The Olympic Stadium in Beijing, designed by Ai Weiwei in the city he now calls "a nightmare"

In his essay posted on The Daily Beast on August 28, 2010, artist Ai Weiwei rants about Beijing being a nightmarish city for anyone to live in. He says that the rapid economic progress of China has ironically made its capital unrecognizable and its people identity-less, and the country’s political rigidity has only worsened these problems.

In a depressing overview of the people living in Beijing, Ai sorts them into one of the two categories. One, he says, are the money-grabbers and power-worshippers who are distressingly predictable. “You don’t want to look at a person walking past because you know exactly what’s on his mind.” Frustrated, he goes on. “No curiosity. And no one will even argue with you.” The other category, which refers to the mass middle to low wage earners in the city, sounds just as pitiful. “I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope,” Ai observes.
The hopelessness that Ai tries to describe has a particular dimension. Working like dogs and making little money certainly could deject people, but the essay makes a turn as Ai brings up the issue of trust between the Chinese people and the Chinese government, which is known to be one of the biggest culprit behind China’s low Gross National Happiness index. In his own words, “[the] worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system.” This sense of mistrust chisels away people’s happiness whenever they find a need for justice. And that happens almost everyday in Beijing, as some films in our catalog can attest to.

Ou Ning’s Meishi Street, for example, zooms in on a common Beijinger’s struggle with the government about the demolition of his house for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Cui Zi’en’s We Are the . . . of Communism, documents the capricious providence of education for migrant workers’ children in Beijing. What these two examples share in common is that the basic needs and rights of the common people in Beijing cannot be met, and the mechanism to obtain justice is often unavailable.

And yet, Ai’s portrayal of Beijing as a land of total darkness does not paint a complete picture of the complexity of life in this city of  nearly 25 million people. Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide and Oxhide II are examples of Beijing residents’ preservation of their cultural identity. Although the city of Beijing changes its face almost every day to the point of defiling its rich heritage, inside people’s homes time-honored traditions like dumpling-making continue, testifying to the resilience of their culture. Watching Liu’s intimate, heartfelt family dinner with her parents makes us temporarily forget the unpleasant world outside their home. Moreover, as Liu’s father says in the documentary, each person makes his own dumplings, just as each person has a distinct character. Ai may still believe and argue that the people of Beijing are uniform and predictable, but in the less conspicuous corners of Beijing we see how individual identities as well as non-mainstream group identities secretly flourish. We can count on the dedicated efforts of independent Chinese filmmakers to reveal those worlds to us.

Relevant Classroom Use

The following is a translation of an announcement from the Bishan Harvestival found on artist/curator/filmmaker Ou Ning’s Weibo feed. It is translated by Isabella Tianzi Cai.

The Bishan Harvestival is a three-day festival of performances, discussions and other events organized on the topic of rural culture in China. It will be held in Bishan village in Yi County, Anhui Province, August 26-28. More details can be found on Ou Ning’s website Alternative Archive.

Ou Ning is the director of Meishi Street and San Yuan Li, both available through dGenerate.

Xiuli Film Lot in Li County of Anhui Province

Bishan Harvestival
Film screenings: Paradox of Reality: Contemporary Documentaries on the Chinese Countryside
Time: August 28, 2011 10:00-18:00
Place: The Film Theater at Xiuli Film Lot in Yi County of Anhui Province

The Chinese independent film movement, which started in the early 1990s, has consistently delved into the vast undocumented reality of Chinese society, recording life in the time of change and writing history from the micro perspective of one individual. Many filmmakers associated with this movement show great concern over the changing living conditions of Chinese villagers and their outlook on life; these filmmakers have devoted tremendous energy in bringing forth the social problems, the political movements, the religious practices, the customs and traditions, and the preservation of history in rural China. They are often seen around villagers’ houses and fields, using their lens to sculpture the changing times experienced by a time-honored agricultural society under the myriad forces of modernization. Their documentaries are one of the most valuable historical records of rural China.

