"Meishi Street" (dir. Ou Ning)

The demolition of hutong neighborhoods in Beijing to make way for modern high-rises and other spoils of “development” has been well documented for years. Ou Ning‘s documentary Meishi Street, which traces a group of Beijingers’ attempt to resist the the onslaught of urban reconfiguring anticipating the 2008 Olympics, is prominent in the canon of documentation of these historic communities reduced to rubble.

Recently, new demolition stories have emerged in Beijing with regard to the home of famed Chinese architect Liang Sicheng, “horrifying heritage experts” and locals alike. Tania Branigan has the story in The Guardian:

Their appreciation of China‘s ancient buildings and their devotion to preserving its heritage made them two of the country’s most revered architects.

But now the home in Beijing where Liang Sicheng and his wife Lin Huiyin once worked lies in rubble – having fallen prey to the development they feared would destroy their city’s ancient streets.

The demolition has horrified heritage experts. Liang is known as the father of modern Chinese architecture, and much of his and Lin’s most important work was carried out while they were living in the courtyard house in Beizongbu Hutong in the 1930s.

It was knocked down by developers over the lunar New Year, despite the fact it is rare for labourers to work during the festival, raising suspicions that the company hoped to avoid publicity.

The tragic irony of this particular demolition presents a striking example of just how ruthless this culture of demolition has become in Beijing. In an article for The Atlantic, Jonathan Kaiman reflects on the historical precedents for demolition in Beijing, as well as Liang Sicheng’s own role in this legacy:

“Once a mistake is made,” Liang once wrote, “it may take a hundred years to correct it, during which residents will have to endure endless sufferings.” In other words, Mao’s party put politics before urban planning, and now some residents are paying for it with their homes.

"Fujian Blue" (dir. Weng Shuoming)

Robin Weng Shuoming‘s award winning feature Fujian Blue is available rent for all Comacast Cable on demand subscribers only until the end of January. Don’t miss a rare chance to see Chinese independent filmmaking on US cable on demand!

Fujian Blue is a thrilling narrative portrayal of reckless youth, corruption, and heartache in of southern China’s most telling social environments.

A full review by Mike Fu can be found here:

“Subtropical reveries of money, sex, and power dominate the golden triangle of southern China in this gritty neorealist drama from Robin Weng (Weng Shouming). Featuring idyllic natural landscapes side by side with Fujian province’s urban sprawl, Weng’s narrative follows a group of young hoodlums circulating carefree in a vapid nightlife of karaoke bars and dance halls. By day, they pursue a more malicious endeavor to extort money from local housewives, whose husbands have made their fortunes abroad and left them floundering at home. The film opens contrasting rows of decrepit houses with breathtaking mansions, reminiscent of a southern Californian suburb, glistening beneath the sun. Already the dichotomy of contemporary Chinese society becomes apparent: the rift between haves and have-nots threatens to grow ever wider, and the stakes only become higher for a younger generation willing to risk everything.”

An underpinning of democratic participation may have led to the end of the TV hit "Super Girls" (courtesy Getty Images)

The recent Presidential elections in Taiwan have been a hot topic in Chinese discussion circles, not only due to observations of how differently politicians are treated in democratic Taiwan, but also because access to news of the democratic process down south has been surprisingly unrestrained in both state media and online. Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times reports:

As the election played out on Saturday, a palpable giddiness spread through the Twitter-like microblog services that have as many as 250 million members. They marveled at how smoothly the voting went, how graciously the loser, Tsai Ing-wen, conceded and how Mr. Ma gave his victory speech in the rain without the benefit of an underling’s umbrella — in contrast with the pampering that Chinese officials often receive.

“It’s all anyone on Weibo was talking about this weekend,” said Zhang Ming, a political science professor at Renmin University in Beijing, referring to Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblog service.

The widespread news of the Taiwan elections on both blogs and mainstream news sources like Xinhua, is unexpected, given the frequent state suppression of democratic rumblings–even in a strictly apolitical context. The TV show Super Girls, a voter-driven talent show and the subject of Jian Yi‘s documentary Super Girls!, was recently given the ax after numerous successful seasons on air. The reason for the show’s end was ostensibly the program’s questionable ethical content, though many speculated that the show’s audience-driven democratic backbone was to blame for the plug being pulled.

In any case, the unforeseen openness of information regarding the elections in Taiwan is addressed in Jacob’s article:

As is typical for politically sensitive news events, Chinese newspapers were instructed to run only Xinhua’s account of the election, but many editors appeared to make up for such constraints by running banner headlines, splashy graphics and large photographs of a triumphant, rain-soaked president. “No one told us we couldn’t put the election on our front page, so that’s what we did,” one editor of a large daily newspaper said subversively.

