Steel Dragon Plot Summary
The plot of Steel Dragon follows a young naïve Jim, who is inspired by an epic martial arts film to leave his mundane job in London to go travelling in China. Expecting temples and mountains, he arrives in Shanghai to experience the frightening polluted chaos of the city.
His alienated mood changes come the evening, when Shanghai transforms to a glitzy Bladrunner-like wonder. Jim meets a Chinese girl Lucy in a bar, and through their conversation he finds out about Shanghai’s troubled past, and the fierce pride that Lucy (and the Chinese) have in their country and its recent success. Lucy and her husband are going on a cruise with friends up the Yangtze river to visit her parents, and Jim agrees to travel with them.
They take a train from Shanghai and Jim becomes aware of the incredible growth of the city and the flow of hundreds of millions of people from the countryside into the cities. They leave the train and board a cruise ship. The cruise becomes a journey into China’s past, and Jim marvels at the epic landscape of the gorges, and historic temples.
This historic vision however is tempered by discovering the massive destruction caused by the Three Gorges Dam, and the scale of pollution and development. Jim visits an industrial town, and is shocked at the sight of thousands of anonymous factory workers doing appallingly menial jobs, along with the huge steel plants belching out coal fumes.
Afterwards Jim clashes with Lucy- he calls the treatment of the factory workers inhuman, and accuses China of destroying its natural beauty. Lucy angrily replies that Jim has no understanding of poverty and what those jobs mean to the people. They are manufacturing goods for Western markets, many factories are run by Westerners- does Jim care how much the workers are paid when he buys his shirts or shoes? Of course not! The West has spent the last 150 years destroying the environment, and the USA still refuses to make compromises to its economy. How can a poor country like China be expected to change? Westerners are complete hypocrites.
Later they come to the village of Lucy’s parents, and Jim realises what life in rural China is really like. There is a protest by the villagers against officials who are seizing land for development with no compensation for the farmers. The clashes become violent and Jim is forced to leave his friends and go back to the boat cruise alone.
Jim decides to travel to a Buddhist pilgrimage mountain. Here amongst the monasteries and misty peaks he finally finds the tranquil China he had dreamed of. Yet it is an strange escapism, remote from the sweeping changes that China is undergoing, and that the West is intrinsically bound up with.