Text by Ding Dawei

Translated by Ji Yu

The Haier Brothers (still), 1996–2005

At the turn of the millennium, midday hours and dusks were defined by the spectacle of volcanic eruptions, mudslides, cataclysmic earthquakes, sky-blotting sandstorms, devastating tsunamis, and tornadoes, all playing out repeatedly on household CRT televisions. African tribes, the Maya, the descendants of Zheng He’s fleets, Arctic poachers, endangered Australian wildlife, and Caribbean pirates were woven into an eccentric, long maritime adventure that entered the domestic lives of Chinese families. Children, with rice bowls in hand, sat transfixed by a cartoon composed of vibrant color blocks and the twitching, repetitive lines of early animation—a brand advertisement stretched across hundreds of episodes.

These children belonged to the first generation in China to undergo the full nine years of compulsory education; they were the “lonely children” of the one-child policy and the first for whom mere subsistence was no longer a primary concern. From this era, most households began placing a refrigerator near the dining table to store their growing food surplus—an appliance that seemed to demand constant upgrading, followed in turn by washing machines, televisions, and air conditioners. A tide of technological terms invaded everyday life, joining a millennium-end cult of technology and a vertigo-inducing material abundance. Whether welcomed or not, the two “stick-figure” children of The Haier Brothers, along with their companions and adventures, became fixtures of both our mental and material landscape. In an era spiraling upward while hovering on the brink of losing control, The Haier Brothers became a cornerstone of a shared Y2K memory—one that embraced a contradictory, nostalgic, and faintly melancholic technological optimism.

The Haier Brothers (still), 1996–2005

The Haier Brothers (still), original HD remaster, 2025

The Haier Brothers premiered in the summer of 1996 on CCTV-1’s (China Central Television) Dong Hua Cheng (Animation City) and ran until roughly 2005, eventually totaling four seasons and 212 episodes. It is widely regarded as one of China’s earliest long-form domestic animated series. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was a staple of CCTV and local stations, particularly during school holidays. In March 2025, the Haier Group announced the completion of an HD remaster, releasing a 20th-anniversary edition across major streaming platforms. Having transitioned through multiple technological epochs—analog signals, pirated videotapes, VCDs, and file-sharing networks—the series now reappears amid high frame rates and widescreen displays. In this new context, it acquires an anachronistic roughness; character proportions designed for 2D perspective appear awkwardly distorted on digital screens, and the distinctive “halo” once produced by CRT electron guns has vanished, flattening the high-purity color blocks and stripping them of their perceived volume. Yet, over the past two decades, shifting aesthetics, corporate logic, state discourse, and the allure—and subsequent disenchantment—of globalization have overlapped. This remaster reactivates the millennial Chinese expectations surrounding “the global,” “science,” and “the child” that remain sealed within this vintage animation.

I. The Body of Imagery

Shen Rongnan, “Cherish Food,” Primary School Moral Education Textbook (Volume II), Shanghai Educational Publishing House, 1988

The animation begins with a wise old man dwelling in the deep sea, who creates two immaculate children. They possess minimal facial expression and little individuality; a line spoken by the elder Haier Brother would sound indistinguishable if delivered by the younger. Here, the ocean functions as a blank origin of the world: a world without borders, private property, or linguistic barriers. The series seeks to endow the brothers with equality and fearlessness through the sea’s ownerless homogeneity. As humanoid vessels of scientific intelligence, they are immune to heat and cold, traversing every climate and environment barefoot, clad in nothing but triangular swim trunks. Their persona oscillates between that of lively children and purely rational “intelligent entities”—a bifurcated identity that sits uneasily alongside the flesh-and-blood members of the group: the brave Captain Grandpa, the kind-hearted Jenny, and the mischievous Crude. Due to the animators’ focus on efficiency, the brothers’ eyes are strikingly inexpressive, often projecting a hollow, dull sadness. Their gaze—cool, steady, and suspended—pierces the viewer much like that of Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen. When we look at them, it is as if science and technology themselves are staring back.

