A Touch of Sin is a Chinese Film that is split into four different sections (and maybe one subsection) that showcases a different issue in China per section.

The first section discusses about the corruption in coal mines. Apparently, China has undergone a period where a bunch of coal mines popped out in remote villages. In this movie, in order to have the coal mines to be built, the village leader promised 40% of all profit earned to be redistributed to the villagers. However, what he said turned out to be a lie, and so he took the profit to himself. Due to the corrupt acts of the villager leader, one of the villagers (who worked in the coal mine) got upset with the leader and went berserk, killing a few villages, the coal mine manager, and the village leader himself.

The second section, I think, was about safety concerns for the regular pedestrian in China. The story starts off with a thief going over to his family’s village. They seemed quite poor, and so in order for the family to get money, the thief steals it from others. He was thinking about going to three different places (don’t know exactly why though). Later on, he leaves the village and at a factory workplace, he shoots two people and takes their purse in broad daylight. 

The third section section started with two lovers meeting up in a restaurant. She tells the man that she’ll give him six months to make up his mind over whether to choose her or his current wife. The women then goes to her workplace, and she finds the man’s wife along with a few other men and they beat her down. Later, the women once again goes to her workplace, which seems to be a place for prostitutes (although the women herself is a cleric), and after her worksheet was finished, she went up a floor to clean her clothes in a sauna. There she was bothered by a two rich men. To protect herself from getting violated, she kills them and then later confesses to the police over the phone

The last section addresses the concerns with one child policy. It begins with a guy accidentally cutting his hand because another guy was distracting him. As a result, he had to pay compensations while the other guy was healing. To avoid this, he runs away from the factory, and starts working at a high end brothel. There, he falls in love, but gets rejected by his lover. Since he cant face her any longer, he goes to work at another factory. However, since he is broke, and won’t receive another paycheck for some time, he asks money from the mother, in which she refuses to give. At this point, he’s quite stressed about the reality of life (he’s likely not used to it because he was the only child in the family, which made him a little spoiled I guess). Furthermore, the guy who cut his hand found the guy who was suppose to compensate him, adding to his stress. Ultimately, he suicided on the factory grounds. I think the combination of being spoiled as the only child and the stress he had while facing reality led to him suiciding. Also, perhaps subconsciously he felt the need to support his family, even though he was broke and was asking the money from the family.