The documentaries selected for the Bishan Harvestival this year include Li Yifan’s film about religious organizations and village governance and its impact on villagers’ daily lives in Sichuan,  Mao Chenyu’s trilogy on family planning, death, and mysticism, Guo Xizhi’s two films on small towns’ political reforms and relocation projects, Lu Xinyu’s focused study on the daily events in a small village in Huizhou, and two other films made by two villagers under the supervision of Wu Wenguang. The aforementioned first four filmmakers perceive reality from an outsider’s perspective whereas the latter two belong to the rural world of their subject – therefore, their films are self-portraits.

During the making of these documentaries about Chinese village life, the filmmakers have consciously minimized their elitism. They went down to the grassroots level and created a leveled field of vision to use for their documentaries. They let reality speak for itself and let images forge their own objectivity. In the villagers’ documentaries, the comments and suggestions given by professionals were treated as advice; during the production stage, the professionals all “exit stage left” and let villagers take the central roles. This method harbingers a kind of imagistic democracy in the age of affordable digital filmmaking for the common people; it stands out against the rampant elitism in today’s culture as a big step forward; and it corresponds to the principles behind rural development since the time of the Republic of China (1912-1949).

Relevant Classroom Use

Demolition Dominates the Residents of Beijing in "Meishi Street"

In China Beat, Jared Hall reports on the spate of public protests that have been prevalent throughout the expansion of the Beijing subway system. Hall focuses on the story of Wang Shibo, whose family shop was slated for demolition to make way for a subway station, at the risk of ruining the family financially:

According to Wang, the family invested practically everything they had to renovate the small clothing shop. But when the subway corporation abruptly presented a notice of eviction, they were reportedly offered just two percent of their investment back in compensation. The very public confrontation with the subway corporation that followed attracted the interest of the international press and a delegation from the National People’s Congress. The shop was torn down two weeks later, but not before an agreement was quietly reached with the family.

Dramatic as the Wang family’s crisis in the face of demolition may be (at one point Wang’s parents doused themselves with gasoline and threatened to burn themselves), it’s a situation that is anything but uncommon in Beijing. In just the past ten years, Hall reports, the Beijing subway system has grown at a staggering pace, from two lines totaling 54 km to 14 lines at 336 km, with another 5 lines on the way.  The subway’s expansion has touched nearly every Beijing neighborhood in the process, though it is only one facet of a decade of ubiquitous urban demolition and renewal, transforming Beijing from a city of modest but distinct hutong alley neighborhoods to large blocks shadowed by expensive high-rise apartments, along with a steep rise in commercial value.

The disparity of value between the old and new buildings has transformed not just Beijing’s landscape but its demographics, with hundreds of thousands of longtime residents no longer able to afford to live in their neighborhoods, or even in the city proper. These citizens seemingly have little power to redress their plight, but according to Hall, one remarkable aspect of the situation is that displaced Beijing residents haven’t been completely helpless in facing the impending loss of their homes:

Their tactics included a combination of petitions and visits to government offices, public demonstrations, as well as lawsuits directed against the subway corporation. This particular repertoire of actions aligns exactly with those described by You-tien Hsing in her discussion of urban households resisting demolition more broadly. Even while operating within the political constraints of the capital, residents’ ability to first draw press coverage and then to extract a commitment from the subway corporation to rectify the problem should warn against dismissing localized resistance to expansion as futile.

One of the first films to thoroughly explore the plight of Beijing residents facing eviction is Meishi Street by Ou Ning. Filmed in the city’s buildup to the 2008 Olympics, the film shows residents fighting endless red tape and official indifference to protest the planned destruction of their homes in order to widen the streets of their neighborhood, located near Tiananmen Square.  Given video cameras by the filmmakers, the residents shoot breathtakingly candid footage of the eviction process.

Relevant Classroom Use

Ou NIng

In addition to being an artist, curator, writer, and director of the Shao Foundation, China’s cultural renaissance man Ou Ning is also an acclaimed documentary filmmaker. After making the experimental San Yuan Li in 2003 with Cao Fei and other members of the U-theque collective in Guangzhou, Ou Ning relocated to China’s capital, where he made Meishi St (2006) about the demolition of one of Beijing’s oldest areas in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics. Both films are now part of the dGenerate Films catalogue.