Their friendly, flat forms resemble the nianhua (New Year print) “fortune-bringing children” of Chinese tradition, while the values they embody—justice, bravery, collectivism, and self-sacrifice—extend a visual genealogy stretching from the “New China” lianhuanhua (comic strips) and Cultural Revolution posters to classroom wall charts and educational films. This lineage constructs “models to be emulated” through bold outlines, pure color blocks, and highly idealized physiques. Indeed, the “exemplary effect” has been a core Zhdanovite methodology of social modeling since the founding of the PRC. Farmlands, factories, frontiers, and blast furnaces in this tradition are not complex settings for aesthetic contemplation, but active arenas of political life. Fixed camera angles, frontal compositions, and minimalist backgrounds compress narratives into singular, iconic moments, where the calculations of class morality supersede individual interiority. Although The Haier Brothers is set in a near-future context, it constantly vacillates between this legacy of class morality (struggle, collectivism, sacrifice) and a nascent “future morality” (characterized by de-antagonization and de-humanization), coalescing into a unique form of modern moralism. Here, the scientific, efficient, and creative resolution of practical problems in production and daily life becomes the bedrock of the value system.

Regarding nature, the series shifts away from the subjective agency of “Man conquering Nature” (ren ding sheng tian), exploring instead how to observe natural laws, mitigate disasters, and ultimately harness the environment. In this sense, The Haier Brothers represents not a rupture from tradition, but its evolution under a new media paradigm: the “political class body” matures into a “scientific knowledge body,” and lagging class consciousness is replaced by ignorance in the face of natural disasters and mysteries. Throughout this transition, the exemplary “good child” remains the central icon. Though their metaphorical umbilical cord remains tethered to an ideologically dense past, their bodies continue to run tirelessly through a rapidly accelerating present. This act of running—and the rifts it creates in its wake—reaches toward the very perceptual core of modernism.

Wukong Battles Saint Seiya, children’s picture book cover

Sun Wukong Battles the Transformers, children’s picture book cover

By the time The Haier Brothers emerged, Chinese children were no longer restricted to domestic imagery. Beginning in the late 1980s and early 90s, Japanese and American animation flooded into China via coastal television stations, smuggled videotapes, VCDs, and illicit satellite links. From Doraemon and Sailor Moon to Disney classics, a “gray market” circulation system emerged, operating independently of the official state apparatus. These pirated cartoons reconditioned the eyes of a generation through higher frame rates, more sophisticated cinematography, and chaotic structures of emotion and desire. Domestic, fan-produced children’s books had already begun “grafting” traditional icons like Sun Wukong and the Calabash Brothers with the Transformers and Saint Seiya, forging a hybrid fantasy aesthetic imbued with an aspirational international flair. Around the time of China’s accession to the WTO, these figures—constantly battling yet repeatedly reconciled—existed alongside corporate-war television dramas, commercials featuring foreign faces, and English-language learning materials. Together, they constructed an early vision of globalization: one that was passive, modular, and assembled from disparate parts.

Music Island (still), 1991

Cosmic Little Heroes (still), 1993

Caught in this cultural tug-of-war, domestic Chinese animation was compelled to maintain a tone of safety, wholesomeness, and educational value—constructing “exemplary figures” to counter the violence, sexuality, death, and existential confusion found in international cartoons. Simultaneously, these productions needed to reinvent themselves to embrace the dawn of the new century. Before the Dongfang Hongye Advertising Agency utilized computer technology to produce The Haier Brothers in 1995, the Shanghai Animation Film Studio had already created hand-drawn commercials for the Haier Group in 1991, and the brothers’ animated debut, the 15-episode Yin Yue Dao (Music Island). This was a straightforward, sci-fi adventure narrative that drew heavily on the espionage and adventure tropes of the 1970s and 80s—echoing films like The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) and Death Ray on Coral Island (1980)—complete with secret island bases, mysterious undersea civilizations, and formidable futuristic weaponry.

