By Thomas Chen
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July 2024)
Figure 1: marketing poster for The Long Season.
First released in China in April 2023 and now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, The Long Season (漫长的季节) is the most popular and critically praised Chinese miniseries in recent memory. On Douban, China’s near-equivalent of IMDb, it has over 900,000 ratings, with an average score of 9.4 out of 10. What accounts for this stupendous acclaim?
The Long Season has an arresting storyline: complex, tightly written, and unpredictable. It is a double-plotted crime drama set in the fictional steel town of Hualin in northeastern China, deftly interweaving a mysterious hit-and-run incident in 2016—the present in which the series opens—with a case of murder by dismemberment in 1998.
Generically a whodunit, The Long Season is also a riot. The Northeast constitutes the wellspring of comedy in the Chinese cultural imagination. Some of the country’s most famous comedians hail from the region, and their skits and sketches on China Central Television’s annual New Year’s Gala have entertained generations of viewers. Directed by Xin Shuang 辛爽, a Northeasterner, the dialogue crackles with repartees, delivered impeccably in the distinctive local idiom by well-known actors Fan Wei 范伟 and Qin Hao 秦昊, both of whom themselves are from the Northeast. They play, respectively, Wang Xiang 王响, a former locomotive engineer for Hualin Steel who is now a taxi driver, and Gong Biao 龚彪, a fellow taxi driver who used to be an entry-level manager in the same factory. The third male lead is Ma Desheng 马德胜, a police captain turned amateur Latin ballroom dancer. All three give bravura performances in dual roles spanning almost two decades that anchor the temporal shifts in the narrative.
But the most important reason for the show’s enormous appeal, I would argue, is its affective resonance with the mood of the times. The “long” (漫长) in The Long Season signifies the unending. Chinese audiences today are in the midst of their own “long season” that is the undeniable downturn of the economy, rampant and ever-widening social inequality, shocking cases of violence against women, and the lingering trauma of not so much long COVID as the government’s response to it: the unsparing way in which restrictions were enacted—and exacted—for nearly three years, and the equally unsparing way in which they were suddenly lifted in late 2022, resulting in uncountable deaths in the immediate months afterward.
Anger, therefore, suffuses the whole series. Who and what are its targets? First, they include the director of Hualin Steel. He is that recognizable “leader as bullshit artist” who waves to the young, shakes hands with the old, and says all the right things in between, such as: “No matter what happens, the mill’s got your back!” When, at a factory-wide assembly, he prefaces the announcement of mass layoffs with platitudes about “change” and the end of the “iron rice bowl,” one of the workers grumbles, “We’re too familiar with their M.O.” As are Chinese viewers, who have become attuned to the cognitive dissonance between rhetoric—Article 1 of the constitution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) states that it is “a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants”—and reality.
For close to fifty years since the founding of the PRC in 1949, the Northeast was China’s center of heavy industry. But it is now its rust belt. The period from mid to late 1990s—precisely the show’s narrative past—was a watershed for the Northeastern region. The seismic reorientation nationwide toward marketization and privatization entailed the major restructuring of state-owned industry at the local level, along with the concurrent dismantling of the socialist welfare system. As Ching Kwan Lee points out in her 2007 Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt, workers didn’t take the dispossession of the “worker-owned” factory lying down but carried out “protests of desperation.” Such responses can be glimpsed in The Long Season, which depicts clashes between Hualin Steel’s employees and its leadership. The factory director, as the embodiment of corrupt duplicity, even gets attacked directly. The show is able to get away with this by ingeniously framing the conflict as personal retribution as opposed to a collective uprising: Gong Biao, finding out at the layoff assembly that the director, who is married, got his love interest pregnant, threatens him with a thermos bottle, while Wang Xiang, realizing their boss’s perfidy in private and public affairs alike, tackles him onstage.
The factory director refers to himself as Hualin Steel’s “parent”—literally, head of the household—since, according to the socialist ethos, workers should identify the factory as their family. He is not the only figure of patriarchal authority in the show to be taken down. Two others receive their comeuppance as well.
One of them is a paternal uncle of Shen Mo 沈墨, the show’s central female character who connects the 1998 murder case with the 2016 hit-and-run incident. Like the factory director, Shen Mo’s uncle abuses his position—in his case, sexually assaulting his niece—while simultaneously intoning lofty sentiments. When the college-aged Shen Mo begins to resist his predation, he accuses her of insubordination. What right does she have to protest? He raised her, clothed her, even bought her a piano. Doesn’t that give him the right to use her as he pleases, to keep her forever under his thumb? “No man in this world,” he says with emotion to Ma Desheng, “can be as good to her as me.” How ungrateful of Shen Mo—and all complainers of patriarchal authority—to want to sever their ties, to liberate themselves. They should be thankful for what the Father has done for them. Instead, they bite the hand that fed them.
In investigating the case of the dismembered body, Ma Desheng uncovers the uncle’s nefarious crime against Shen Mo. Unable to restrain his outrage and his disgust, the police captain thrashes him. Ma is that beloved recurring figure in the Chinese cultural canon, the rogue cop who—as Haiyan Lee remarks in A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination (2023)—while breaking formal laws and rigid rules, is actually observing morality of the highest order. In stepping out of bounds, all three men pay a price for their sense of right and wrong: after the layoff assembly dustup, Gong Biao loses his job as an up-and-coming administrator at Hualin Steel, and Wang Xiang no longer drives the train. Ma Desheng resigns from the force after the official reprimand of his conduct.