In March 2010 I interviewed Ou Ning in Beijing about his filmmaking career for an article I was writing on China’s independent documentary sector for RealTime Arts magazine in Australia. Only a few select quotes appeared in that piece, but the complete interview contains a wealth of fascinating material not only on Ou’s background, but also the rise of China’s “digital” documentary generation.

Thanks to Ou Ning for his time and for speaking so openly about some controversial matters. The interview was conducted mostly in English.

Dan Edwards: I believe you started your career as an editor and graphic designer. Can you tell me how you first became involved in filmmaking?

Ou Ning: In 1999 I was commissioned by Emei film studio to design a film magazine. When I got the magazine’s content I was very disappointed, as it was all just about movie stars and commercial movies. I advised the publishers to change the magazine, and along with Wu Wenguang I got them some content about independent films. The publishers were very happy and commissioned me as the editor.

At that time there were no real film critics in China. With the magazine we organised screenings in a group that became U-theque. I knew the Hong Kong film director and critic Shu Kei [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shu_Kei]. He had distributed a lot of art films in Hong Kong, and through him I was able to get the license to distribute a lot of films in China. The screenings we organised were very successful and U-theque grew very big.

In 2003 there was the “Zone of Urgency” at the Venice Biennale. The curator Hou Hanru wanted to discuss social problems in Asian cities, and he was particularly interested in “alternative spaces” in Asia. U-theque was a good example of an “alternative space” – a space that is freer than official institutions like museums. U-theque used to use a lot of ordinary spaces for screenings like bars and cafes. So they commissioned U-theque to make San Yuan Li.

Did the U-theque screenings take place in Guangzhou?

Actually U-theque began in Shenzhen. We had so many people we also moved to Guangzhou as well. We had a total of 800 members in both cities.

Is U-theque still active?

No. In 2003 an important historical event happened. After we made San Yuan Li, Nanfang Dushi Bao [Southern Metropolis Daily, a mainland newspaper famous for its investigative reporting] sponsored our retrospective of Jia Zhangke films in 2004. Then the death of the student Sun Zhigang was reported by the Southern Metropolis Daily [Sun was beaten to death while being arbitrarily detained by police in Guangzhou]. So the after that the Guangdong Government really hated the paper. They also hated the film, San Yuan Li. Actually they never saw the film, but San Yuan Li [an area in Guangzhou] had a reputation as one of the worst areas for drug abuse in China. They were afraid our film would publicise that.

Fifteen police broke into my office studio and took all my documents and DVDs. They were trying to prove U-theque was an illegal organisation – and that the Southern Metropolis Daily had supported an illegal organisation. They also wanted to take my computer but I insisted they could not take it.

Then they banned U-theque as an illegal organisation.

How did you come across the subject matter for your next film Meishi Street, and how did you first meet the main character, Zhang Jinli?

They really liked San Yuan Li in Europe. Both Le Monde and Le Figaro reported on it at the Venice Biennale.

In 2005, Germany’s Federal Cultural Foundation supported Shrinking Cities, a project looking at shrinking cities like Liverpool and Detroit. This drew my attention to the organisation, and they commissioned me to make a project about Beijing. But I quickly found Beijing was very different to Guangzhou.

Initially I wanted to make a film like San Yuan Li – ie not a traditional documentary film. In San Yuan Li there is no story, it’s just like a montage. I wanted to do one about Dashilan [an area in Beijing just south of Tiananmen Square]. All the footage in San Yuan Li was sped up, but in the new film about Beijing I wanted the whole thing very slow. So I shot a lot of footage in Dashilan. I went there for four days every week and interviewed a lot of people, shot every hutong – totally there are more than 100 hutongs in Dashilan, and I shot almost every one. So I had more than 200 hours of footage, shot over one year.

I met Zhang Jinli [the central character in Meishi St] one morning in 2005 – it was summer, very early morning. I got up about 6am and was shooting on Meishi Street. An old person came to me because he saw me with a camera and thought I was a journalist. He came to tell me, “Today something will happen at 179 Meishi Street” – the address of Zhang Jinli’s restaurant. As a documentary filmmaker, every day I was looking for a story. He told me something would happen at 9am, so I organised all my team and we went there.