In 1993, the Taipei-based Hong Long Cartoon was commissioned to produce another hand-drawn series, Yu Zhou Xiao Ying Xiong (Cosmic Little Heroes). Drawing on the visual language of the Japanese anime Ronin Warriors (1988) and the manga aesthetics of Akira Toriyama, the series was saturated with then-trendy themes of space exploration and mecha combat. Ultimately, neither Music Island nor Cosmic Little Heroes garnered recognition from their patron, the Haier Group. Both iterations cast the brothers as righteous, courageous fighters, but in doing so, they fell into a distinct 1990s trap: an over-reliance on action-heavy spectacle and a profusion of imaginary gadgets created an atmosphere of pure entertainment, yet failed conspicuously to align with “scientific rationality.” Both series even included a plotline involving the “rescue of Sister Qindao”—a narrative arc of emotional desire that was deemed entirely superfluous to the corporate ethos and product-driven mission of their ambitious employer.

The rapid popularization and continuous upgrading of color television sets led to a dramatic expansion of channels and broadcast hours at the turn of the millennium. An avalanche of heterogeneous visual content replaced the PM5544 test pattern that had long dominated Chinese screens; suddenly, the public realized there was more television than one could possibly consume. This era of infinite airtime and endless viewing imposed urgent new demands on image production: the priority shifted from the singular quality of an individual work to a model of sustainable supply and stable output—demands that traditional, hand-crafted animation could no longer meet. During this period, the monumental paper-cut series Ren Shen Wang Guo (The Ginseng Kingdom; first broadcast in 1997) consisted of only fifty-two episodes, while 3000 Whys of Blue Cat (first broadcast in 1999), the successor to The Haier Brothers, eventually exceeded three thousand.

The smooth, techno-polished aesthetic introduced by digitization—and later by the 3D turn after 2005—gradually supplanted the once-dominant Shanghai Animation Film Studio style, which was characterized by rich, handcrafted textures like ink wash, paper-cutting, and puppetry. In masterpieces such as Havoc in Heaven (1964) and Nezha Conquers the Dragon King (1979), the bleeding of ink, the frayed edges of paper, and the rhythmic stutter of puppet joints were essential to the aesthetic. These traces reminded the viewer that images are artifacts—the result of iterative human labor on paper and celluloid. Early computer animation, by contrast, sought to eliminate these traces of labor, even when still utilizing hand-drawn drafts. It offered unified color blocks produced by batch processing, closed contours, and saturated yet flat layering. Character movement relied on looping cycles of key poses—walking, running, or reacting—while backgrounds often consisted of vast areas of flat color, with detail added only as needed to illustrate specific educational points. Production efficiency and technical stability effectively diluted aesthetic density. 

Viewed from today’s era of AI-generated imagery, The Haier Brothers serves as a particularly apt historical anchor: it demonstrates that new technologies do not immediately trigger structural or formal innovation, but are often first used to reproduce outdated visual modes more efficiently, evolving only slowly atop this viscous foundation. For a child, the perceptual shift from hand-crafted to computer animation lies in the substitution of instability and finitude with efficiency and reproducibility. When labor is no longer visible, the image is mistaken for a self-evident reality—quietly shaping how a child understands work, humanity, and the world itself.

The Haier Brothers (still), 1996–2005

The subtitle of The Haier Brothers is Global Adventures, and the protagonists’ travel route serves as the opening image of every episode. According to Haier’s official website, the team sets off from the center of the Pacific, “crossing five continents and four oceans, visiting fifty-six countries, overcoming 238 distinct hardships, and traveling over 190,000 kilometers—the equivalent of nearly five global circumnavigations, or more than twenty times the length of Xuanzang’s journey to the West.” The fundamental appeal of the global adventure genre lies in its capacity to endlessly generate a “global imagery,” offering an immersive travelogue of shifting yet perceptible locales. Yet, the canyons, volcanic craters, snowfields, and dense forests encountered in the series are highly homogenized in form, composition, and palette. Early computer animation technology relied on the categorization and modularization of scenes; by repeatedly calling up assets from a library and merely altering hues or foreground props, a “new country” could be instantaneously generated. What the viewer sees is a sequence of highly abstracted representations—instantly recognizable landmarks or stereotypical ethnic costumes—rather than concrete sites of lived experience.

