Beijing Bicycle

There is a noticeable difference in appearance between the poor and rich in Beijing. Though Communist in name the economic policies created in part by Deng Xiaoping have greatly increased industrialization and at the same time class inequality. Like in America, the upper class wear fancy clothes, drive nice cars, and have beautiful homes. The shopkeeper lives where he works. The bicycle messenger spends more than a month of working just to pay for his ride. He is from the country, and it is evident is used to being poor. Towards the middle of the movie he grabs his bicycle and screams, pleading with his high school antagonists. Everyone is aware of the inequality. The students know that, even publicly, they can subject the powerless to brutality. The expensive mountain bike is a status symbol to the student, and to the main character a way to provide him with a more comfortable way of life. Both are frustrated with their financial situations, and take actions to rise higher (monetarily).

People from the country are viewed as ignorant peasants. They don’t have skills the city needs, unless those skills are physical. As large masses of the rural population shift to an urban life they are faced with poverty. The economy is booming, but there are more people than there are jobs. The rural folk have fierce competition amongst themselves. In order to have a low paying bicycle runner job you must memorize all the streets and be swift, and even then you could be fired. People in the city, since there are more of them, are harder to define. What they all have in common is that their place in society is precarious. If you are from the country you have no money. If you are from the city you may be lucky enough to be employed, but there is no safety net in place for those who lose a job. Most people have to expend a tremendous amount of energy just to exist in China. The bicycle thief’s father has been promising for years to buy his son a bike. Yet he is faced with sending another child through education. People from the city are better connected and have more money, but they are confined, like rural people, by the world around them.

The streets are packed with cars and bicycles. The sidewalks are filled with people. There are main streets that run past sky scrappers and street venders, but the back roads are a confusing jumble of lefts and rights. Old men play card games outside their apartments while trucks filled with flour take sharp turns around them. Resources and goods need to be distributed throughout Beijing, but the process looks like a race (and is in part) and is not in the least bit orderly.

The United States likes to have lower, upper, and middle class living in completely different areas. Economic segregation is obvious in America. Things are different in China. In Beijing, a wealthy business owner can look out of his window and see a person sleeping in the streets. Shacks are neighboring posh apartments. The high rises standing above the poverty are monuments to hard work as well as exploitation.

There was going to be little repercussions for beating up the main character. The history of the bicycle is complex. But nobody cared about cutting through the subtleness. There was no reason to. Here is how it went down.
1. Kid throws rock at hip bicycle rider.
2. Kid is seen with some peasant guy.
3, Rock thrower gets beaten up.
From here there really isn’t an in depth discussion into what the main characters complicity is in the entire attempted murder thing. The bloody and hip bicyclist has one of his friends hold onto the main character. In the process of events the bicycle messenger gets beaten up. He could have gotten beaten up because he just crossed the wrong idiot thug. There was probably minimal thought behind the violence; there was little initiative for any the characters to deeply understand the situation. So they didn’t. The bicycle messenger was beaten up because he may have had something to do with the stoning, and there was no harm to them if they were wrong.