The ‘stupid American’ exposing the dark side of the Chinese dream

“Life is short. When you look back, it’s late…” A man muses quietly to himself as he paces around his factory, piles of shrink-wrapped products – wiping-up cloths – around him. We are 40 minutes into Ascension, a feature-length observational piece from Chinese-American director Jessica Kingdon. Winner of the Best Documentary Feature award at the Tribeca Film Festival and shortlisted for an Oscar, the film follows China’s industrial supply-chain upwards from the factory floor to the country’s elite.

Encounters include textile workers integrating their own ceaseless micro-movements with those of the machines among which they work. Recruits to an air-conditioning company are made to dress in fatigues, undergo military-style training, make a pledge of corporate allegiance and perform a march-past in honour of senior management. An assembly-line worker uses metal batons to piece together what turns out to be the frame for a sex doll. Her jiggling rubber body is scrubbed down and touched up with cosmetic paint – “Number Three pink” for the nipples – before an alarmingly life-like head whirls rapidly around as it is screwed into place.

Ascension is a riot of richly-coloured products and packaging accentuated by bright, sterile-white factory décor, backed by a spacious soundtrack whose clever instrumentation seems to emerge from the ambient noise of the production process. The result is beautifully immersive, yet provocative of a deep unease. With no interviews or commentary, I’ve been left alone with my thoughts, wondering who these people are and what they imagine their lives are about.

The mumbled meditations of the man in the cloth factory thus come as a relief, promising insight and interpretation at last. “When you’re old,” he says to himself, “you realise that nothing is valuable.” I find myself nodding, his words capturing my mood. “You’re rich, you’re poor – at the end, you’re old.” Yes. Yes…

Then I catch sight of the mobile phone in his hand. He’s reading from a screen – rehearsing. Suddenly, he’s back with his co-workers, taking turns to shout rhythmical, rapid-fire slogans into a camera-phone from across stacks of wiping-up cloths. “Life is short, turn and look!” “Don’t be angry, the enemy is ourselves!” “Cherish parents, wife and kids!” They’re preparing a social media post. This is about selling stock, not taking stock.

It’s deflating, but intriguing too, and I find myself engaging with the film on fresh terms. Jessica Kingdon would no doubt approve. Ascension, she tells me, is personal for her, and she wants it to be personal for her audience too. Her grandparents fled China after the Communist Revolution in 1949, and she often wonders what they would make of the place today – not least the pursuit of a “Chinese dream” intended to help the country one day surpass America.

Kingdon spent four years looking for answers, exploring "material striving and the quest for upward mobility" across 51 locations in China. She and her team didn’t always receive a warm welcome. Bosses at some of the companies they visited found the observational filming style at once insulting and deeply suspicious. Were they not important enough to be interviewed? And why all these lingering shots of employees and processes? Cover, surely, for corporate espionage.

One CEO was only brought round when the local man arranging Kingdon’s access showed him some film shorts that Kingdon had made in graduate school, assuring him that these “stupid Americans” were incapable of stealing tech secrets. To seal the deal, Kingdon agreed to make a promotional film for the company, featuring an interview with the disgruntled CEO.

Happier moments included discoveries about Kingdon’s family in Changsha, Hunan province. “My great-grandfather,” she says, “turned out to be a famous poet that I grew up hearing stories about – I didn’t know if he was real or not.” With the help of a local historian, she tracked down some living relatives along with a book of poetry that her great-grandfather, whose name was Zheng Ze, produced in 1912. One of his poems, Ascension, became the title for her film.

“I felt like the themes related to this paradox of progress… In the poem the narrator, presumably my great-grandfather, ascends to the height of a tower and is able from that vantage point to look down on and survey land that is being invaded and destroyed. It lays on his heart heavily. So I was thinking of this concept of ascension, [which] instead of relieving our worries increases them.”

At the top of the tower in contemporary China, Kingdon finds that commercial success does not necessarily bring liberation. When set alongside the repetitious production processes at the bottom of the supply chain, elite leisure time, too, appears curiously regimented. Men and women are guided on and off rides in theme parks, herded through carefully curated attractions, encouraged to jump up and down in sync at outdoor music concerts.

“I hope,” says Kingdon, “that at the end of the day people take away the moments of humanity, and intimacy and poetry that come through in sometimes dehumanising systems.”

Ascension is rich in such moments. At a “ways of business etiquette” seminar, instructors on a stage guide smartly-suited women through an exercise designed, they promise, to strengthen facial muscles and enhance control over one’s features. We begin with some co-ordinated clapping, as Frank Mills’s song Music Box Dancer plinky-plonks merrily away in the background. Soon we’re stretching our mouths into wide, mirthless smiles, pulling them with invisible strings attached to our fingers.

It all looks very earnest and professional, until the camera catches one of the participants struggling to maintain control as a genuine smile begins to break through, briefly threatening to become a full-on fit of laughter. People feel, says Kingdon, that “if they follow the script they’ll be rewarded… [they are] playing the game in order to get ahead. It’s not like the women at the etiquette classes aren’t in on the joke.”

How many people in China are taking the same approach to politics – playing the game, in on the joke? In a snippet of informal conversation caught on camera, a woman weighs Western concerns about human rights against the pressing needs of the poor in China. “If you can’t survive,” she says, “how can human rights exist?” I put it to Kingdon that this feels a little like a speech. “In contemporary China,” she replies, “there’s a lot of ambiguity about what is allowed to be said and what’s not. I think a lot of people come off as sounding really practiced… there is a level of performance that’s happening.”

Political discussion is rare in Ascension, but politics is everywhere. The mention of human rights comes during a sequence that British viewers will surely enjoy: butler school. As the teacher explains, to students sitting around a table in what looks like a plush conference room, many people in China have grown rich overnight. They send their children to top schools, both in China and abroad. “Now,” she concludes, “they want butlers… Has anyone seen Downton Abbey?”

Blank faces. The teacher presses on. One graduate of this school, she says, found that his first job was squeezing toothpaste into a cup for his boss. What, I suddenly wonder, would Chairman Mao make of what his “new China” has become? But the teacher hasn’t finished. No matter the task, she tells the domestic servants of tomorrow, professionalism towards one’s employer requires not showing a “sour face… no matter how he humiliates you”

“You can,” she adds, “curse him behind his back.”

Ascension is in UK cinemas from Friday 14