The animated world is defined by this “placelessness” (Edward Relph). Indeed, television audiences of the 1990s largely constructed their understanding of the world through such condensed keywords. From magazines and pictorials disseminating “world knowledge” to theme parks, World Expos, and geography programs, these media collectively formed a shared worldview—or rather, a shared “worldscape”—for an entire generation. “Landscape” is not merely an object of sight, but an invented mode of seeing (Denis Cosgrove): a visual ideology that transforms the world into consumable images and cartographic, plannable space. The “placelessness” of The Haier Brothers is not, however, entirely hollow. It inherits the externalized scenic gaze found in landscape painting and tourism advertising, yet it is re-infused with genuine emotion by the unique social psychology of 1990s China—a state at once anxious and exhilarated, self-effacing yet profoundly self-confident.

Around the turn of the millennium, we accepted and embraced The Haier Brothers—whether actively or passively—not only because of its pervasive airtime, but because it had become a “prescribed image.” Images possess a capacity for self-reproduction and iteration across diverse media; consequently, the act of viewing is not a neutral physiological function, but a “perceptual program” that becomes embedded in the body. Refined through the repetition of the everyday, this program eventually solidifies into a habitus (Bourdieu)—a subconscious mechanism for the allocation of attention and the formation of judgment. When this habitus expands to a collective scale, it manifests as a form of visibility jointly calibrated by social experience, educational systems, and image regimes. Sight is first acquired at the individual level, then stabilized, replicated, and transmitted across generations through the conduits of school, family, media, and technological interfaces. This process resembles a Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics—written into environments and habits, and perhaps even into a cultural genome—such that each new generation inherits a pre-trained mode of seeing from the very first moment they encounter the world of images. Every generation acts as both the inheritor of these visions and the inscriber of the next.

II. The Body of Technology

In the mid-1980s, the Qingdao Refrigerator Company imported production lines and technical expertise from the German firm Liebherr. This strategy—purchasing patents to bypass or accelerate lengthy research and development cycles through capital investment—was a characteristic corporate trajectory in 1980s China. This Sino-German partnership was swiftly transformed into a brand narrative: to illustrate the “Qindao–Liebherr” trademark story (Qindao being the former transliteration of Qingdao) and to establish a recognizable brand identity, the company adopted a pair of “twin children” as mascots, representing China and Germany respectively. The juxtaposition of these two children translated the cold abstraction of technology transfer into a visual shorthand that was approachable, companionable, and memorable. It also established the foundational logic for the later character design of The Haier Brothers: one embodied the local “Qindao” (the elder brother), while the other represented the projection of German technology and the external world (the younger brother). Although it was the Chinese side that initiated the technology import, the narrative deliberately designated the local figure as the elder—perhaps an expression of a certain anxiety over lagging behind, or a protective gesture toward national subjectivity.

Qindao–Haier modular refrigerator commercial (still), CCTV-1, 1991

Music Island (still), 1991

The elder Haier Brother has black hair, the sun-darkened skin of a laborer, and wears yellow swim trunks; the younger has blond hair, fair skin, and blue trunks. Beyond these superficial traits and their titles, there is little to distinguish them in their “wise” dispositions or their courageous qualities. Their paired structure thus directly embodies a relationship of translation. If we extend the timeline further back, the “Haier” persona is revealed not as a modern gift arriving from nowhere, but as part of a longer historical arc. Between 1898 and 1914, Qingdao was a German concession under the Jiaozhou Bay Lease (then known as Tsingtau and Kiautschou). During this period, the German Empire implemented a rigorous colonial engineering program, positioning Qingdao as a Far East naval base and a free port. Modern harbors, docks, and shipping facilities were systematically constructed, and in 1904, the Qingdao–Jinan Railway was completed, linking the port directly to the Shandong hinterland. Colonial planners introduced European concepts of functional urban zoning, laying roads, water supplies, and sewage systems while establishing frameworks for public health and municipal governance. Industrial facilities—most notably breweries—alongside administrative buildings transformed this late-Qing fishing village into a modern city. Technology, order, and governance standards became the city’s invisible infrastructure. This colonial urban model, centered on engineering rationality, persisted long after the end of German rule; it was inherited through the Japanese occupation and the Republican era, profoundly shaping Qingdao’s subsequent industrial trajectory and its specific path toward modernity.

