Up the Yangtze: a careful representation of Chinese peasantry.

Throughout the duration of the film Up the Yangtze, I was overwhelmed with Cheng's careful attention to  his representation of Cindy's family, and the other members of their economic class. Carefully, Cheng's interview with these people developed a unified voice for those whose stories are usually never heard, or are often oppressed by their economic standing. Here we uncover in this film, that those whose lives are most immediately and deeply affected by the Chinese government's dam project are those whose voices are not heard, their woes shrugged off for the greater good of the country.


If Cheng had not approached his work in this documentary carefully enough he could have falsely  and mistakingly represented these people in the trope the western world associates with the chinese peasant. A trope all to loudly represented in the comic "The Blue Lotus" by Tin-tin's author Hergé. This comic series has been sited as a good place to expose the ins and outs of post colonial racism, in this specific comic the trope of chinese peasant appears only as: an impoverished man with deeply cut cheek bones, ribs that stick out, always running barefoot in the streets, making his money by transporting western tourists.

This trope of "The Blue Lotus" is connected in the role Cindy is asked to play on the tour boat, but instead of representing Cindy as another basic representative of chinese peasantry, Cheng allows us to understand the troubles of the class of people she and her family represent by inviting us directly into their home. As if answering Johnson's call Cheng does not settle for the "'dog-like', 'fawn-like'"(Johnson 388) basic representation of a people and allows the story to unfold how we understand Cindy's position. A girl forced into working a cruise boat in an effort to help her family, at the price of submitting herself constantly to an imperial regime. She is taught to wear make-up, smile constantly, and never discuss politics in order to make more tips. As Burke to clearly explains, "A can feel himself identified with B, or he can think of himself as disassociated from B" (Burke 49). Cheng builds on this binary first allowing us to see for ourselves the deplorable poverty Cindy and her family live, completely separated and juxtaposed from the grandeur of the cruise ship. And then he asks his audience to chose who to identify with, the lower classes he interviews or the Tin-tin like character, the westerner who turns in Jerry for asking for a tip, the westerner who wishes to visit a country and be guided blindly through so they may leave believing "Everyone is Happy. "