No other filmmaker has been more immersed in the social upheavals of contemporary China than Wang Bing. Beginning with “Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks” (2003) a three-part, nine-hour look at the painful decline of a once-thriving industrial zone, the 52-year-old documentarian has consistently portrayed those dispossessed amid the changing landscape of his rapidly developing country.

Dislocation is Wang’s great theme and the subject of “Bitter Money,” his 2016 portrait of young rural migrants who leave their villages for low-paying jobs in the booming garment factories of Huzhou. (The film, along with five of his other documentaries, is available on the new OVID.tv subscription streaming service.)

Wang’s camera wanders among the lives of the men and women who have flocked to the sewing factories. Sensation precedes explanation. Using no narration in his fly-on-the-wall vérité, Wang resembles the American documentarian Frederick Wiseman. But where Wiseman explores institutions, Wang focuses on individuals. He follows them — into their workplaces and homes (often the same), recording their conversations and family relationships.

Wang spent two years filming “Bitter Money,” maintaining that he shot 2,000 hours for this two-and-a-half-hour film. Working alone with a small digital video-camera customized with an autofocus lens, he seemingly blends into his subjects’ lives. Because he edits less and holds shots longer than more conventional documentarians, his films are akin to Warhol screen tests — full of revealing behavioral tics and transcendent empty moments. Wang’s presence is not exactly invisible but only occasionally addressed. “Time to sleep — you can film tomorrow,” one man tells him. One wonders if the existence of China’s extensive surveillance network has accustomed his subjects to this sort of attention.