Qingdao’s colonial history gave “technology–order–civilization” a tangible material form at the local level, while the German Empire’s colonial practices and engineering traditions provided the ideological scaffolding for this configuration. Unlike British and French colonial models, which centered on trade, administration, and cultural assimilation, the German Empire—during its brief yet intensive colonial experiments—consistently prioritized engineering, surveying, railways, ports, and industrial systems as proofs of civilizational legitimacy. In this context, technology became a moralized display of capability: it symbolized efficiency, precision, and discipline, while being imbued with an ethical mission to “improve the world.” Power did not appear to operate through overt violence; instead, it unfolded as a natural extension of technical rationality. In this sense, German engineering rationality carried, from the outset, a depoliticized narrative tone. Even today, these myths persist: the belief in spare parts buried within a three-meter radius, in Tsingtao Brewery production lines unchanged for a century, and in German machinery so perfect that “not a single screw can be altered.” To believe in such technological virtue is, in effect, to believe in the inevitability of one’s own “progress.”

This ethical narrative of technology did not vanish with the retreat of colonial empires in the twentieth century; instead, it permeated the global industrial system in more subtle, concealed forms. During the late Cold War and the nascent stages of globalization, “Made in Germany” gradually decoupled from its military-colonial origins, coming to symbolize reliability, durability, and rational design. When a nation imports foreign technology, it also imports a wholesale imagination of “how to become a modern industrial subject”: through standardization, process optimization, engineer-led systems, and the prioritization of long-term stability over short-term gains. If we trace the historical trajectories of these “advanced technologies” that we have long selectively forgotten—from early imperialism embedding China’s coastal regions into global systems via ports, railways, and trade networks, to the Reform Era’s reconnection to global industrial chains through joint ventures, technology transfers, and quality standards—the gunboats and concessions have effectively been transformed into contracts and production lines. After nearly a century, the expansionist logic of capital converges once again in the same port city.

Qindao–Haier upright refrigerator commercial (still), CCTV-2, 1990

Returning to the commodity itself, the challenge of seafood preservation was a major catalyst for the widespread adoption of refrigerators in the 1980s and 90s. According to statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture yearbooks, China’s total seafood output was approximately 3.485 million tons in 1985; by 2001, it had surged to 25.721 million tons. Per capita annual seafood consumption rose accordingly from 2.93 kilograms to 8.21 kilograms. Over these fifteen years, seafood became a reliable source of protein in China. As the marine supply expanded to such a massive scale, graded storage and cold-chain logistics became indispensable. The proliferation of highly perishable goods—dependent on a continuous low-temperature chain—necessitated a rapid expansion of the consumer refrigerator market. In this dual expansion of supply and demand, modernity proved particularly adept at satisfying the needs it had itself engineered: in 1985, urban households owned a mere 6.58 refrigerators per hundred households, while rural ownership stood at just 0.06. By 2001, these figures had climbed to 82.13 in cities and 13.5 in rural areas.

The refrigerator was no longer merely a gleaming household appliance, but a technology of time. It liberated perishable goods from the constraints of seasonality and distance, transforming the volatile uncertainty of the sea into something delayable and stockpileable. Once households began to believe that the rhythms of nature could be frozen by technology, the Haier Brothers—born of the sea—acquired the material foundation necessary to sustain their narrative imagination. Just as port cities welcomed foreign commodities and technologies into local spaces, refrigerators welcomed the bounty of the ocean into the domestic sphere. They extracted the sea from the uncontrollable flows of spoilage, odor, and risk, translating it instead into a pristine surface of deep blue. This “deep blue” is precisely the color a brand requires: it signifies cleanliness and reliability, while simultaneously evoking distance and passage. It suggests a mastery over decay and disaster, alongside a firm confidence in global circulation. Thus, the technical ethic that the refrigerator enacts materially—bringing the sea into order—is seamlessly replicated through image and narrative. In this era, the sea is no longer merely the sea; it has become a stage of modernity, designed to be displayed, disseminated, and taught.