Gong’s, Wang’s, and Ma’s reactions are not the only instances of righteous anger in The Long Season. Wang Xiang’s wife, likewise a former factory employee, had cardiac stents put in years earlier, the insurance payment of which still hasn’t been reimbursed. To add insult to injury, the factory no longer covers her medication either. “I dedicated all my best years to Hualin Steel!” she yells at the dispensary clerk. Then there’s another former coworker who in the 2016 timeline tries to collect her retirement benefits, but a government agent holds up the process due to a missing seal in her documentation. Wang Xiang joins her in the bureau to vent indignation. Such scenes may appear to be minor, but they are precisely ones that Chinese viewers identify with: quotidian dealings with the state apparatus in which the people are robbed of their economic citizenship and human dignity.
Closely related to these outpourings of anger is vigilante vengeance, which picks up in the last third of the series. As a woman, Shen Mo does not turn the other cheek. A loaded customer—rich and drunk—at the nightclub where she is the pianist throws wads of cash at her face when she refuses to play a song he wants. Later that night, Shen Mo has her biological brother (and his crew) beat up the customer for revenge. Shen Mo’s uncle whips her for disobedience. She in turn gets his own son’s arm broken. A wealthy businessman rapes Shen Mo, who was drugged by a coworker and supposed friend. Shen Mo winds up killing both the businessman and the coworker. She also ultimately kills her uncle as well as his wife, who, though she didn’t actively commit evil, was nevertheless silent in the face of it. To go along is not innocence; it is complicity. Shen Mo will not meekly suffer the brutality of men and their underlings.
In addition to all the blood spilled, however, there’s forgiveness, represented by the transformation of the third figure of patriarchal authority in The Long Season—none other than Wang Xiang himself. Though not devoid of empathy—he favors leniency, for instance, toward young petty criminals who resort to delinquency out of desperation—the Wang of the 1998 timeline is nevertheless overbearing and self-righteous at work and at home. As a former model worker who has served the plant for thirty years since he was 18, he is an “activist” on multiple factory committees, a true believer in and purveyor of political slogans accreted over the decades—such as “Hualin Steel is my home; its welfare is my own”—for whom the work unit is the foundation of all of life’s certainties.
What changed him was loss, first of his son, then of his wife. This change is poignantly captured in the scene where he finds his son lying on a riverbank, wet and still. The father, in the shock of the moment, reacts harshly at first, barking at his son to get up. He then breaks down. What has been lost is not only a son and a wife, and not just a factory that’s been around for as long as the PRC, but also the relationship of a people to a place, a sense of a wider community, a way of life and a way of belief, and the respect of and for a social class. The most potent symbol of this total collapse is Wang Xiang’s replacement of one picture with another: he once framed and proudly hung on the wall the factory newspaper’s front-page coverage of himself being congratulated by the factory director for his service; now he takes it down and puts in its place a memorial portrait of his son.
It’s common practice for Chinese fictional narratives, whether novels, films, or TV series, if they want to portray social problems that impinge on the present, to be set prior to the current administration. In a show like The Long Season, made in the Xi Jinping era—2012 to the indefinite future—2016 has to be a time of poetic justice: the ex-cop Ma Desheng is the one who solves the crimes; Shen Mo is brought to account; and Wang Xiang finally learns what happened to his son. Snow falls in the last episode, as if to blanket all the bloodshed, wrapping up the long season, the interminable fall from which the main characters can’t move on. Only then does the show move forward, tacking on a 2017 segment that hints at the formation of a new nuclear family around Wang.
But it’s not all sunny in 2016. The angels of justice—Wang Xiang, Gong Biao, and Ma Desheng—aren’t exactly thriving. They are old and ailing, beset by tragedy, frustration, and disappointment. This present is also the setting of two inspired scenes of seemingly no account in the sixth episode. Both are characterized by muteness, an underlying motif of the show. In the opening scene of the episode, Wang Xiang is sitting inside his taxi as it inches forward in the automatic car wash. Behind a windshield inundated with water, he patiently and carefully picks loose threads off the red sweater his son once gave him. He may be physically dry, but he is awash, too, in unremitting grief, baptized eighteen years earlier with a sorrow that now nourishes a new consciousness (fig. 2).
Figure 2: Wang Xiang at the car wash.
In the other scene, later in the episode, Wang tries to make small talk with a retired factory worker who in 1998 found the first bag of dismembered body parts. Still a ragpicker after all these years, she ignores him, a silent rebuke less of Wang, who used to look down on her, than of the “New Era”—Xi’s designation—in which the lives of people like her have not changed for the better.
The Long Season visualizes and verbalizes outbursts of rage. But it would be mistaken to view the release of pent-up fury as cathartic in any way. Sure, Chinese audiences must relish seeing the wealthy, who figuratively throw money in their faces, get punished and the two-faced leaders and molesters of morality in their own lives—those who use their power despotically, who violate others both overtly and insidiously while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy, service, and sacrifice—get vicariously pummeled. Yet anger persists, even—or especially—when it is not voiced. Muteness may sometimes signal resignation, as in the car wash scene discussed above, but in The Long Season it never means inability or apathy. As Lu Xun wrote nearly exactly a hundred years ago, “When we hear moaning, sighing, crying, and pleading, we needn’t be startled. But when we encounter fierce silence, we should pay careful attention. . . This augurs the imminent arrival of ‘real wrath.’”[1]
Thomas Chen
Lehigh University
Notes:
[1] 鲁迅, “华盖集-杂感.” 《鲁迅全集》(北京: 人民文学出版社, 2005), vol. 3: 53.