Why, in Chinese cinema, bad things happen only in Binhai
Restrictions on the portrayal of actual cities as places riddled with corruption and crime have led filmmakers to use ficitonal seaside settlement as a setting for their stories of vice, making a Binhai a Chinese Gotham City
Binhai: a seaside city where corrupt cadres reign with impunity, foreign spies sabotage official projects, drug traffickers run amok and police fight crime with the support of the entire state machine. If this sounds strangely like Gotham, it’s because Binhai is, perhaps, the Chinese equivalent of the gritty home city of Batman.
In the real world, there’s a new neighbourhood in Tianjin called Binhai, and a county in Jiangsu, but they are (at least for now) nowhere near as sleazy and chaotic as the fictional city depicted in books, on television and in films in China in the past three decades.
The latest iteration of this troubled Binhai appears in Vivian Qu’s noir-tinged thriller Angels Wear White (2017). Here, the city is populated by lecherous lawmen, terrifying thugs, exploitative pimps and pathetic parents, and nearly everybody is in on the con, with both officials and mobsters closing ranks to protect the depraved elite.
In contemporary Chinese cinema, bad things can happen only in Binhai. It is the setting of Hidden Rock (1977), in which murderous spies try to wreck a new ship; The Wave (1978), about a power-grabbing scheme by a cadre loyal to the Gang of Four; and Johnnie To Kei-fung’s Chinese narco thriller Drug War (2012).