The Haier Brothers sculpture

The transnational image of The Haier Brothers as a pair of children mirrors the transnational nature of the commodity itself; both are imbued with a cross-border mission. In the 1990s, these brothers performed a symbolic expedition that anticipated the global expansion of state-owned enterprises—at least on a spiritual level. Their desire to “go abroad” was not merely a market-expansion impulse, but rather the unfolding of a capital logic with which we have become deeply familiar. This text—assembled from modern industrialization, trademark strategy, and the television system—ingeniously packages global ambition within the forms of two children. By giving this expedition an “innocent” face, the series presupposes an optimistic confidence in globalization: a vision of the world not as a space of conflict and asymmetry, but as a map waiting to be reordered and redistributed through technology and rationality. Within this framework, the world is repairable; problems can be decomposed and engineered, and scientific knowledge is granted cross-cultural legitimacy. The adventures in the series are not framed as acts of conquest, but rather as exercises in problem-solving and risk management. This narrative posture extends the constructive logic of imperial engineering rationality into the postcolonial context. The complex world, once awaiting conquest, is rendered readable, learnable, and repeatable as “common knowledge.” This very “readability”—which we are trained to expect and adhere to—is capitalism’s most sophisticated technology of affect: a genuine commodity in its own right.

III. Taming Adventures

At the conclusion of nearly every episode—often accompanied by the iconic opening bars of the theme song “Lei Ou Zhi Ge” (The Song of Lei’ou)—the elder brother faces the camera, addressing the children watching at home. With an air of excitement, or perhaps the lingering fatigue of adventure, he asks: “So, kids, what did you learn today?” The purpose of this line is to prompt young viewers to review the key educational takeaways after the thrills of a winding adventure. Television, by its very nature, reconstructs everything in the form of stories: “Politics becomes a story; news, a story… Even science becomes a story” (Neil Postman). Broadly speaking, successful science-education programs do not necessarily prioritize the act of learning; instead, they cultivate a contagious “illusion of having learned.” If the true efficacy of The Haier Brothers as popular science lies neither in the volume of data it planted in our minds nor in the specific “whys” it resolved, it succeeded elsewhere. Through hundreds of episodes of repetition, it embedded a singular, foundational idea into our cognition: that the world is readable—and that it is our duty to read it.

The Haier Brothers (still), 1996–2005

Disasters, detours, pursuits, misunderstandings, and peril—the story unfolds through these motifs. Although the series features countless antagonists (ranging from cowboys besieging Indigenous peoples to polar bears hunting seals), from beginning to end, there is only one true villain: “disaster,” which the Wise Old Man describes as something that has “opposed civilization since the dawn of humanity.” Disaster should, in theory, be the most vital component of adventure; it signals a rupture in order and a destabilization of the subject. As Giorgio Agamben suggests, a genuine avventura (adventure) is a contingent and unforeseeable encounter—a moment in which one’s original identity is lost. The Haier Brothers, however, deploys disasters with such density and evenness that it paradoxically constructs an anti-adventure mechanism. Behind every disaster lies a transparent scientific principle and a moral takeaway, yet never a genuinely political or ethical question. Tsunamis are presented as “the power of nature,” volcanoes as “the Earth’s breathing,” and sandstorms as mere “climatic phenomena.” They rarely point to problems embedded in specific social relations, and never touch upon the complexities of resource extraction, colonial history, or uneven development. The Wise Old Man tells us that disaster has existed since the birth of humanity, but never prompts us to consider whether its existence might also be a consequence of human activities. Disaster is no longer a true adventure; it becomes a visual element of violence and stimulation used to thicken television content—a controllable component within a narrative rhythm. These disasters must be overcome or eliminated because the animated world must ultimately present itself as an order under rational control.