At 9am Zhang Jinli hung his banners for the first time outside his restaurant and handed out flyers. When he saw me with my camera he got so excited – he thought, “Oh good, a journalist has come!”

I talked with him – that was the first time I met him. After that every time I went to Dashilan I would talk with him, and I found he was a really interesting man – a very smart guy. So I had a new idea. I decided to give a camera to him, teach him how to use it and ask him to document his protest and his daily life. Zhang Jinli’s character is very good – he’s very interesting and humorous. Because he was trying to protect his property I realised this was a very urgent story. So I wanted to make a film about his story first, and after that I would continue with my other project. So that’s how Meishi Street came about.

How long after you met Zhang Jinli did you decide to give him a camera and ask him to document his own story?

After I met him, it was one month later I gave the camera to him.

Was he keen, or did you have to persuade him?

Actually he is very open to new things. When I told him, “I am going to give the camera to you,” he was very happy. The first day he just took the camera and shot some of his friends in the park.

That scene is in the film…

Yeah, that’s right. He felt very excited – the most exciting thing for him was one time he hung the banners on the roof of his house. The police came to take down the banners. When he put the camera on the police, the police were very afraid of the camera. That made Zhang Jinli realise that actually the camera is a weapon for him. Then he was more motivated to shoot more footage.

I noticed in a lot of the footage in the film, Zhang is filming the police, but the police have cameras too.

Yeah, it’s very interesting. You can say that digital technology has had a great impact on Chinese political society. You can see at the end of the film during the demolition process, there are so many cameras on the scene. That means that there are some cameras from the police station, some from our team, some from NGO organisations. The digital technology has brought some opportunity to the people to document history by themselves. This is a great change in China. Before that, history only had one version, by the Chinese Communist Party, but now with digital technology history has different versions. History has a Zhang Jinli version, a Security Bureau version… there’s a lot of different versions, not just one version. That is a great progress in the political situation in China.

In terms of the final film, how much time did you actually spend on the street shooting Zhang’s story, and how much of the film did Zhang Jinli shoot himself? Did he shoot most of the footage that we see in the film?

Two-thirds is Zhang’s, one-third our team. In total he provided me with about 70 hours of footage. The last scene of the demolition is mainly by us, because Zhang is in the action, on screen.

And was Zhang involved in putting the film together during the editing process?

No, he just provided footage. That is why the film is directed by myself. Actually at that time Zhang Jinli didn’t have the opportunity to tell a story. The original idea was to give a camera to him and teach him to edit. That would be a more complete idea – just like Wu Wenguang did with his village project. He gave a camera to villagers and taught them to edit.

But Zhang Jinli, after this, bought a camera himself, opened a blog and he’s become very interested in digital technology and using all the different kinds of media to document his daily life. He is still in the process of trying to get his compensation. He now lives in his sister’s house. Before the Olympics the district government said they’d give him a house close to where he used to live as compensation, but after the Olympics when he went back to talk to them they ignored him.

So it sounds like it was quite an empowering experience for him, in terms of telling his own story and producing his own media?

Yeah, he is so smart. Every two or three days, or at least once a week, we would meet and he would provide his new footage. After one month I found he was not only shooting but also speaking – narrating. Like a journalist. So in Meishi Street we can see him becoming educated as a citizen journalist. We can see him acting just like a journalist, interviewing people.

Did you ever go back to your original project about Beijing?

After Meishi Street, I had so many new projects so I haven’t had time to do it.

That footage would already be very valuable – big parts of that area have been destroyed and rebuilt in the past few years.

Yeah, after Meishi Street was rebuilt in 2007 I often went back there to get new footage. So my footage covers the whole process of change in that area – it’s totally different now. I really want to finish this project, but I don’t know how to find the time…

Both San Yuan Li and Meishi Street are very collaborative projects, with multiple people contributing to the filmmaking process. Do you feel this an important aspect of your approach to filmmaking?

