Youth (Spring)—the first installment of Wang Bing’s larger project Spring—is a laborious film, in terms not only of its mammoth runtime of 212 minutes, but also of its subject matter: Chinese workshop labor. Wang has been charting how the Chinese economy affects people’s lives since his colossal first feature West of the Tracks in 2003. He got the idea for Spring after talking to some of the migrants he filmed in 2016’s Bitter Money, an aptly titled portrait of Chinese couples’ relationships gone sour due to poor economic conditions. Youth (Spring) continues Wang’s predilection for creating an account of larger communities through smaller portraits of individuals.
Divided into 12 parts, Youth (Spring) transports us into the lives of young migrant garment workers in China. We never hang onto any one protagonist in particular. More specifically, the film focuses on the Zhili region on the Yangtze Delta basin, just outside Shanghai (one of the richest cities in China), which is best known for producing the bulk of children’s clothing in China. China has the largest textile industry in the world, and the Zhili region is just one small part of that. Young people from all over more rural parts of China temporarily move to the Zhili region in the spring to work in the approximately 20,000 workshops there, in order to save money for their futures, and return home for the winter.
The Zhili region is unique for many reasons, one being the garment workers’ slightly higher levels of freedom than in other regions; we watch the young men and women tease, play, argue, fall in love, and fight for higher wages from their workshop managers. The workshops in the Zhili region are not owned by the state, meaning fewer workers and more independence. The workers are paid in cash every six months, and based on the amount of items that they make, so there is no way to know how much cash flow is coming in. The young men and women work from 8 AM to 11 PM, sometimes with no breaks and no days off.
Unless a lot of people suddenly become more invested in where our clothes come from and the everyday minutiae of the lives of the people who spend their days making endless piles of stuff, Youth (Spring) is not destined to be the blockbuster of the summer. Of course, that was never Wang’s intention. One could deride Youth (Spring) as overly repetitive—seemingly endless—and that would be completely missing the point: Youth (Spring) is possibly the most significant document of Chinese garment workers ever created. Day in and day out, the workers repeat the same motion thousands of times, with only the sewing machines’ hum to listen to (unless they bring their own music, which they sometimes do). Wang has successfully captured the lives of people who have never been on screen before, and aren’t allowed to see their own film.