David Bandurski, a researcher at Hong Kong University’s China Media Project, said the disparity in coverage between the state media and privately owned Internet portals suggested that officials were still unsure how to grapple with a rapidly evolving medium. “The control regime, if you call it that, is still trying to catch up,” he said. “If their approach is too stringent, they risk a blowback.”

Whatever the culture surrounding state news coverage media programming, the blogosphere proves to be a force to be reckoned with, absorbing and proliferating information and creating a truly new kind of dialogue.

"Tape" (dir. Li Ning)

By Maya Eva Gunst Rudolph 

A fleet of masked vigilantes are taking Beijing—and leaving a trail of public spectacle in their wake. A trend of “superhero mimicry” growing popular in Beijing was recently reported on by J. David Goodman for the New York Times‘s Lede blog. These anonymous good Samaritans, adopting names like “The Incredible Shining Knight” and “Chinese Redbud Woman,” have been running wild on the streets of Beijing–and all over weibo and baidu blogs–engaging in small acts of public benevolence.

While the admittedly low-key feats of these grassroots heroes skew more towards random acts of kindness than Batman-caliber vengeance against the forces of evil, these public displays of goodwill are heartening rarities in the landscape of public meddling in China. Late last year, the news of the apparent apathy of shoppers at a Hardware Market in Foshan who passed by an injured two-year old child left bleeding on the ground exploded on the blogosphere, causing many to lament a Chinese society bereft of ethical compassion. This sense of a social dysmorphia is both exhibited and questioned in Huang Weikai‘s documentary Disorder, in which the ebb and flow of social passivity and activity unfold amid discombobulating incidents of civil disobedience, misplaced justice, and editing techniques designed to both fragment and reproduce the natural chaos of urban life.

While many may find this superhero posturing inspiring, or at least entertaining, the larger social conditions of both spectacle and prohibition can’t be ignored. Though the internet has provided a vast arena for Chinese netizens to gripe, snoop, and offer unsolicited advice and judgment for all matter of undertakings, activities of a physical nature (even those as benign as aiding the poor and under-served), activities that suggest some level of public exhibition are still strictly discouraged by the powers-that-be. As Disorder makes boggling apparent with a sophisticated pastiche of larger-than-life images, surreally-presented ironies, and an overarching awareness of documentary’s essential condition as simulacra, both the presentation and reality of China’s cities are alive with spectacle. These pantomime superheroics, complete with Marvel Comic capes and masks, are simply a deliberate participation in the role-playing that exists inherently in city streets, on the internet, in a filmmaker’s lens. In the documentary Tape, filmmaker and performer Li Ning leads his dance troupe onto the streets of Jinan, exhibiting a dramatic swirl of performance art and movement on highway medians, under overpasses, and on moving truckbeds. Li Ning’s highly experimental style as a dancer and choreographer is partially an exercise in juxtaposition, in the melding and examination of performance as organic and inorganic activity in unexpected spaces, but also suggests some of the public stage mentality that informs these Superhero deeds. Indeed, it is partially this blurring of performance and daily life that has also brought us the microblog, the flash mob, and the documentation of everyday spectacles from youtube to feature films.

In both Huang and Li’s documentary efforts, in which the filmmaker is positioned as both participant and observer of a highly dramatic landscape; in the case of these theatrical acts of Superhero altruism and the effective introduction of fantastic figures into the reality of urban life; in examining the state structure that forbids these acts of performance and documentation and is subverted by individuals employing both technology and personal conviction, there is no clear line between perception and engagement, performance and reality, spectacle and “real life.” As it appears in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle—a useful point of departure for this examination of modern urban activity—“reality emerges within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real.” In this sense, everything, from what is created actively to what is experienced passively to various modes of documenting these events, is connected in the sphere of the spectacle.

"Struggle" (dir. Shu Haolun)

Shenzhen’s Foxconn factory, made famous last year by a trend of worker suicides that created a global moment of uncomfortable horror, is probably the most well-known factory in the world. Employing hundreds of thousands of young Chinese migrants and manufacturing a huge chunk of the world’s electronics—including the hand-crafting of Apple products—the controversy surrounding the Foxconn factory have been painted as a perfect storm of corporate corruption, the absence of protective labor laws and worker’s rights in China, and the imbalanced hypocrisy of a world with an exponential demand for electronics.