Yes. This is a new way of making films – you know most of the Chinese documentary filmmakers often work individually, in one-man teams. But because when I started making films I was running the U-theque organisation I developed a co-operative idea from that orgnisation. For each project we had a list of four or five people who were in charge of the camera. So we shot a lot of footage, and then every week we would have a meeting to discuss what to do next. From Monday to Friday we would be shooting in the city. Then Saturday or Sunday we would sit down, have a meeting to preview and discuss all the footage, then decide how to shoot the following week. So we had so many meetings when making the film.

Was this for both San Yuan Li and Meishi Street?

Yes, both.

Are other people from U-theque still involved in filmmaking?

Of course! There’s quite a lot. Huang Weikai (Disorder, 2009, also in the dGenerate catalogue) participated in both San Yuan Li and Meishi Street. He was my main cameraman. So far he has made three documentaries by himself. Also Fu Xinhua, another member of U-theque, has made two more films about urban villages in Guangzhou.

In earlier periods of the People’s Republic, filmmakers only came through the film schools and other specific training institutions, so groups like U-theque and the idea of people training themselves is a big change.

Yeah, there are two things that made this change. First was pirate DVDs. People educated themselves. They didn’t need to go to Beijing Film Academy – they saw a lot of films through pirate DVDs, which gave a very rich film history. When they had seen this history they wanted to make things themselves, and they found there were very cheap cameras that had come out. I mean everyone can buy a camera and start filmmaking. We can also say pirate DVDs are part of digital technology. This technology has had a great impact on filmmaking in China.

When did that change start to happen here?

I think it was in the 1990s people started seeing DVDs. It was after that – after the turn of the millennium – they started making films. I wrote an article about this for a Belgian art festival – how DVDs and digital cameras changed filmmaking in China and the whole political situation.

Many of China’s independent documentary filmmakers seem to come from fine arts backgrounds. I’m thinking about people like yourself and Cao Fei, Ai Weiwei and Zhang Dali. Others like Zhao Dayong and Hu Jie started as painters before moving into filmmaking. Why do you think so many visual artists in China are attracted to documentary filmmaking?

I think today you must know that documentary is the most powerful medium to show your concept of Chinese society. For example Ai Xiaoming was the first intellectual to use documentary film to talk about very sensitive events in China. She made a film about Sun Zhigang, the young man killed by the Guangzhou police. She also made a film about an AIDS village in Henan. Documentary film is the powerful medium for people to get involved in politics. Ai Xiaoming was the first one to do that, and then Ai Weiwei has also done that.

I think today’s contemporary art is very commercial in a very commercial system. Some artists have changed to making documentaries because they are concerned about Chinese society and Chinese reality. It’s a more direct way to express themselves, because a lot of artists care about society and they have found contemporary art has lost its critical power.

Ai Weiwei discovered this. He has produced four documentaries, and then he mails the DVDs to a lot of different people for free. Anyone can send their address to him and he’ll mail it to them. He has distributed more than 15,000 copies of his films this way.

Earlier you talked about the problems U-theque had, and how much the authorities didn’t like San Yuan Li. Have you ever suffered any other interference from the authorities in your filmmaking activities? Did you have any problems when you were shooting Meishi Street for example?

When I was shooting San Yuan Li the government didn’t know – I just had to deal with the people in the village. So there was no trouble in making the film. And in Beijing, because Dashilan – where Meishi Street is – is a tourist area, there were so many tourists every day with cameras the street office and local government could not recognise who was a tourist and who was a documentary filmmaker, so there was no problem [laughs].

Do independent documentary filmmakers in China generally regard themselves as a community, or do they tend to work in isolation? Do you have much communication with other filmmakers?

Yeah. There is a community in China. At the very beginning it was maybe a filmmakers community, but now because Ai Weiwei and Ai Xiaoming use documentary films to get involved in citizen’s political movements, some activists have joined in. The Chinese activists also gather on Twitter. They have a big community, because Ai Weiwei is like a leader – a godfather. When he makes a documentary film, he sends a DVD to everyone and it becomes very well known in the activist scene. So the community is getting wider and bigger – it’s gone beyond the filmmakers. Chinese activists discuss politics on Twitter every day – discuss everything that happens in China.

