Female Liberation in "出走的决心" ("Like a Rolling Stone")

The new movie "Like a Rolling Stone" reflects the tectonic shifts underway in Chinese society.

The biggest movie in China this fall is “Like a Rolling Stone,” a powerful and controversial film that launches a direct assault on the traditional role of women in Chinese society.

Since its release, the movie has set off an incessant firestorm on Chinese social media. The film’s financial success and social impact — not to mention the fact that it was allowed to be shown in theaters at all — speak to the major shifts that are underway in China. Reflecting on the evolution of Chinese society helps us realize that, contrary to what we hear from Western media, China’s integration with the outside world has contributed to substantial changes in China.

Dreams Deferred, But Not Forever

Based on a true story, “Like a Rolling Stone” follows a woman who, at various points in life, is held back from pursuing her dreams. As a teenager, this ambitious, bright-eyed girl from a small village in central China is struck with wanderlust. Her friends all expect her to travel far and wide; the possibilities seem endless.

Disaster strikes in the form of familial obligations and social expectations. Even though she is a great student, her parents don’t allow her to take the university entrance examination. Instead, they force her to begin working straightaway in order to provide money for the family — or, more specifically, for her little brother’s education. She insists that she could earn much more money for the family if she attended university, but her parents don’t think higher education is suitable for a girl.

Shortly after entering the workforce, she abruptly gets married, disregarding all the red flags and her parents’ warnings, primarily to escape from her suffocating family. But it doesn’t take long for her to realize that she merely traded one prison for another. Her husband turns out to be a miserly, selfish, lazy, violent, and chaevanuastic asshole of the highest order.

As the years go by, she often considers getting a divorce, but her parents refuse to support her, saying they wouldn’t let her move back home if she got divorced. In a classic case of victim blaming, her father grumbles that she never should have married that man in the first place, and her mother pleads with her to endure her husband’s behavior. The only person who encourages her to get divorced is her daughter, who even as a young girl resents her mother for being too weak to stand up for herself. The scene in which her adolescent daughter confronts her for being “cowardly” is tough to watch.

Several years later, the protagonist crosses paths with a group of travelers who have exited the conventional workplace to embark on an endless road trip throughout China. She is inspired by these itinerant journeymen and yearns to follow in their footsteps. Disregarding the criticisms of those around her, she persists in learning to drive and getting a driver’s license. After mustering the funds needed for the down payment on a car loan, she finally has everything she needs to follow her childhood dreams.

But once again, family obligations get in the way. Her adult daughter, after giving birth to twin boys, wants her mother to stick around to help raise the kids. The protagonist agrees to stay until her grandkids start kindergarten; yet again, her dreams are deferred. But right when the kids start kindergarten, her daughter gets a new job and once again asks her mother to stick around.

This time, the protagonist finally stands up for herself. In a fit of righteous rage, she storms out of her house during the middle of the Covid pandemic and drives off into the night. When stopping for gas, she asks the attendant at the gas station whether all the roads are closed. (Context: during the pandemic, many roads in China were closed, and checkpoints were erected to prevent travel in and out of areas with high numbers of infections.) But the attendant shares an open secret, one laced with symbolic significance that runs much deeper than its surface meaning: It’s impossible [for the authorities] to block all the roads. There are roads in the mountains and in the countryside; there’s always a road.

The rest of the movie shows how the protagonist — or, more to the point, the person who this movie is based on — is living today. She is driving around China, taking in the beautiful sights; rendezvousing with fellow travelers with whom she trades recipes, travel tips, and life wisdom; and live-streaming on social media, where she has earned a small fortune.

At one point, her miserable and pathetic husband calls her to complain that he was charged a few bucks because his ETC (a toll collection device, similar to an E-ZPass) was still in her car. She had been on the road for months, and he had never called once; this is really what finally gave him the gumption to call? So she hangs up the phone, transfers him the money he was charged, rips the ETC off the dashboard, and hurls it off the mountain she was standing on. The golden sun rises in front of her as she laughs euphorically and smiles resplendently. Tears of joy stream down her face as she realizes she is free.