Indeed, even amid the celebratory tributes following Steve Jobs’s death last year, some gristlier postmortem appeared, examining sharply the conditions of Apple’s complicity in the miserable culture of anonymous labor at Foxconn. But while the 2010 suicides brought some attention to the plight of Foxconn workers, a recent resurgence of familiar issues has made it perfectly that even some international criticism  has yielded little reform. Put plainly by a recent Atlantic article, “Foxconn is still a hard place to work.” 

Workers at Wuhan's Foxconn Factory (photo courtesy of club.china.com)

Earlier this month, a group of workers at the Foxconn plant in Wuhan ascended the factory roof in a mass “suicide protest.” Around 300 Foxconn workers, bereft of any union or protective labor laws, took to the roof threatening a mass suicide if their work conditions did not improve. According to an article by The Telegraph‘s Malcolm Moore:

“We were put to work without any training, and paid piecemeal,” said one of the protesting workers, who asked not to be named. “The assembly line ran very fast and after just one morning we all had blisters and the skin on our hand was black. The factory was also really choked with dust and no one could bear it,” he said.

Several reports from inside Foxconn factories have suggested that while the company is more advanced than many of its competitors, it is run in a “military” fashion that many workers cannot cope with. At Foxconn’s flagship plant in Longhua, five per cent of its workers, or 24,000 people, quit every month.

“Because we could not cope, we went on strike,” said the worker. “It was not about the money but because we felt we had no options. At first, the managers said anyone who wanted to quit could have one month’s pay as compensation, but then they withdrew that offer. So we went to the roof and threatened a mass suicide”.

The culture surrounding Foxconn and the divisive question of Apple and other American corporations’ involvement therein was also recently explored in an episode of WBEZ radio’s This American Life. The episode, entitled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” follows the Apple enthusiast and reporter Mike Daisey and his seemingly-simple quest to find out who made his iPhone and iPad and what their lives are like—information that Apple would apparently like to keep quiet. Kicking off the episode, host Ira Glass conducts a telling interview with an unexpected guest: Siri, the robotic voice of the iPhone 4S. “Siri, where were you manufactured?” asks Glass. “I’m not allowed to say,” is Siri’s eerie reply.

Shu Haolun‘s 2001 documentary Struggle examines a rare attempt made to bolster workers’ rights and address some of the egregious neglect visited upon injured workers at factories like Foxconn. Following the story of lawyer Zhou Litai and his clients, factory workers injured on the job and subsequently dismissed without compensation, Struggle highlights just how perversely the odds are stacked against factory workers. Deprived of any organizational power, factory workers are treated as disposable assets—even those who get injured at work, even those like the Foxconn workers whose distress has led to unthinkable acts of desperation.

While the labor abuses made in the name of filling a staggering demand for electronics has often been painted with an undercurrent of First World/Developing World tension, the exploding–or possibly even explosive–market for Apple products in China is simply adding another layer to the already convoluted miasma of problems. For Foxconn, Apple, a world greedy for more electronics, and a sea of workers with severely limited options, the struggle continues.

Zhou Hao presents "The Transition Period"

In the wake of the now-disbanded protests in Wukan, much attention has been paid to the somewhat unconventional methods employed by Wang Yang, the CCP secretary of Guangdong Province. The New York Times‘s Sharon LaFraniere reports:

Mr. Wang, the up-and-coming Communist Party secretary of the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, faced a political turning point when 13,000 irate residents of Wukan evicted their leaders and barricaded themselves in their coastal village for 13 days in a last-straw uprising against local corruption.

Given a choice of storming the village with armed police officers or conceding that the villagers’ complaints had merit, Mr. Wang chose the latter. And in a single morning, he defused a standoff that had drawn unflattering worldwide news coverage.

The decision won him praise in the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, which called it an act of “political courage” in a tense situation. Some analysts said it might have strengthened his already strong prospects to land a seat on China’s elite ruling body, the nine-member Standing Committee of the party’s Politburo, when a wave of mandatory retirements vacates seven of the seats this coming year.

The intense international focus on an individual government official is by no means insignificant–especially a government official whose ideology has historically gone against popular trend. Writes LaFraniere of Wang’s early days in the politbureau, “he talked of “thought emancipation” and the need to pioneer changes — and just as quickly hit head winds.” 

