By Isabella Tianzi Cai

Earlier this month, the story of a dead Chinese college student circulated the Internet under close monitoring by Chinese press authorities.  The 23-year-old man, Zhao Wei, was a college student making his way home by train. He traded his seat with a passenger in another car so as to stay close with his friend. Somewhere during this exchange, he got on the bad side of his train conductor. He was led away by railway police and mysteriously died.

An initial autopsy report ruled that Zhao’s death was due to his jumping off the train. His body suffered many injuries, with signs also showing that he had been handcuffed. Unconvinced by the findings, Zhao’s bereft parents have been trying to petition the authorities to investigate further. As stated by official Chinese news channels, the case will be properly handled by the railway police, which, ironically, may have also caused the death.

Zhao’s tragic death and its murky aftermath echo the December 8, 1994 fire incident in Urumqi, which is explored in a powerful documentary, Karamay, by Xu Xin. In both these incidents, ordinary young people were victims. The Karamay fire raged in a theater where roughly 1,000 students and teachers gathered to perform for a visiting delegation of government officials. Because of inadequate fire escape routes and instructions, 323 people, including 284 children, were killed, while nearly all the officials, who were the first to be evacuated, left unscathed.

As the details of Zhao’s horrifying death have leaked into China’s public sphere, they have triggered concern over public safety issues. Upon learning of Zhao’s death, people have reason to think that if such police brutality can happen on a train, it can happen elsewhere as well. The Karamay fire also had this effect on those who learned the facts of the matter. The victims’ parents had all intuitively treated the theater as a safe public venue for their children, but were tragically let down.

As distressing as Zhao’s death is the apparently futile quest for justice by his parents, whose efforts have proven powerless against a giant state apparatus. The parents of the Karamay incident suffered a similar fate. As described in Xu Xin’s epic investigation, their years of tireless efforts to demand an official apology have resulted in nothing. They have had to put up with not only the the trauma of their personal loss, but the apathy and indifference of the authorities.

Another similarity between the two incidents is the  media blackout that surrounded both of them. Since the Karamay fire, only upbeat news reports about the fire circulated in the public, paying lip service to the victims while assuring that new safety measures will prevent such a tragedy from happening again. Seventeen years have now passed. One may judge how much China’s media landscape has evolved from the excerpt of an article by David Bandurski below:

The fact that the Zhao Wei story is still being actively scrubbed from the Internet, combined with the fact that no other mainstream media have touched the story, strongly suggests there has been some sort of directive from press authorities on this story that either defines it as off-limits or sends the signal that coverage is risky.

Many thanks to David Bandurski for bringing the story of Zhao Wei to greater attention. David is editor of the Chinese Media Project, and also the producer of films directed by Zhao Dayong, including Ghost Town and Street Life, both distributed by dGenerate.

Karamay will screen on Sunday April 3 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, as part of the series Fearless: Chinese Independent Documentaries.

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1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

In the newest issue of RealTime Arts Magazine, there is a rousing article by Dan Edwards on the significance of digital independent filmmaking in China. Here’s the opening passage:

While China’s political system remains deeply authoritarian, the country’s overwhelming size and explosive growth have opened cavernous gaps in the government’s control of culture, through which a new generation of DV-wielding documentary filmmakers has climbed.

Edwards profiles films such as Hu Jie’s In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul, Ou Ning’s Meishi Street, and Du Haibin’s 1428 (editor: The latter two are distributed by dGenerate Films). He also interviews three notable figures in the contemporary digital filmmaking scene: producer/journalist David Bandurski (Ghost Town), artist/filmmaker Ou Ning and filmmaker/journalist Hu Jie. Here are some choice quotes from each:

Bandurski: “I’ve never heard an independent filmmaker in China ask themselves, ‘Can I do this?… Independent filmmaking is the freest avenue of expression that exists in China today.”

Ou: “Before, history only had one version—by the Chinese Communist Party… Now with digital technology history has different versions.”

Hu: “I knew very little about the history of the 1950s and 60s… While making Lin Zhao I had the sense that I was feeling around in the dark. Then I found the door of history, opened it and walked through. There I found a lot of ridiculous, cruel stories that really shocked me, and that was the motivation to go further.”

Read the complete article at RealTime Arts.

Find out more about Meishi Street, 1428, and Ghost Town.

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Zhao Dayong

“How China is using art (and artists) to sell itself to the world” is an informative and insightful article in The Star by Murray Whyte. It analyzes China’s recent boom in cultural and media industries and its discontents—a burgeoning scene of individual expression. dGenerate directors Ou Ning and Zhao Dayong and producer David Bandurski are featured in the article as prominent representatives of the alternative art scene.

For Whyte, China’s recent supports and displays of cultural development reflect the government’s deep desire to raise “soft power”– “the ability of a political body to get what it wants through cultural or ideological attraction”–in order to match its huge economic development. The efforts include the plans for new museums and “creative districts” nationwide, proliferation of a glossy magazine industry that embraces Western excess, participation in global cultural events such as the Frankfurt Book Fair, the induction of formerly underground filmmakers back into state-run studios, and the production of big-budget political blockbusters such as The Founding of a Republic.

These splashy, showy displays, contrary to common expectation, do not indicate progress in free expression. Artist and activist Ou Ning, whom the article identifies as a “tireless campaigner for cultural freedom,” refers to the overwhelming urban reconstruction making place for the creative districts as “trading a specific brand of artistic freedom for a broader tyranny.” Commenting on the burgeoning media and culture landscape, David Bandurski (producer of Ghost Town) of Hong Kong University’s China Media Project notes, “This has nothing to do with the vibrancy of culture, or the diversity of culture.” Instead, he continues, “[The government] wants a renaissance, but they want it to happen under party control.”

Beneath this superficial and artificial glamor, the article also notices a “thriving underground scene” that represents a “new kind of expression that has sprouted amid the state-mandated cultural flowering.” Documentary film, as the article quotes Ou Ning again, is the country’s new frontier for individual expression. Among them, Ghost Town by Zhao Dayong and San Yuan Li by Ou Ning and Cao Fei both depict abandoned landscapes and lives, one left “on the distant margins of a country pushed into modernization overdue,” the other “swallowed by Guangzhou’s land-gobbling development.” Although Zhao Dayong defines his work as more individual expression than political act, Ou Ning and Whyte both see the progressive effects of this growing individual expression. The article concludes with Ou’s remark, “Everyone to make a small change in their daily lives. That’s how society can change: individually, step by step, by all of us.”

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