Are you currently working any other film projects?

[Sighs] Even though I work as a curator and the director of the Shao Foundation, the thing I most like to do is to be an artist – a creator. I really want to go back and make a film. When you work as a curator you have to handle a lot of administration. I hate that! [laughs]

I made a film about Guangzhou, and one about Beijing, so I’d like to make a film about Shanghai. There’s a worker community in Shanghai built in the 1950s, also located in the center of the city. A lot of migrants have now moved in – it’s the same kind of community as Dashilan and San Yuan Li. I planned to do this project after the Beijing project – I planned it in 2006, but I haven’t had time to do it [laughs].

Relevant Classroom Use

Three dGenerate films are now available on Objective Cinema, a newly launched online platform for select social- and political-themed films.

The films are Ban Zhongyi’s Gai Shanxi and Her Sisters, Rachel Tejada’s Digital Underground in the People’s Republic, and Ou Ning’s Meishi Street.

Gai Shanxi and Her Sisters

Digital Underground in the People’s Republic

Meishi Street

The goal of Objective Cinema is to support and encourage social change at a grass roots level by making socially conscious films available to a worldwide audience. Gai Shanxi and Her Sisters documents the story around a group of Chinese women forced into sex slavery by Japanese soldiers in the Sino-Japanese War. Digital Underground in the People’s Republic penetrates the close circle of contemporary Chinese filmmakers and brings their voices to the fore. And Meishi Street archives the images of a demolished street in Beijing and the grievances of the uprooted residents for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Trailers, intros, and stills from the films are also available on Object Cinema’s website. Registered members can also rent the films online for a period of 48 hours or buy them on DVD.

Relevant Classroom Use

Artist Ai Weiwei (source: Archinect)

By Isabella Tianzi Cai

Chinese architect and artist Ai Weiwei, designer of the famous “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium in Beijing, and whose current “Sunflower Seeds” exhibition is receiving critical acclaim in the Tate Modern Gallery in London, now faces the demolition of his Shanghai art studio demolished later this month. According to the Chinese government, Ai’s studio was erected illegally and had to be removed by law. But according to the artist, the building project was initiated by a high government official who came to him in 2008, soliciting his help in developing a new cultural district in Shanghai. The current accusation against Ai states that he does not have the proper paperwork for the building project, but two years ago before the project started, Ai was told that the paper works were all in place. The contradiction in the government’s statements arouses Ai’s suspicion that the demolition is a retaliatory act against his political activism in China’s human rights movement, which remains a hot-button issue with the Chinese government.

Before the Flood (Dirs. Yu Yan, Li Yifan)

While Ai’s celebrity status as a globally recognized artist makes his eviction particularly newsworthy, it’s certainly not unique. In the past decade, millions of Chinese were uprooted to make way for the Three Gorges Dam project (as depicted in Yu Yan and Li Yifan’s Before the Flood and Yu’s Before the Flood II) and many thousand Beijing residents who were forced to relocate for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games (as depicted in Ou Ning’s Meishi Street). These are but two instances of a nationwide phenomenon of residents having their property taken or destroyed by force. But there’s one distinction to make with Ai Weiwei’s situation. In the case of the uprooted residents, people’s personal rights were made subservient to more prestigious projects that were supposed to benefit the nation at large. Ai’s case is a more conspicuous situation of harassment by the government. As Ai continued to gain fame and support both internationally and domestically, his political affiliations and beliefs have been increasingly monitored and moderated by the state, lest it pose a threat to the state’s control over public security and national stability.

