August 2025
The Fengyang Cultural Brigade turned All Star Rock’n Break-Dance Electronic Band scrambles up a hill to see a train. The train is offscreen, but we hear it coming. We are made to share our young characters’ anticipation for it. The train finally appears on the right of the frame, blowing its whistle. Its noisy, industrial rhythm dominates the scene. In the next shot, the film’s main character, Cui Mingliang (Wang Hongwei), reaches the tracks, coming toward the camera while the train charges on behind us. Zhong Ping (Yang Tianyi) and Zhang Jun (Liang Jingdong) join him, shouting and carrying on. The three of them stand together in the foreground, with the rest of the band completing the composition behind them. They watch as they catch their breath, exhilarated and left behind.
25 years ago, Platform announced Jia Zhangke as the great chronicler of the People’s Republic of China’s modernization and development period known as Reform and Opening Up. Platform is a coming of age story that follows members of the provincial Fengyang Cultural Brigade amidst the People’s Republic’s post-socialist transformation during the 1980s that reaches the heights of a national epic. While the PRC’s modernization and marketization policies have been encouraged and celebrated in the West as the answer to a stalled or failed socialist project, Platform shows the promise and disillusionment of China's “economic miracle” from the margins.
Jia Zhangke has been lauded for a patient, controlled, naturalistic style that borders on documentary. Non-actors speak the local dialect and are filmed on location with minimal artificial lighting. Scenes generally use long and medium shots (there is not a single closeup across Jia Zhangke’s first nine feature films), a mostly still camera, diegetic music, and stage performances. But to limit Jia Zhangke or Platform to docu-realism is a disservice. Sophisticated compositions, jump cuts, match cuts, sound effects, asynchronous sound, and interplay between diegetic and nondiegetic music disrupt the film’s apparent naturalism. As Jia Zhangke told Senses of Cinema in 2001, he sees “what he wants to see.”[1] In Platform, we do not see an objective China; we see a China that Jia Zhangke wants to show us, taking liberties where he sees fit, highlighting and inventing as he documents. The result is a patient and sophisticated style that produces rich, layered scenes and motifs open to multiple readings that are appropriate to the complex experiences of China’s ‘80s generation.
Jia Zhangke’s focus on everyday characters and their circumstances has been a hallmark of his work. This preference for a humanistic cinema, a universal concern for the struggles and wellbeing of everyday people, has allowed his work to deliver an emotional depth that has connected with global audiences. It would appear that Jia Zhangke’s humanism is also the reason he has successfully crossed over from the underground to mainstream Chinese cinema without artistic compromise with his 2004 film The World. Jia Zhangke’s first three films, Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000), Unknown Pleasures (2002) were not permitted official distribution in China. Jia Zhangke’s latest dramatic film Caught by the Tides (2024) recently appeared in select theaters in the United States.[2]
While art house openness and humanistic commitments have their merits and produce an effective and sympathetic depiction of the lower classes, Platform does not provide a social or political analysis. The film shows how characters act and make decisions — just not as they please — in a changing China. While politics happens far from the film’s characters, history is what the characters immediately experience. In other words, we see the effects of determining social structures instead of their causes. Since audiences are not given any exposition or framing beyond the coming of age story presented and the characters’ immediate concerns and disappointments, viewers are given space to insert their limited, confused, or biased understandings of China and its complex history as they interpret the film. Here, we see the double-edge sword of a humanistic film that focuses on the lower classes: a sympathetic but ultimately depoliticized film that does not explicitly state the causes of peoples’ misfortune or challenge the audience's preconceived notions. Instead, audiences are left to muse on the cause of the difficulties that Platform’s characters encounter to produce their readings. With an inadequate understanding of China’s history, audiences are likely to fall back on familiar talking points: the brutality of socialism, totalitarianism, and Communist rule; insufficient liberalization and democratic structures; the light of capitalist development and shadows of constrained and otherwise perverted marketization.
Today, the intense rivalry between the US and China has raised the stakes for grasping Chinese history and cultural objects. Informed approaches have the power to break prejudices and propaganda and open more possibilities for international solidarity. In Platform, the hardships that the film’s characters encounter are not the perils of a foreign communist society. Instead, we see the familiar injustices of patriarchy and the routine disasters of an emerging market economy. In Platform, we find our “big world” in Jia Zhangke’s provincial home.
