A harrowing drama about school bullying has struck a strong personal chord with Chinese movie audiences and soared to the top of the box office after authorities belatedly gave it the go-ahead.
Better Days (少年的你) shines a spotlight on what the state-run China Daily called “a nationwide problem which has existed for years,” but is rarely broached in Chinese films.
A real-life case went viral this week about a seven-year-old girl who needed hospital treatment after a group of fellow students forced scraps of paper into her eyes.
Photo: AFP
Better Days has grossed at least 1.4 billion yuan (US$200 million) in the nearly three weeks since its release, according to the China Movie Data Information Network.
Starring Zhou Dongyu (周冬雨) and Jackson Yee (易烊千璽), two popular figures in Chinese movies, the film is based on a novel and tells the story of a teenage girl who teams up with a school drop-out to protect her from bullies.
The plight of the movie’s lead character has left theatergoers deeply moved, with many people commenting online that they had been reduced to tears. For a few, the film is a reminder of a past they would rather forget.
The film also highlights the pressures of the gaokao (高考), the notorious examination for Chinese universities.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appears to have only reluctantly allowed the film by Hong Kong director Derek Tsang (曾國祥) to show because of the sensitivity of the subject.
In February it was abruptly pulled without explanation from the Berlin Film Festival days before it was to be screened.
It also failed to come out as scheduled in June in China’s heavily vetted movie theaters, before finally being released in China on Oct. 25.
Many Chinese have speculated online that it was only green-lighted after cuts were made. The film was released overseas last week.
The Global Times cited a survey that found more than 32 percent of Chinese elementary and junior-high school students have been bullied.
Six percent were frequently bullied, it said, which given China’s vast population means tens of millions of young children.
“When you were a kid, you bullied others or were bullied by others, right?” says a policeman in the film, summing up the scale of the problem.
Moviegoers are left in no doubt that the Chinese government is taking bullying seriously with public-service announcements before and after the film.
One message details the steps the government is taking, such as the launch last year of a major anti-bullying campaign in schools.
On Tuesday, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law professor Qiao Xinsheng (喬新生) wrote in the China Daily that the film “has sparked a public debate on school bullying.”
A meeting last month of China’s legislature made clear that bullying is a top priority, Qiao said.
Psychological counseling of bullies is one prime way to stop them, he said, adding that security guards should be deployed at schools.
The age of criminal responsibility should be lowered from 16 to 12 for the worst offenses, he said.
The girl in Better Days seeks help from the school, but its weak measures are ineffective and only make the bullying worse.
That was the bitter experience of Huang Hui, a 26-year-old journalist in Shanghai.
As a young teenager, Huang said she was targeted after she moved from a village to a town boarding school in Hubei Province. Some of her classmates called her inferior because of her rural background. One of her teachers also took a disliking to her and accused her of gossiping about him.
“He slapped my face and pulled me by the hair into a wall,” Huang said.
“Then I had to get on my knees in front of the dormitory for the whole night while everyone walked past. It was humiliating,” she said.
The bullies then accused her of spilling secrets about them, she said, adding that they beat her up.
“The torture made me feel it was like a prison or hell,” Huang said, calling bullying in schools “very common.”
A younger brother was also a victim.
With her father working in another city — the case for many millions of children in rural China — Huang took matters into her own hands.
“The law of the jungle, that the weak are the prey of the strong, pushed me to grow powerful in high school,” she said. “I became a member of a school gang, able to stand up to whoever I didn’t like.”
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
Cannabis-based medicines have shown little evidence of effectiveness for treating most mental health and substance-use disorders, according to a large review of past studies published in a major medical journal on Monday. Medical use of cannabinoids has been expanding, including in the US, Canada and Australia, where many patients report using cannabis products to manage conditions such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and sleep problems. Researchers reviewed data from 54 randomized clinical trials conducted between 1980 and May last year involving 2,477 participants for their analysis published in The Lancet. The studies assessed cannabinoids as a primary treatment for mental disorders or substance-use
NATIONWIDE BLACKOUT: US President Donald Trump cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba, strangling the Caribbean island’s already antiquated grid Cuba’s national electric grid collapsed on Monday, the nation’s grid operator said, leaving about 10 million people without power amid a US-imposed oil blockade that has crippled the already obsolete generation system. Grid operator UNE on social media said that it is investigating the causes of the blackout, the latest in a series of widespread outages that last for hours or days and that this weekend sparked a rare violent protest in the communist-run nation. Officials ruled out a major power plant failure, but had still not pinpointed the root cause of the grid collapse, suggesting a problem with transmission. Officials said that
‘HEALTH ISSUE’: More than 250 women are hospitalized every day due to complications from unsafe abortions, and about three die, a study showed Jane had been bleeding heavily for days before finally seeking help, not from a hospital, but from the man who sold her the pills meant to end her six-week pregnancy. Abortions are strictly outlawed in the mainly Catholic Philippines, forcing women to turn to a patchwork of providers operating in the online shadows. While rare in practice, Philippine law allows for prison terms of up to six years for abortion patients and providers, leaving thousands of Filipinas to search for solutions in online forums where unlicensed sellers promote abortifacients. “It was very painful, as if my abdomen was being twisted,” said Jane, whose
RSS