In The Readability of the World (1981), Hans Blumenberg observes that the modern world is no longer one in which God conceals meaning within nature; rather, it is a world where humans hide themselves within cultural and social performances. Consequently, the world ceases to be a truth awaiting discovery and becomes instead a system of appearances that is continuously encrypting and being decrypted. If the popular-science framework of The Haier Brothers offers a table of contents for the “book of nature” (or the book of disaster), its more concealed operation is the recoding of the human world into a readable visual grammar. Though it appears to be constantly unveiling nature’s secrets, the series actually performs a mild yet highly effective encryption: it leads us to believe that behind every appearance lies a controllable mechanism. In doing so, it trains us in obedience to the world’s normativity rather than an appreciation for its multiplicity of meanings.

When the Haier Brothers—figures carrying an “excess of childhood” within their bodies—were held up as role models for the generation born in the 1980s and 90s, the primary lesson they imparted was not merely that “the world is amiable,” but that “the world is controllable.” It is only after passing through a regimen of “readability” that the world is allowed to enter our grasp. Disasters replay endlessly within the domestic sphere, yet they never truly pierce the boundaries of everyday life, precisely because adventure has already been tamed. This taming does not necessarily stem from malice, but it comes at a significant cost. It attributes the difficulty of navigating the world primarily to a deficit of knowledge, rather than to conflicts of interest, institutional friction, systemic power, or the inherent distortions of language. That which cannot be rendered into data—emotional complexity, the ambiguity of desire, the irreversibility of death, or the impossibility of total communication—is swept out of the narrative. Solutions are consistently equated with narrative closure. Over time, we come to treat problems merely as objects awaiting technical repair, and understanding as nothing more than a prelude to operation. In this paradigm, the “right” person is no longer the sensitive or complex individual, but the one who can swiftly translate situations into rules, and rules into action.

The Haier Brothers (still), 1996–2005

Thus, in turn-of-the-millennium China—at the precise moment when our viewing experiences were simultaneously expanding and collapsing—what we practiced was not adventure itself, but the hallucination of converting adventure into a manageable life, mistaking this operational capacity for freedom. The techno-optimism and technology worship of that era—and indeed of our own—gained their smoothest narrative momentum precisely from this misjudgment and wishful thinking. We grew accustomed to searching for a singular mechanism behind every phenomenon, dismantling complex problems into manageable modules, and treating “reading through” as a necessary, even moralized, posture. This explains our composure amidst technological vertigo, but also our profound anxiety when faced with the “unreadable”—those moments when the world refuses to cooperate with our desire to read it. We remain perpetual students, or perhaps merely captives of the illusion of having learned. To maintain this readability, we willingly—even eagerly—pay a heavy price. 

The Haier Brothers leaves us with an ambiguous legacy: a drive to render the world as a readable text, underpinned by an avoidance of the unreadable, a misrecognition of transparency, and a reflexive reliance on standard answers. It shaped not only our optimism but also the blind spots and barriers of that very optimism. Perhaps we were destined to become the sterile yet courageous Haier Brothers; yet in the 2020s, as the certainties we once held begin to falter on a daily basis, we may find ourselves preferring the company of the clumsy Crude, exclaiming at every turn: “Ah—now this is a hard problem!”

Ding Dawei is a curator, writer, and producer based in Paris and Beijing. His practice encompasses documentary forms, archival research, experimental cinema, and video installation, with a particular focus on how images are produced, circulated, and consumed through viewing apparatuses and infrastructural conditions. In 2017, he founded the Beijing International Short Film Festival (BISFF), where he continues to serve as Festival Director. As a producer, he has collaborated on projects selected for major international film festivals, including the Berlinale, the Locarno Film Festival, and Cinéma du Réel. His work has been exhibited in museums and art institutions worldwide.