Meishi Street (dir. Ou Ning)

For the time being, no one in China – not even those like Ai whose international stature would seem to glorify their country – has the power to fight against the state. However, the upside of the current situation is that it is easier to report their predicaments to a worldwide audience, through video, internet sites and social networks.  Chinese nationals are increasingly getting behind the camera and acquiring proactive roles in using other means of media exposure. Ai Weiwei is almost without peer in this regard, as reported earlier this year in a feature by the New Yorker. Still, Ai is by no means the first to tap into newly accessible media to document his hardships with authorities.  In Ou Ning’s Meishi Street is the subject of the documentary, Zhang Jinli, uses the video camera himself to film the demolition of his neighborhood as it was happening around him. By acquiring the means to tell their own stories, people like Zhang are no longer completely disadvantaged but are empowered to take some action on their own behalf, if only to make others aware of their plight. Although Zhang did not receive justice in the end as he would like to have, his case exists for others to learn from and take action in the future.  Following this spirit of preserving the facts, the film’s unobtrusive reportage editing approach shows the director’s intention to keep everything as factual as possible, with no deliberate narration or any other kind of interference. Meishi Street stands as both a valuable historical archive as well as a statement of concern for the disempowered, made with the hope that its existence may inspire actions on behalf of social justice.

Isabella Tianzi Cai is a regular contributor to the dGenerate blog. She is a graduate student in Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University.

Relevant Classroom Use

Nail Household Fighting Against Demolition Squad

by Sara Beretta

Sometimes reality exceeds the virtual, in its absurdity, strangeness and grotesquery. It also happens that the virtual realm can help in coping with the harshness of real life, by re-enacting and mocking its absurdity and cruelty. This is the case of Nail Household Fighting Against Demolition Squad, the online flash game by Mirage Games that is spreading like wildfire over China. First appearing on the popular website 17173, it’s one of the most played online games.

The so-called “nail householders,” their houses left as lonely nails in the middle of already demolished ones, have to hire people to face the demolition team men, who are milling about to crash down the remaining squatters. There’s Mrs. and Grandpa Ding (Chinese for “nail”) and their six-member family fighting against the crew – with slippers, homemade tools and other scrappy objects – in order to keep their houses standing. What is unusual for a video game  is that there are but a few chances to win: after strenuously fighting for six levels, the player hits the “survival level,” set up so that the player is all but doomed, something that rather closely resembles the game’s real life basis.

It’s a funny, easy game, in the style of popular satirical videos (“e-gao”), but what’s compelling is its similarity to daily life,  where a lot of families have to face eviction and forced relocation, or to accept money as a refund for being removed  from their houses. And many of them refuse, opposing the oncoming bulldozers, sometimes with tragic results. A recent incident in September 2010 involved heavy injuries to a family in Fenggang town, Yihuang county.

An actual "nailhouse" surrounded by a development site

For the past several years, the character destroy (“chai“) painted on walls brings drama and misfortune: it means that the house has to give place to progress as dictated by local authorities: a huge new road, a bus station, etc. Residents opposing the demolition are an increasingly urgent social topic, their tragic struggle, grotesquely depicted in the video game, have even carved out a space within Chinese mainstream media. But independent media, in the form of un-official documentaries and amateur videos, have covered this issue far earlier and with far more urgency.

One critical example is Meishi Street (2006) by visual artist Ou Ning, which documents the resistance of some Beijingers to the knocking down of their nail house in the name of 2008 Olympics urban projects, not only filming them but allowing them video cameras to film their plight from their own perspective. It is also worth mentioning Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s San Yuan Li (2003), an experimental documentary concerning the modernization threatening the former farming village of San Yuan Li, situated in the outskirts of Guangzhou. Meishi Street and San Yuan Li (both distributed by dGenerate Films) offer powerful images and voices to better illuminate a crucial contemporary public issue – one that, ultimately, is not a game.

Relevant Classroom Use

The latest issue of Hong Kong-based Open Magazine features three articles on citizens’ documentary in Chinese civil rights movements. One of them, written by Teng Biao, who is a human rights lawyer in Beijing, has been translated and published at Interlocals.net. See original.