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Set in Fenyang County, Shanxi Province in the North of China between the years 1979 and 1990, Platform puts us at the beginning of China’s Reform and Opening up, or post-socialist period. The film opens with a four shot, eight minute sequence cut between opening credits, a dedication, and the title card that immediately establishes the film’s epic subject, coming of age story, film style, and humanistic concerns. First, with the camera fixed and horizon low, a group of working men stand outside a rural theater. The men stuff the bottom third of the frame, while a large poster looms above them in the background (which is not subtitled for English-speaking audiences) that says: “Diagram for New Rural Development.”[3] One could read these workers as a tableau of socialist China’s old working class. But after a dedication to Jia Zhangke’s father, these workers appear instead to signify Jia Zhangke’s warm and loving acknowledgement of the previous generation. In this scene, we see how closely Jia Zhangke skirts the line between political, humanist, and personally emotive imagery, a line he straddles throughout the film’s runtime.
The “Diagram for New Rural Development” refers to a policy that replaced rural communes with a household responsibility system. The scholarly work of Rebecca Karl, Ralf Ruckus, and Lin Chun converge on the same story of what happened in China after the death of Mao. With 80% of the population in the countryside, voluntary and forced de-collectivization was the first step toward a broader de-Maoification of the country. Implemented in the late 1970s by Deng Xiaoping, who took control of China after the death of Mao, the household responsibility system saw villages retain ownership of land but gave individuals and families new rights to lease the land for farming.[4] Crops were still sold to the state at set prices according to a contract quota system, but extra crops could now be sold on market for a private profit. This policy change enabled some innovations and boosted the agrarian economy until 1984.[5] Unfortunately, household responsibility did not come without costs. As Lin Chun points out, replacing communes with “atomized households” saw a decline in public utilities, infrastructure, schools, and clinics. “The evaporation of a nearly universal public health network, rudimentary as it was, exemplified this loss.”[6]
The opening sequence of the film continues with the Fenyang Cultural Brigade performing a play called “The Train to Shaoshan.” Shaoshan is the birthplace of Mao and an important site for socialist China. Across these first two scenes, the diagram and the play form a juxtaposition: Deng’s official, imposing diagram stands unacknowledged in the background against the humble and quaint Maoist stage performance watched by an audience.
The final scene in the sequence establishes the train as a complex motif that recurs through the film. On the Cultural Brigade’s bus, the troupe leader scolds Cui Mingliang for tardiness and his poor train sounds during the play. Cui Mingliang defends himself by saying he’s never taken a train. The bus gets going and the troupe make playful train sounds as they ride in the dark. Finally, the title card cements the train motif. The film takes its title from a pop song, Liu’s “Zhantai” [Platform], which plays during the scene when the band rushes to see the train.
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Platform’s coming-of-age story centers on four young people who form two couples: Cui Mingliang and Yin Ruijan (Zhao Tao); and Zhang Jun (Liang Jingdong) and Zhong Ping (Yang Tianyi). Cui Mingliang and Zhang Jun wear bell-bottoms, the latest fad. Immediately we see a generational divide that corresponds with the Reform and Opening Up period. Cui Mingliang’s mother makes his bell-bottoms for him; his father, a laborer, asks him if he can work and squat in them, accusing him of acting like a capitalist. Cui Mingliang and Yin Ruijan meet discreetly but are unable to get together romantically. Yin Ruijan’s father, a local official, thinks Cui Mingliang is a hooligan who comes from a bad family; Yin Ruijan does not believe they are made for one another. Meanwhile, Zhang Jun and Zhong Ping are more daring. Zhong Ping gets a perm at Zhang Jun’s request, smokes in private, and does her eyebrows to look “chic.”
