When Deng Xiaoping said that ‘to get rich is glorious’ under a Socialism with Chinese characteristics, a Touch of Sin centers on four intertwined but subtly linked vignettes which depict how the less fortunate is driven to violence by the unfairness in the new capitalist China. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter at Cannes, Jia said he wanted to bring changes to the contemporary China by ‘letting everyone see that with that belief in the free spirit, we can tell stories that help propel society forward.’

 

The movie opens when a Shanxi miner, Dahai, gets a tongue-lashing for a genuine outrage: the village chief has become rich by selling the collective state-owned coal mine. He challenges the power to pay back the dividends but is badly beaten up. While orthodox method fails him, he goes on a vengeful killing. In the second story, set around Chongqing, a migrant worker returns home where his family is afraid of him.  He is like a capitalist bounty killer making a living by killing the rich. The third vignette is about a long-suffering woman, tired of warding off the sexual advances of clients who think that money can buy everything, is pushed into violence. The last story focuses on the downward path of a rural youth ill equipped to advance himself in the new age of Chinese Industrial boom. Suffering from an unrequited love and family’s debt, his return to an assembly line worker makes him so despondent that he ends his life by jumping off the dorm balcony.

 

After Dahai denounces the local corruption by mine owner, he is beaten up and sent to hospital. He’s tossed a sweetening wad of money in hospital for silence. This reflects how rich people in China think that money can solve everything. In the third story, the rich client tries to molest Xiao Yu and says, ‘I have money! I have money!’ has once again highlighted the corrupted mind of how Chinese are deluded that money can cover up the dirty things they did. It reminds me of a news of a six-year-old boy from Shanxi, who got killed for his livers. There’s an entrenched corruption in managing organ trafficking and the victims’ families were paid to keep silent.

 

Humiliated and thwarted, Dahai starts a solitary campaign and vows, ‘I can be more evil than the village chief’. His massacre is the realization of Mao’s proverb, ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’. It reveals that China’s turn to capitalism is backed by contradiction and corruption, which come with the territory of moneymaking. People become more money-driven and are bribed for personal wealth that upends traditional norms. An economic reform brings ‘rampant corruption, inequality of wealth between winners and losers’ (Grant, 2009).

In a report of YaleGlobal, two eminent Chinese scholars suggested that 80 percent of the Chinese government officials were corrupt, and the situation has not improved. Liu Shengjun, a famous economist and key opinion leader on Weibo, has called this ‘crony capitalism’ (Hu, 2015), where the existing sociopolitical crises are escalated by entrenched monopoly and corruption. The market-oriented economic transition has provided plenty of incentives and opportunities for corrupt practices (He, 2000), when some people are allowed to become independent in control of their own interest. The whole idea of capitalism is a system based on its own theory of winners, driving the capitalists to become more grasping and exploit money from the poor.

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The working class cannot benefit from the system because of the super-exploitation labour force. The workers are paid low and forced to work for long hours.  Xiao Hui, the protagonist of the last story, needs to pay for the injury of his fellow. Workers’ health and safety are not protected. Plus, the hukou system exacerbates the exploitation of migrant workers (Fan, 2014). This is clearly shown in the movie when Xiao Hui cannot get his first wage since he isn’t a formal worker. Workers with rural hukou cannot share services and social welfare. Worse still, in capitalism, bourgeoisie is the one who has power, therefore, no matter how hard the working class is, their upward social mobility is stymied. In his last job at a Taiwanese-owned factory, which is a reference to Foxconn that produces electronic products, Xiao Hui is spiraling into a sense of emptiness between a regimented assembly-line job and an overcrowded high-rise factory dorm. The whole scene is so real to explain why 18 Foxconn’s workers committed suicide in 2010.

 

The violence of the capitalism is the exploitation of the working class. When the protagonists from each story cannot find an intellectual way to express themselves against the powerful forces, violence becomes a mode of liberation. Dahai carries out violence to fight against the unjust social system of corruption; Unable to find self-wroth in society, Zhou San resorts to violence against the rich when he shoots the wealthy lady coming out of the bank.  Xiao Yu is a representation of women’s oppression in a capitalist society. Women are downplayed when people think that money can lure them to give a blowjob. Xiao Yu eventually kills the client to reclaim her dignity. Xiao Hui is the most miserable — a capitalist society has pushed a young, sweet-faced youngster to self-destruction. He is killed by the rigid fate: exploited worker, debt and despair.

 

Violence is a way to cope with the dehumanizing effects of unbridled capitalism where the majority has been exploited. The four characters are anti-heroes who nurse a seething grudge against the drips that trickle down from the top 5%. It is a film of income inequality, unjust social system, corruption, exploitation and an ultraviolent sense of every man for himself, which are the products of a capitalist system. No good deed goes unexploited, meaning that good people are few and far between; the rich is born to be rich and the poor remains poor.

 

The meaning of Chinese title, ‘天注定’ (doomed to fate)  is different from ‘A Touch of Sin’, but they can be related. As the old Chinese curse has it: ‘May you live in interesting times,’ people who are born in the new China have a fix fate. If you are born a worker, you are forever a worker. To tempt fate, it’s a kind of playing-God practice; you need to be tainted by a touch of sin: violence.