Female Liberation

The movie’s central theme is the notion that women can find meaning and happiness outside of marriage and family life. By traditional measures, the protagonist should have been content: she is married to a man with a stable job, she has two grandsons, and she “married up” by mating with a man from the city. But these material and social indicators of success do not fill the void in her heart. Traditional feminine social roles are unable to satisfy her quest for meaning and dignity.

This movie was released only a few months after “热辣滚烫” (known in English as “You Only Live Once”), a movie about a woman who embarks on a journey of fitness and self-discovery. In it, the protagonist, who at the outset is extremely obese and lethargic, feels unloved by her family and friends. She starts boxing in her free time, initially to get close to an attractive boxing coach, but eventually discards the weak-willed coach and doubles down on her sport in pursuit of a personalized sense of self-worth. Both movies celebrate women who, after tapping into inner reserves of strength, change their lives by being brave enough to buck social norms. Both movies were astronomically successful at the box office, lauded by social liberals, and fiercely derided by social conservatives.

A Nuanced Portrait of Men

A key aspect of “Like a Rolling Stone” is its nuanced portrayal of male characters. By avoiding the pitfall of depicting all male characters as sexist jerks, the movie soars above the flawed binary which pits men against women. Yes, the protagonist’s husband epitomizes chauvinism, but he is juxtaposed with the protagonist’s son-in-law, who is generous and delicately sensitive to his wife while also retaining a healthy sense of masculinity.

The social discourse surrounding feminism in China — and in East Asia, more broadly — is far more polarizing than in the West. As a Wisconsinite, I’m well aware that the word “feminism” is often greeted with sarcastic derision and even outright hostility, but I also recognize and belong to the sizable cohort of liberal-minded men who identify and strive to behave as feminists and allies. But in China — even in big, international cities populated with the most open-minded folks in the country — a vast majority of people find the notion that a man could be a feminist absolutely laughable. I’m not just talking about the comments section on social media platforms; those are toxic and polarizing all over the world. Even classroom conversations and friendly dialouge tends to paint the relationship between feminism and traditional values in depressingly simplistic terms, as if men and women are eternal enemies and the incremental progression of women’s rights necessarily comes at the expense of men.

In this context, the importance of portraying a win-win dynamic between men and women cannot be overstated. The callous, unadulterated sexism of the protagonist’s husband is contrasted with the love and support shown by her son-in-law. In this way, the movie exposes the tyranny of sexism while showing male viewers a better alternative.

Gauging Social Progress in China

To get a sense of the pace of social progress in China, we should compare China to its regional and cultural neighbors in East Asia, not to Western countries in North America or Europe. Compared to other East Asian societies rooted in Confucianism, China is not at all an outlier with regard to gender norms. In terms of women in the workplace, China is far more progressive than Japan, in whose corporate world female bosses are practically non-existent. When engaging in negotiations with Japanese companies, foreign companies often enlist male employees instead of their female superiors because females won’t be taken seriously or treated as equals. In South Korea, the relationship between men and women is far more toxic than it is in China. The 4B movement — a movement whose proponents refuse to date, marry, have sex with, or procreate with men — has no equivalent in China.

Of course, two wrongs don’t make a right; sexism in Korea and Japan certainly doesn’t justify sexism in China. But the only way Western observers can accurately gauge social progress in China is to compare it with peer countries with relatively similar cultural heritages. These Confucian societies skipped the Renaissance and dove straight into the Industrial Revolution. They’re prosperous societies, but many of the ethical assumptions we make in the developed West are not taken for granted there. Compared to China, Japan and Korea are depicted by Western media in a much more friendly and progressive light, but that has more to do with the U.S.’s geopolitical interests than anything else.

