Xiao Zhao, the 19 years old subject of Haibin Du's documentary “A Young Patriot,” comes from one of the rural families skipped by the Chinese economic miracle. He and his family live in an old nondescript house in a small town. He doesn't fare well in school, making entering a good university and escaping the poverty of his family close to nil. And despite all of that, in the three years Du follows him with his camera, the young man is an ardent anti-Japanese nationalist. He quotes Mao, sings patriotic songs, even wears camouflage clothes. He even goes as far as to fetishize joining the army and going at war to defend his motherland, though in reality he is a pseudo-intellectual who loves photography. A motherland that has and probably never will do anything for him.
A Young Patriot is streaming on CathayPlay
Towards the middle of the documentary, Xiao, now a photography student at what seems like a third-rate provincial university, goes with a group of classmates to teach at a small minority village. The group takes a train and a van, on top of that walks up a dirt road and crosses a dangerous bridge to finally reach their destination. They are warmly welcomed there, treated to a meal and drinks, having fun, though barely able to communicate with their non-putonghua speaking hosts. Next day, they start teaching the numerous children living there and in the vicinities. Some try to teach maths and other topics, while Xiao focuses on the language, and more importantly for him – on the anthem. He recites it to them, asking them to repeat after him until they manage to do it perfectly. As a reward, or maybe an inspiration, it is uncertain, he buys them a big Chinese flag and makes them stand still while he hoists it. His pride in what he has done, teaching the children the dominant language and making them feel “Chinese” and “modern” as opposed to “minority” and “primitive”, is palpable.
This somewhat short short segment of the otherwise long, but never boring movie shows how the Chinese government and its propaganda manage to work. On the one hand, they completely brainwash and fanaticize the youth, or at least parts of it, so, believing it does something good for the motherland, it helps for the destruction of traditional ways of life of non-Han members of the country, as well as the deaths of their languages. On the other hand, it puts the minorities in such a bad position, that they have no choice but to willingly divest of their culture, language, and identity, so as to fit the Han dominated society and make money. A society that does not want them, as we can see from the condescending and discriminatory manner in which Xiao's classmates act. All this makes this part of “A Young Patriot” one of the most difficult to watch depictions of cultural and linguistic assimilation in recent history.
The critique of destruction for the sake of economic modernization becomes even more poignant when the same government that Xiao praises the entire runtime of the documentary decides to destroy his grandparents' and parents' houses. Then, instead of realizing the ridiculousness of his extreme fervor for an impersonal and dehumanizing regime, the young man just tries to find justifications for what it does to his family. He puts the blame on a slew of things, but never on the system itself. Precisely in this schizophrenic state of extreme belief coupled with bitterness and hatred lies the greatest discovery of Du's three year-long observation of the young patriot. After all, he has the privilege of not having to live through the atrocities the previous generations did. Instead, he was fed with the sugarcoated official narratives about them, coupled with relative material wellbeing and economic prosperity. But in the end, both his life as that of almost everyone else in his country is valueless in the eyes of the system.