Still, any scrutiny of government officials can reveal the frustration and complexity of Chinese civil service, as shown in Zhou Hao‘s 2011 documentary The Transition Period, which traces the hierarchical ascent of Guo Yongchang, an official in Henan Province. From exposing the outrageous money-grubbing and drinking culture that characterizes much of government work; to scenes of a government official placating citizen protestors in public and then threatening the same protesters behind closed doors; to examining Guo’s ethical struggles, The Transition Period shows the convoluted fabric of government service. In a post-Wukan era, when many are questioning the government’s actions and responsibility towards under-served villagers, The Transition Period provides a compelling window into how government officials operate and how progress is made–and stymied–by a government apparatus from top to bottom.

LaFraniere quotes Guangdong local official Zheng Yanxiong, whose area of jurisdiction includes Wukan and who laments the roles of government cadres:

 “Your powers decline every day, and you have fewer and fewer methods at your disposal — but your responsibility grows bigger and bigger every day.”

“Ordinary people want more and more every day,” he continued. “They grow smarter every day, and they are harder and harder to control.

“Today’s government officials are having a hard time.”

"Though I Am Gone" (dir. Hu Jie

China News Watch‘s Stephen Chan, discussing a recent CCTV broadcast, reports on recent efforts made by Xi Jinping and the CCP to “to step up ideological control of students and young lecturers” at Chinese Universities. Recently enacted, wide-spread initiatives to tighten controls and censorship of Chinese cultural life–from the internet to TV and film and beyond–are now increasingly apparent in the education system. Said Chan, “Universities have long been regarded as the most important stronghold for the party’s grip on ideology.” 

While many have lamented the Party’s recent social control initiatives to be retrogressive, these changes proposed by Xi–the presumed successor to current CCP President Hu Jintao–are dually troubling, stirring up uncomfortable memories of education “reforms” made during the Cultural Revolution.

Hu Jie‘s 2007 film Though I am Gone exhibits some of the horrifying effects of educational controls run tragically amok in the mid-1960s. Hu’s film documents Revolutionary fervor perverted to violence, telling the story of a group of Red Guard students who fatally attacked their teacher Bian Zhongyun in 1966. Accused of being a “Rightist” and counter-revolutionary, Bian was a Beijing educator whose death represents the senseless brutality of the Cultural Revolution era—much of it sprung from dogmatic control and misplaced ideology.

Chen reports on Xi’s strategy within the  university system:

Xi also emphasised the importance of keeping an eye on lecturers, especially young ones.

“Young teachers have many interactions with students and cast significant influence on them,” Xi said, adding that their political opinions and moral standards “have a very strong influence on students. They also play a very important role in the spread of ideas”.

Xi said universities must make it a paramount task to “instruct” the thoughts of young lecturers and recruit more of them to join the party.

"If You Are The One" Courtesy of Reuters

Times are hard in the world of Chinese reality TV. If You Are The One (Fei Cheng Wu Rao), China’s mega-popular answer to reality TV dating shows, has been gradually feeling the pinch of SARTF’s tightening regulations on entertainment broadcasting. Edward Wong of The New York Times reports in the latest in a series of articles entitled “Culture and Control“:

[R]egulators formulated a sweeping policy that takes effect on Sunday and effectively wipes out scores of entertainment shows on prime-time television. The authorities evidently determined that trends inspired by “If You Are the One” and a popular talent show, “Super Girl,” had gone too far, and they responded with a policy to curb what they call “excessive entertainment.”

That a dating show could help set off the toughest crackdown on television in years exposes the growing tension at the heart of the Communist Party’s control of the entertainment industry. For decades, the party has pushed television networks here to embrace the market, but conservative cadres have grown increasingly fearful of the kinds of programs that court audiences, draw advertising and project a global image not shaped by the state. Television, after all, occupies a singular position in the state’s media arsenal: with its 1.2 billion viewers and more than 3,000 channels, it is the party’s greatest vehicle for transmitting propaganda, whether through the evening news or staid historical dramas.

Still, If You Are The One hasn’t met quite the same fate as Super Girls. The one-time uncontested queen of Chinese reality TV and subject of Jian Yi‘s documentary Super, Girls! was cancelled last year amid a whirl of audience anguish. It’s the same sweep of regulations that ended Super Girls, though, that is now reigning in a wider spectrum of media and popular culture. Wong reports:

The tightening of television is at the fore of a major new effort to control culture overseen by President Hu Jintao that is also permeating film, publishing, the Internet and the performing arts.

Jian Yi films "Super, Girls!"

If You Are The One and Super Girls, both seemingly as innocuous as their American counterparts (The Bachelor, American Idol, etc.) have evidently pressed political buttons and brought to light some sensitive issues. From the democratic voting process of Super Girls (in a fashion similar to American Idol, fans were able to vote for their favored singers) to frank talk of a younger generation’s sex and money woes on If You Are The One, the controversy surrounding these shows has proven more than purely spectacular.