Through the first 28 shots that comprise the first fifth of the film, the camera is stationary. Beginning with the 29th shot, the camera comes to life with a slight handheld wobble. The introduction of minor handheld movements and panning seems to primarily correspond with moments of romantic and cultural change brought by the ‘80s generation. It’s as if the stationary shots used in the modest rural theater and the first half hour of the film cannot adequately depict the new ideas, feelings, and expressions of the young characters. We see examples of this when the camera pans to the right to follow Zhang Jun walking with a girl. The girl exits, and the camera continues to pan and then moves alongside Zhang Jun as he meets Zhong Ping, who accuses him of chasing girls. The camera seems fixed on Zhang Jun; it pans to keep him in frame, even though this means Zhong Ping speaks from offscreen. Zhang Jun moves back toward her, and then there is a switch. The camera seems to pan with Zhong Ping, then with both characters as they walk together and begin to form a couple. Far from a simple docu-realist style, here we see meticulous and expressive camera movement and blocking that are the hallmarks of an auteur.
The connection between camera movement and new experiences of the ‘80s generation appears in several more scenes: the camera pans again to follow a truck with the Cultural Brigade inside loudly singing a parody of a song about the future belonging to the ‘80s generation from the previous scene. Following a long stationary scene where the troupe leader takes the group to task for their irreverent song and asks Mingliang to recite Zhou Enlai’s Four Modernizations, the camera wobbles slightly before panning to follow Jun and Ping into a beauty shop. Inside the shop, the camera pans as they sit while Ping gets her hair done. Then, in the next two scenes, the camera pans to follow Ping as she walks into a troupe meeting with her new hairdo. The camera pans again as she dances the flamenco in a red dress with a flower in her mouth at a troupe rehearsal.
When Jun returns from visiting Canton and seeing the “big world” as he calls it, he returns in fresh clothes with a tape recorder and new music. This leads to a lively dance party in which the camera pans back and forth to follow the characters while George Lam’s disco hit “Ghengis Khan” plays. In Zhangke films, subtitled lyrics often suggest attitudes and internal feelings of characters, as well as themes of the larger work. In this scene, the subtitled lyrics say:
The sandstorm rages but even so we sing
Free and carefree, among friends
…We are joy and light
Gheng, Gheng, Ghengis Khan
We can read the “sandstorm” as China’s transformation and the “we” as the young characters making their way in the world. But more importantly, with this use of “Genius Khan,” we see a move away from a tradition of ideological and didactic art, as the pop song references a historical figure that has nothing to do with socialism or the Chinese Communist Party.
Platform’s coming-of-age story is elevated to the heights of a national epic through interpersonal drama set against broad social change. In one key sequence that illustrates the film’s incredible economy and complexity, Zhong Ping is pregnant and she and Zhang Jun are unsure what to do. In the next scene, Zhong Ping sits with Zhang Jun and the troupe leader, who explains to an offscreen Cui Mingliang that he was one of the “young urban intellectuals” sent to the countryside. The troupe leader is referring to the end of the creative period of the Cultural Revolution, when, in 1969, Mao ordered thousands of unruly youth to the countryside to work.[7] It becomes clear that the four of them are in a hospital so Zhong Ping can get an abortion. After Zhong Ping and Zhan Jun follow a doctor around the corner, Cui Mingliang asks the troupe leader to explain privatization to him. The intellectual troupe leader says: “Privatizing is very simple. What was public becomes private when you buy it. It’s all yours: the actors, equipment, everything.” The doctor returns complaining that Zhong Ping won’t go through with the abortion. “What do you want? You want to shame us?” Zhan Jun asks Zhong Ping. Zhong Ping slaps him before going into the operating room. The scene concludes with the three men standing in the hallway as audio from a loudspeaker is imposed over the scene: the sounds of a rally celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party and the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Here we feel tremendous sympathy for Zhong Ping as we see three groups of men invoked — her peers, local authority figures in the troupe leader and doctor, and a national authority figure in Deng Xiaoping himself — that enforce conservative, patriarchal attitudes that limit her autonomy. Meanwhile, the film has also introduced privatization, which will become a key plot point in the story that dramatizes a major transformative force in the Reform and Opening Up period.