In the article, Teng gives a comprehensive overview of the civic documentary movement in China for the past few decades. While the facts are impressive in both volume and numbers, the ideas aren’t all new to us. He writes,

Information monopoly is designed to benefit those in power, while Citizens Documentary can eliminate the cover-ups in certain extent. Only a few documentaries can already make the dictatorship pay a huge price. One can imagine that with the expansion of the Civic Documentary campaign, covering up truth will be a futile and obsolete attempt. Till then, there should be a significant change in the mode of power operation. (Interlocals)

Such a reversal of these power dynamics can be seen in Ou Ning’s and Cao Fei’s collaborative film, San Yuan Li. Ou and Cao led a group of twelve amateur videographers to videotape their enigmatic little village of the same name, embedded in the outskirts of the megalopolis of Guangzhou. In the past decade, because of the state’s plan to modernize the region and the ever expansion of the city, everything old about the village has been either rapidly changing or rapidly disappearing. In order to save the village’s transitory appearances, the filmmakers enlisted ordinary villagers to document the losses. Politically speaking, this form of resistance is subtle, but it is kindled with a spirit of free discourse, both journalistic and democratic in nature.

Another point of relevance in Teng’s propositions lies beyond the implicit political significance of cultural or historical preservation using film; when certain documentaries are produced for investigative purposes, the stakes can be even higher. In Ou Ning’s Meishi Street, we experience a zero-distance encounter with a group of Beijingers facing demolition of their homes. These people open themselves up in front of the camera and for the camera, venting grievances that they couldn’t elsewhere. One man decries the state media for exactly the same reason that Teng mentions: “covering up truth will be a futile and obsolete attempt.”

In the face of China’s unassailable march towards modernity, nobody is an isolated victim. The questions and debates on which aspects of Chinese culture are worth preserving and which information needs to go out in the light will mount with increasing urgency. Already manifested in Xie Wenjun’s documentary, Disappearing Guangzhou, cultural preservation and human rights movements can be intricately linked. See Arthur Waldron’s comments on Xie’s film:

The narration makes the point that the post-80 generation involved in documenting cultural loss in Guangzhou is focused on cultural preservation, but for the residents of the endangered neighborhoods, it is the even more serious matter of the defense of rights. (Waldron)

Note that the people in Guangzhou feel threatened today not just because some have been forced to relocate for the upcoming 2010 Asian Games but also because there was a proposal in the local government to replace Cantonese with Mandarin in some television broadcasting. Protests abounded after the news leaked, despite the fact that it had all just been a proposal. To read more about China’s language policy, see Waldron’s blog.

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The Laogucheng neighborhood in Beijing is being demolished. (Photo: Shiho Fukada, The New York Times)

The New York Times recently featured an article entitled “Trampled in a Land Rush, Chinese Resist.” In anticipation of the possible passing of new legislation to protect the rights of low-income homeowners, local officials and developers are rushing to take advantage of the current absence of regulation. In neighborhoods like Beijing’s Laogucheng, residents have united as a community, standing up to real-estate developers planning to level their homes and construct enormously profitable high-rises and greenbelts in their stead.

The Times article features a video clip of one such protest, in which one resident implores the policemen attempting to contain the crowd; “How are we supposed to live? We have a low income and we only live on the rental income of our apartments! Now your evict our only tenants and cut off our only income? You are demolishing our houses- How are we supposed to live?”

This legislation is a long time coming. Developers have been demolishing homes and displacing populations with impunity, offering inadequate (if any) compensation, cutting off utilities and even hiring thugs to harass homeowners. Last November, the former wife of a garment factory owner, Tang Fuzhen, set herself on fire on the roof of the building after it was slotted for demolition, subsequently dying from her injuries. Other self-immolations, nail houses and protests have convinced legislators that changes must be made.

The article states that “The latest draft of legal protections would require developers to consult homeowners, pay market rates for homes and put off demolition until sales and relocation details are settled- prohibit governments from forcibly seizing homes.” While some members of Congress recognize the necessity of these safeguards, the interest groups who stand to make billions in their absence are currently blocking these changes.

One resident of Laogucheng describes injustice his community is suffering in the interim. “Even if you don’t want to leave, you have to leave, even if you want to buy, you cannot buy. They told us to buy second hand apartments in the mountain area. We live in Beijing and they want us to move to the mountains.”

These protests echo the resistance exhibited in Ou Ning’s Meishi Street, which chronicles a community fighting to save their neighborhood for its slotted demolition in preparation for the Olympic Games. The issues raised in this documentary are relevant as ever to those living in China today. Find out more about Meishi Street.

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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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