Rundale

Adam Stoneman

Where does democracy start? The Neutrality Roadshow has been hosting conversations in villages, towns, and cities across the country about neutrality, militarism, and the dangers of dismantling the Triple Lock. While the Opposition has called for a plebiscite, this initiative is more radical in cultivating spaces for people to discuss these issues in their own communities.

Sparking a national conversation on these important questions flies in the face of the prevailing twin ideologies of technocracy and managerialism, which construe politics as the dispassionate application of expertise, and place little value in the capacities and perspectives of ordinary people. According to this position, voting for a public representative is the apex of democratic expression, to which plebicites and other mechanisms of direct democracy only interfere. In a recent Dáil debate, Deputy James Geoghan claimed that holding “some makey-uppy vote” on the Triple Lock would be “undemocratic”.

In this state of depleted democracy, understanding and insight into histories and contexts of democratic practices beyond Europe and North America can be revitalising.

A vision from another world, How Yukong Moved the Mountains, is a fascinating record of China in the last years of the Cultural Revolution. Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan’s 1976 documentary is structured in 12 parts and across as many hours, with each episode focussing on a different aspect of communal life. Pioneering a form of ‘cinematic Maoism’, Ivens and Loridan immersed themselves in factories, villages, schools, and communities across China between 1972 and 1974, carrying their camera amongst the people ‘as a fish swims in the sea’, and capturing social relations with an astonishing degree of intimacy and depth.

The documentary takes its title from a Chinese folktale in which a foolish old man named Yukong decides to clear a path with a pick through two mountains that are blocking access to his village. Facing down the ridicule of his neighbours, he replies that when he can do no more, his offspring will take over, and then their offspring, and so on for generations to come. This parable was retold by Mao in 1945 as a story of collective will and determination that could clear away the mountains of imperialism and feudalism.

Unlike Ivens’ earlier war-time documentary on China, The 400 Million (1938), focusing on resistance to the Japanese invasion, or his films The Spanish Earth (1937) and A People Armed (Cuba, 1961), socialist revolution is not presented as heroic military struggle but as the transformation of the everyday lives of working people.

And while today, political documentaries tend to look back for inspiration, such as The Rent Strike (2024), produced by the tenants’ union CATU about the renters’ movement in the early seventies, or 406 Days (2023) and The 8th (2020), which both document more recent struggles, Ivens and Loridan sought inspiration in the present, to record the ongoing process of ‘socialism in construction’.

Yukong emphasises the collective – group discussions over individual interviews, shared struggles over personal narratives. Attesting that ‘women hold up half the sky’, in ‘The Fishing Village’ we meet the 8th March Crew, a collective of women who operate a fishing boat in Shantung. Since the revolution, they work as equals alongside men. The women explain that superstition and patriarchy used to govern their lives: “Before, if a woman stepped on a net strung out on a beach, the net would be abandoned. It was a feudal custom.” While advances have been made in gender equality and family planning, patriarchal attitudes remain, especially amongst the older generations. There are still those “bogged down in ideas from the old society.”

‘Story of a Ball’ depicts a classroom discussion centred on an incident involving a student who kicked a football after the bell was rung, grazing a teacher. The teacher immediately confiscates the ball, before a meeting is called with the class to discuss the matter. “No punishment”, the teacher explains, “We’ll get together to work out the problem. We’ll deal with it politically.”

Initially, Jia Yanming and his friends are defensive, claiming that it was only for “love of the game” that he kicked the ball. In turn, other classmates speak up: “People are masters of their own acts” says one. “Comrades”, the teacher addresses the class, explaining that is important for teachers and students to speak openly and listen to all perspectives. Eventually, Jia comes to accept criticism of his actions, reflecting that he had transgressed to spite his teacher, who had criticised him for forgetting his drinking cup, and to avoid losing face in front of his friends.

“As for me”, the teacher responds, “my repressive attitude and irritability have gotten in the way here.” The meeting is brought to a close, and Jia and the teacher shake hands before leaving.

This depiction of frank, open exchange between adults and children, presents a radical departure from the dynamics of hierarchical school discipline, usually conducted individually and in private, contained in the command “Go to the principal’s office”. I remember an incident in my own schooling in Galway when a basketball I had launched unskilfully during a PE lesson landed with some force on the teacher’s head. Needless to say, his response was less dialectical.

The dialogue in ‘Story of a Ball’ can sound affected at times. The filmmakers interviewed the class and asked them to recount on camera what had happened two days before. Ivens openly defended the use of reconstructions in his documentaries, insisting that his commitment was to documenting social truths, rather than upholding principles of objectivity or neutrality . Ivens likened a documentary to a document or record in court: “Do we demand objectivity from witnesses in court? No, the only demand is that all evidence must be unquestionably true, just like a witness swears on the Bible.”

If the scene is an idealised representation of reality as recounted to a foreigner, it remains revealing for the set of ideals it represented – equality between students and teachers, the practice of rational discussion and exchange of criticism in resolving disputes and disagreements.

Throughout Yukong, we observe collective decision-making through discussion and argument, whether fishing crews deciding the points system that determines their annual salaries, or arguing about where they should fish; workers in a Shanghai pharmacy challenging their manager over the profit motive; or the cast of an opera consulting the public on their new performance – these are the seemingly mundane questions that shape our everyday lives. The leader of a revolutionary brigade committee explains the process of democratic decision-making and the desire to achieve consensus: “the discussion goes from the workers and back to the workers many times”, he explains. “Decisions made unanimously carry more weight”.

These enlightened ideals of public criticism conceal a dark shadow, however. What Mao called “the Marxist-Leninist weapon of criticism and self-criticism” was also capable of inflicting grave injustice and excessive cruelty, unleashing harboured grudges and petty vengeances in the form of bloody purges, denunciations and repression.

Xia Yan, an influential playwright and screenwriter, and an old friend of Ivens, wrote painfully of being removed from his post as vice minister for culture in 1965 and imprisoned for eight years during the cultural revolution. At an emotional reunion after he was released, Xia wrote that Ivens was “well able to imagine my suffering in those years.” Yet Yukong does not bear witness to these aspects of the Cultural Revolution. This ‘social truth’ is absent from the film.

Inevitably, a deeper understanding of China’s modern history must confront the complexities, contradictions, failures as well as successes of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. The question of how a poor, agrarian and feudal society transformed itself, over the course of 76 years, into an advanced industrial country, under a red flag, will never be answered by routine and shallow dismissals of China as ‘totalitarian’.  The destructive aspects of the Cultural Revolution should not efface the elements of popular, democratic transformation.

Ivens and Loridan’s achievement in Yukong is to observe and listen to people taking charge of their own lives.Their film reminds us that socialist democracy is not simply about electing socialist politicians to the Dáil every five years, but about the power of ordinary people to determine their living and working conditions.

In the face of precipitous challenges – the housing crisis, the rise of the organised far-right, and the drive towards militarism – we must remember where democracy starts: in our workplaces, schools, community centres, and GAA halls. In seeking to build and strengthen our own democratic cultures of participation, we would do well to look eastward, beyond Europe, to understand how Yukong moved the mountains.