Privatization transforms the Cultural Brigade and its performances. With the state’s withdrawn support for the Cultural Brigade, troupe member Song buys the organization. He does this reluctantly to the troupe’s applause; they believe they are saved. The fate of the Peasant Cultural Brigade gestures to the future of Chinese people under new economic policies. Over the next few years within the film, Song will wear nicer clothes than everyone else. He will cease to do any driving, unloading of equipment, or performing. He will yell at and berate his employees to wake up, get to work, and stop loafing around. As the All Star Rock’n Break-Dance Electronic Band, the troupe’s performances change as well, with traditional songs giving way to rock and roll performances and eventually women dancing along the side of a road.
When Song’s company begins to travel, Yin Ruijan is split from her friends. She stays behind in Fenyang because her father is sick and goes on to become a local official. After Zhang Jun and Zhong Ping get in trouble with the law because of their illegal relationship, Zhong Ping runs away. We never see or hear from her again. Eventually, Yin Ruijan returns to the screen. She works alone at night in an office, listening to the radio. She puts her papers down and, using most of the room, dances gracefully, with fluid, deliberate, and emotional arm movements, turns, and pauses. Perhaps she wishes she had left with the troupe to continue working as an artist or chosen Cui Mingliang as a romantic partner. Perhaps this is a moment of everyday catharsis.
Yin Ruijan’s dance contrasts with the music and dancing associated with the All Star Rock’n Break-Dance Electronic Band. In one scene toward the end of the film, Song and two beautiful women he employs visit a local official to get permission to put on a few shows. Song suggests his dancers give a preview of the show. He asks the officials if they would like to see “something romantic or something a little hotter?” After Song and the women realize they’ve been tricked and that the official they needed to see was not there, the women seem unhappy with what they were asked to do. To this, Song tells them: “One must suffer in order to eat. It's better than breaking a leg. Don’t sulk.” In the last scene with the Brigade turned Break-Dance Electronic Band, the same two women dance on the bed of a truck by the side of a road to the pop song “Under the Street Lamp.” Their synchronized, upbeat dancing is similar to the “hotter” dance they performed in the office, featuring popular dance moves with clapping, pointing, and shoulder shimmies. Song looks on as trucks pass and subtitled lyrics appear on screen. The lyrics seem to summarize Zhong Ping’s disappearance, the women dancing in Song’s show, and perhaps the conditions of China’s labor market:
Under a street lamp
A girl is crying
Where is she from?
She’s crying pathetically
Who has ditched her?
Where can she go?
In the last scene in which characters dance or hear music, we have another dance party. Again, the camera pans back and forth, following the characters as they move, drink, and party. Lyricless dance music plays. We have reached the end of a line. While socialist songs have given way to carefree pop music about other historical figures, now history, didacticism, and even words have disappeared entirely. With music free from politics and history, the characters are now free to move and enjoy themselves. The problem is that this scene is less lively and energetic than the first “Ghengis Khan” dance party. The question is whether this kind of lyricless and individualized enjoyment can be read as joy, or if now it is a means of social reproduction, a way to blow off steam to continue touring and working.
At the end Platform, match cuts and asynchronous, non-diegetic sound disrupt the film’s naturalism to produce a rich and contradictory ending. While the pace of the movie has been slow, the movements of the ending seem to happen quickly. It is necessary to review them more closely to make sense of them.
Cui Mingliang returns home to Fenyang. Despite his journey, he has ended up in the place he began. He learns from his mother that his father has opened a new business and his parents are estranged. Cui Mingliang reconnects with Yin Ruijan. He goes to visit his father. The camera pans to follow Cui Mingliang cross a street wearing a red sweater and gray suit. Inside his father’s shop, the camera continues to pan with Cui Mingliang, but his father isn’t there. He lights a cigarette and walks out the door. There is a match cut to a patio, except now we are in a different place entirely. Cui Mingliang steps out, now dressed in a blue sweater, and takes a drag from his cigarette. The camera is fixed. An asynchronous audio scene plays of a woman and man talking, and in a masterful and surprising second match cut, Cui Mingliang naps in a green chair in the corner of an apartment. The camera is fixed and will not move for the rest of the film. Cui Mingliang’s hair has changed and his glasses are gone. He wears the red sweater and the gray suit, cigarette burning between his fingers. Yin Ruijan stands outside, holding a baby, presumably their child, and comes inside as the same asynchronous audio continues to play:
“I’d like to live by the sea. I’d so much like to see the sky, to hear the sound of the waves,” a woman’s voice says. As she does, we can hear a train and its whistle in the background of the scene. “Pack your bags,” a man replies. “I’ll wait for you,” the woman says.