Western Media’s Simplistic Narratives

Western media has been pushing the narrative that China hasn’t significantly changed over the past few decades. Hawks in Washington, D.C. use this to argue that engagement with China was a complete failure and that the U.S. needs to take more aggressive measures to squeeze China out of the global economic system.

The problem with this framing is how we think about social and political change. If you believe in the outdated theory that economic liberalization inevitably leads to electoral democracy, then indeed, you’re probably confused and disappointed with China. This idea was prevalent amidst the atmosphere of arrogance that pervaded Washington, D.C. in the 1990s. The end of the Cold War seemed to justify American supremecy; the consensus in Washington was that the “end of history” had arrived and that the entire world was on an irreversible path towards democratization along Western lines. I was born in 1992 and unwittingly absorbed these beliefs.

But China charted its own course of economic liberalization without political democratization. Cynics and ideolouges in the West have been predicting China’s collapse for decades because they refuse to accept that their theories were wrong. So yes, if your primary barometer for China’s social change is purely top-down — i.e., if your focus is on China’s methods of choosing its leaders or whether it has become a geopolitical ally of the U.S. — then indeed, you may refuse to acknowledge that China has evolved at all.

But from a grassroots perspective, China has changed dramatically. In the 1990s, a movie like “Like a Rolling Stone” — one which champions a feminist hero, undercuts traditional gender norms, and identifies huge flaws in the culture — wouldn’t have been allowed to be shown in theaters. Similarly, conversations about the Cultural Revolution were completely stifled in the 1990s, but these days, books and movies about that dreadful period of Chinese history are very easy to find. For example, the 1994 film “活着” (“To Live”) was censored when it was first released, and its stars Ge You and Gong Li were briefly banned from making movies, but now the book it’s based on — which I can report, having read the Chinese version, is just as depressing and critical as the movie — is sold in virtually every bookstore in China. Furthermore, a number of other issues, including but not limited to worker safety, air quality, and public safety, are light years ahead of where they were in the 1990s.

The book placed smack dab in the middle of this display at a bookstore in Guangzhou, China is none other than “活着” (“To Live”), a scathing critique of the human cost of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Its prominent position in this bookstore — not to mention its bestseller status — is a testament to the social evolution that has occurred in China over the past few decades.

Social change in China would not have happened to the degree it did without the country’s integration with the outside world. Tourism, academic exchanges, and cross-border trade all put Chinese people into direct contact with foreign cultures and concepts. It’s no surprise that cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen, where relatively high percentages of the population have lived and/or travelled abroad, are vanguards for social progress in China. Even the internet, dampened by the infamous Great Firewall, plays an important role in expanding people’s horizons. Yes, many foreign search engines and social media platforms are technically blocked in China, but this is a mere annoyance, not a formiddable barrier. Anyone who wants to search on Google, doom-scroll through Instagram, or read articles on CNN can easily download a VPN — many of which are free — and explore the world wide web to their heart’s content.

Improvement doesn’t imply perfection. By pointing out that Chinese society has liberalized substantially in recent decades, I’m certainly not arguing that China is a free country by American standards. But the truth is that China today is radically better across virtually every metric than it was a few decades ago. If that weren’t the case, then why, in recent years, have so many Chinese people living in the West decided to return to China?

The Arc of History

The combination of lies and ignorance coming out of Washington, D.C. and Western media is evidence that Western politicians and media executives don’t care whether Chinese society has changed or whether the lives of ordinary Chinese people have improved. This shouldn’t surprise us one bit; most politicians and media executives don’t care whether the lives of Americans are improving either!

Even so, it’s worth reminding ourselves that China has changed dramatically and that it’s still in the process of evolving. Progress isn’t linear, and the arc of history doesn’t automatically bend towards justice, but to deny the transformation that has occurred in China over the past few decades is tantamount to turning a blind eye to hundreds of millions of people. Anyone concerned with the welfare of humanity must contend with the cultural zeitgeist so aptly captured in “Like a Rolling Stone.”