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.”
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