assured is definitely not a Ponzi scheme. Ominously, as he limps up a huge staircase (the likes of which his doctor told him to avoid, or risk disaster) to deliver food packets to a rigid schedule, the camera focuses on a poster hanging outside a presumably elderly resident’s apartment, reading “Beware of scam artists.”
Li Wei is unmoved, though, and in his next interview with the camera, is excitedly explaining that the 28th of June will change everything. According to him, Pi Coin is about to go “onto the main net”, and from there, the crypto-coins he owns will only increase in value. After this, he explains he has already hatched big plans to use the inevitable windfall to fund a range of new products and projects. His ascent to China’s wealthy elite is all but assured. But again, Chen Chunquan suggests another, less rosy outlook, when the camera comes to rest on a school of catfish, swimming against the current of the mighty Sham Chun River. While some manage to slightly advance for a while, the muddy water washes them all back down-stream.
Moments later, the magic of cinema has whisked us to the big day itself. Li Wei insists he isn’t panicking, but oddly enough his huge funds have not yet materialised. Days later, we are party to a phone conversation in which he insists an unnamed caller (presumably the person who sold him the pyramid scheme in the first place) explain themselves. “Are you joking?”
The sad scene plays with a buzzing screen in the background, televising a state broadcast on behalf of China’s one-party government. “What the Chinese Communist Party does is lead accountably. We cannot leave anyone behind,” the broadcast happily proclaims over an inspiring swell of orchestral music – as our protagonist learns he has only 6 cents left in his digital wallet.
All of this might start to feel rather mean in relation to Li Wei after a while, but for two points. The first is that importantly, the camera does a lot of work to humanise him as an individual, to show what makes him tick. He moved to Shenzen seven years ago, when his father passed away, in the hopes of finding work that could help his family live well. It is a story which has played out for millions of people, and just as fruitlessly. Echoing a number of others – including a taxi driver who laments spending 18 years in the city and losing his youth to it, and a fortune teller who cannot afford to leave, but hates the place – Li Wei often speaks about wishing to return to his family, and to relax for a couple of years before his next big project.
At the same time, Li Wei is never damned by his own standards. The counterposing of images by Chen Chunquan which occasionally see him become the punchline, also serve to ultimately contextualise his beliefs. Li Wei has been raised to believe that anything is possible in this brave new China – an economy on par with the United States, but clearly ensnared by the same ideological trappings as a result. The material reality is that the majority of China’s residents are poor, and struggling to make ends meet. In a society where people are now raised cradle-to-grave to expect they can become billionaires, if only they invest wisely and work hard, this has created a potent breeding ground for con-artists – who remain perhaps the greatest beneficiary of digital technology of all. They don’t even have to go door-to-door anymore, which is more than you can say for poor old Li Wei.
That is not to say that Chen Chunquan merely paints Li Wei as someone to be pitied, though. This is a complex portrait of someone who is so enthralled by dominant economic doctrine that he repeatedly reworks his reality to comply with it in increasingly harmful ways.
In what is probably the most horrendous, reactionary example of this, Li Wei unflinchingly backs his boss for sacking a colleague who “does not listen properly”. The worker in question is deaf – and Li Wei has lost out on better-paid work himself because he is also hard of hearing. But to admit that there is something wrong here, would be to countenance the idea that there is something else other than individual gumption at play in the success of a businessman under capitalism – and that might well bring Li Wei’s world-view crashing down around him, while forcing him to face some uncomfortable truths about the time and money he has wasted chasing it.
So, instead, our man launches into a tirade about the “two kinds of deaf people”; the ones who listen and obey management, and the ones who make trouble. Apparently, he cannot envisage a day in which he might ever be painted as “the wrong kind of deaf” – something which it is alluded to in the next scene may be closer than he is expecting. With his building placed on lockdown for a Covid-19 outbreak, his employer becomes increasingly irate at his absence – whether he has a note from the government or not.
The final moments of our time with Li Wei do not give us much more hope for him, either. His last interaction with the director shows him desperately trying to flog Chen Chunquan shares in Pi Coin – a bare-faced attempt to recoup the money he has lost on the scheme, via the only means anyone ever makes money back on such a venture – finding some other sucker to leave holding the bag.
As well as providing a rare, acerbic glimpse into the ideological heart of modern China, Chen Chunquan’s documentary has a lot to say about the economic lot of the working class around the world. How our conditions have left us ripe for exploitation, while encouraging us to enforce our own misery by preying on those in the same boat, chasing the false promise of upward mobility.
In many ways, it is the grim, documentarian realisation of one of the most cutting assessments contained in Robert Tressel’s seminal socialist novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, exploring the apparent death-grip of exploitative ideology on those it harms most.
“The revulsion of feeling that Barrington experienced during the progress of the election was intensified by the final result. The blind, stupid, enthusiastic admiration displayed by the philanthropists for those who exploited and robbed them; their extraordinary apathy with regard to their own interests; the patient, broken-spirited way in which they endured their sufferings, tamely submitting to live in poverty in the midst of the wealth they had helped to create; their callous indifference to the fate of their children, and the savage hatred they exhibited towards anyone who dared to suggest the possibility of better things, forced upon him the thought that the hopes he cherished were impossible of realisation.”