Modern Spring and Autumn and Taiwanese Society
"In my view, "The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon" is deeply Confucian in its theology of Heaven's Mandate and its understanding of social ethics."
I watched The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon (a.k.a. Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon / Zhou Chu Chu San Hai, 2023) on the plane, with Chinese subtitles—appropriate for a Taiwanese film.
The story follows Chen Guilin, a professional killer who learns he is dying of cancer and discovers there are three criminals ranked above him on the most-wanted list. He decides to kill all three before he dies, so as to die as the worst person in Taiwan.
In my reading, this film is deeply Confucian. Chen Guilin’s killings are not gratuitous; they follow a logic of zhengming—“rectification of names.” Each of his targets has committed wrongs that go unpunished, and he appoints himself the instrument of Heaven’s judgment. His path is the Confucian ideal in violent miniature: inner sage, outer king; kill the corrupt to cleanse the world. The film does not endorse his killings; it presents them as tragic inevitability.
The three villains are vividly drawn, and the film’s political allegory is not subtle. Guiqing, the cult leader who uses spiritual authority to exploit his followers, invites comparison with figures in Taiwan’s recent political history. The doctor who uses his position to traffick organs has the cold efficiency of technocratic power. And Xiang Gangzai, the Cantonese-speaking gangster—whose name literally means “Hong Kong boy”—is an outsider who made himself at home in Taiwan’s underworld.
Lin Luhuo, Chen Guilin’s informant, is the film’s moral compass: she represents the mainland Chinese who find themselves caught between systems, neither fully belonging to Taiwan’s world nor fully separate from it. Cheng Xiaomei, the policewoman pursuing Chen Guilin, is Taiwan itself—the Orphan of Asia, as the poet Wu Zhuoliu once described it—trying to maintain order in a world that makes order seem absurd.
The film’s ending, in which Chen Guilin achieves his goal but finds no peace, tilts toward pessimism. Confucian ethics without a functional state to uphold them become private vigilantism. Heaven’s Mandate, invoked without a legitimate vessel, curdles into nihilism. Taiwan’s social problems—the cults, the corruption, the organ trafficking, the gangs—are real; the film does not pretend they can be solved by one man’s suicidal rampage. It mourns that they can’t be solved at all. That mourning spills beyond the frame.