The censorship to If You Are The One, once lauded as the raunchiest, most irreverent star in the Chinese TV galaxy, has been a long time coming:

 Fans of “If You Are the One” immediately noticed the changes when the June 26 episode aired. Most obvious was the addition of a third host — Huang Han was a mother who taught psychology at the local party school. All the female contestants had been replaced. The new ones were more subdued. So were the male contestants. And there was no mention of their incomes. “We started to choose older participants who have a stronger desire for marriage,” Mr. Wang said.

Each episode now had to be reviewed at least six times in-house before broadcast, one person said. The producers still asked the hosts to steer talk toward social topics, but more subtly. “The comments made by contestants weren’t as incisive as before,” said Guo Wei, 34, a longtime fan.

The effects of this censorship, apart from disappointing a devoted fan-base, are yet to be fully felt in the Chinese TV world and beyond. The internet, where state grip is slightly less ubiquitous, is proving a crucial tool in keeping entertainment alive and accessible.

Mr. Wang said he hoped the censors, when they whittle down the entertainment shows, keep in mind that “If You Are the One” made changes when asked. The show now tries to win ratings not through fiery dialogue, but by promoting itself online and bringing on overseas Chinese contestants. On the show’s Web site, all the episodes from the show’s first half-year have been deleted. “Our show,” he said, “is one that obeys the rules.”

"Though I Am Gone" (dir. Hu Jie)

With the release of films such as Hu Jie’s Though I Am Gone (2006), Wang Bing’s Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007) and Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (2008), there seems to have been a growth of interest in recent years in the relationship between film, memory and the notion of witnessing in Chinese Language Cinema. The aim of this symposium is to explore this trend in relation to work produced in the People’s Republic, Hong Kong, Taiwan and diasporic China through documentary filmmaking, fiction film and video art.

This symposium has been jointly organised by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of Glasgow and Ricefield Chinese Arts and Cultural Centre as part of Takeaway China, a festival of film and photography from China held annually in Glasgow.

Among the dGenerate titles screening will be Xu Tong‘s Fortune Teller, Hu Jie‘s Though I Am Gone, and Robin Weng Shuoming‘s Fujian Blue.

For more information about the symposium and Takeaway China festival, including abstracts, speakers’ biographies and details of film screenings, please go to www.takeawaychina.com

This symposium is free of charge, but as places are limited all delegates much register by Friday, 20th January. For further information and to reserve a place please contact Dr Philippa Lovatt at p.lovatt.1@research.gla.ac.uk

Known internationally for his artistic and interdisciplinary projects, which have become inseparable from steadfast political convictions and consequences, Ai Weiwei here addresses his work as a documentary filmmaker (many of these films are available on youtube), his concept of “social investigations,” the line between documentary and performance art, and his collaboration with other filmmakers.

Writes Sniadecki:

It is clear that Ai’s outspoken internet postings and his activism contributed to his detention, but another related cause that has been less explored in overseas discussions is his role as a documentary filmmaker. Working with a production team organized through his Beijing studio—his residence and his main headquarters located in the northwest corner of the capital—Ai has released eight guerilla-style documentaries and many short online videos that, in their rough style and critical approach, seek to initiate a space of open inquiry and free speech around social issues in China. These goals may appear similar to those pursued by Chinese independent filmmakers such as Wang Bing, Zhao Liang, and Zhao Dayong, but Ai’s work is far more confrontational, far more directly political in function, and absolutely devoid of concern for both cinema aesthetics and the status of the artist. His are hard-hitting activist films that are shot in-situ, edited together swiftly, and then immediately posted online to contribute to his larger project of unmasking abuses of power and egregious cover-ups. Thus, his films are akin to the work of Guangzhou-based activist Ai Xiaoming’s films and Xu Xin’s Karamay (2010), the powerful six-hour documentary about a tragic fire that claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent schoolchildren in an oil town in the northwestern province of Xinjiang (Ai’s studio staff actually helped Xu Xin post Karamay online). Yet the major difference here is that Ai’s interventionist filmmaking often compels him to puncture the body of the film itself by appearing on screen to present challenges to authorities in direct defiance of their power. In fact, what captivates and thrills Chinese audiences—the majority of whom view these films on laptops after downloading them for the brief window that the films remain undetected by internet police—is exactly the daring verbal assaults Ai hurls at police officers and officials who fail to respond to his demands for fairness, justice, and greater transparency.

The interview can be accessed here in its entirety.