We can link this audio scene with the changes in music discussed above. If in the previous scene with a radio, we have a dance track with no lyrics, now we have dialogue but no music at all. This dialogue connects thematically with the lyrics of Liu’s “Zhantai”:
An interminable railway platform
An endless wait
…A lonely wait
My love is always about to leave
No love awaits me upon arrival.
My heart lives on expectations
On eternal expectations.
Romantic love, longing, and waiting are the shared themes between the dialogue and Liu’s lyrics. One could read Liu’s lyrics as a continuation of the dialogue: the woman who says she will wait for her partner could be on the platform waiting endlessly. Whether we can accept that reading or not, this audio will rhyme and contrast with what comes next while sharpening the question about the capacity of the family.
Cui Mingliang continues to nap in the corner as the asynchronous dialogue ends. Yin Ruijan boils water, bounces the child as it screeches happily. The radio sound fades out. We hear the sounds of the apartment and the sounds of children playing outside. Beneath this audio is another sound, a non-diegetic track, the faint rumbling of a train. Yin Ruijan steps outside, and when she comes back in, a new sound builds, a piercing, whining, crescendo. A whistle. The sound of what seems to be an oncoming train. Yin Ruijan continues to play with the child while Cui Mingliang shifts, still asleep in his chair. With the train at its loudest, the film cuts to black. We continue to hear Yin Ruijan play with the baby and the train sound. This audio lasts for another 8 seconds before the sounds in the apartment and the train fade out and the credits roll.
Here we see image and sound decoupled while combined diegetic and non-diegetic audio juxtaposes naturalistic domesticity with symbolic modernization. The screeching of the train gives the impression one is watching a horror film as Yin Ruijan plays with her child. While Yin Ruijan seems joyful, Cui Mingliang’s napping and burning cigarette does not suggest a happy home. On the other hand, he could just be taking a nap. Nevertheless, this scene contrasts sharply with the romantic audio scene. Even though the realism and naturalism of Platform’s ending is undermined by its editing and audio effects, the film delivers a realistic ending that contrasts with the romantic scene’s sentimental romantic dialogue, characters’ longing, and stirring music. Maybe this ending, while not expressed through the conventions of realism, is realistically as good as it gets for these characters.
This reading seems supported by the fact that the opening and closing credits of Platform are prefaced by train sounds. As we have seen in the opening, it is the young Cultural Brigade making playful train sounds in the dark on their tour bus. In the end, a non-diegetic train sound is imposed on a fixed domestic scene from the town in which the tour bus departs. If the troupe’s train sounds at the start of the film signaled the beginning of a journey, then the train sounds at the close of the film signal an end. We have come full circle and are back where we started from: the form of the film matches Cui Mingliang’s coming of age story, which may or may not stand in for the story of the whole 80s generation in China.
While the film comes full circle, there have also been important advancements. At the beginning of the film, familial and personal attitudes were such that Yin Ruijan and Cui Mingliang could not be together. On a formalistic level, fixed stationary shots gave way to camera movement. Despite the circuitous path of the characters and film, there has been progress. Characters have grown and formed a new family. What is unsettling about the ending is that the explosion of formal techniques – perhaps reflecting the magnitude of transformation in China – results in another fixed and stationary shot before fading to black. This suggests that despite all of the cultural, political, and social change, the characters are fixed, stuck, trapped once again in a new paradigm. It is difficult to resist seeing this coupling and family in Lin Chun’s terms: the emergence of the “atomized household.” Even if we resist importing critical discussions of Chinese history, the final seconds of black screen and train sounds invite us to consider what we have seen, this circuitous path to a romantic relationship and family life. The question is whether this progress, embodied in this coupling, is enough. Can romantic love and family life sustain us in post-socialist China? Can it sustain any of us caught within the market economy, this interminable platform?