"The Transition Period" shows the inner workings of local politics in China

U.S. ambassador to China Gary Locke’s recent arrival in Beijing generated intense discussions among Chinese nationals about how Chinese civil servants compare unfavorably to their American counterparts. As reported in a September 20th article in The Wall Street Journal’s blog “China Real Time Report,” the central government and its affiliated media bodies such as the Guangming Daily and the Xinhua News Agency tried to cast aspersions over the political motives behind the U.S. government’s choice of a Chinese-American ambassador. But Chinese online netizens focused on something entirely different. After seeing photos of Locke buying his own coffee and carrying his own bags, and learning that he flew coach to China, Chinese web commentators assailed their civil servants for squandering taxpayers’ money on ridiculously extravagant meals, cars, and the like, and for shirking physical work and other chores that they consider to be below their dignity.

Zhou Hao’s 2011 documentary The Transition Period, which will be playing next Monday in Chicago’s Doc Films series on Chinese independent cinema, looks at the working life of one typical Chinese civil servant by the name of Guo Yongchang before his transfer to a new post within the Chinese government. Shot over the last three months of Guo working as the party secretary of the Committee of the Communist Party of Gushi County in Xinyang Municipality of Henan Province, this documentary presents different facets of Guo’s work as a medium- to low-level Chinese civil servant in a leading position. This article aims at laying out some groundwork in China’s political system and its political environment for first-time viewers of the documentary, as sometimes the stories in the documentary are more complicated than their presentations. (Spoilers may follow.)

Gushi County has a population of about 1.6 million and a total of 32 towns. Like every other county in China, it is governed by both its county government and county party committee, with the latter having more power over the former. You may read the translation of a popular online joke below to learn about the different roles and levels of clout of five main constituents of the Chinese government:

An eighth-grader asks her mother about the Chinese government, “What does the government do?”

“The government is like me, your mom,” she replies. “I cook for you, wash your clothes, and make your bed. I do all the hard work in this house.”

“What does the party committee do?”

“Well, the party committee is like your father,” Mom replies. “He makes all the important decisions and orders me around to carry them out.”

“What does the People’s Congress do?” the girl continues.

“The People’s Congress is like your grandpa,” Mom replies. “He strolls around with his bird cage every morning but never does anything.”

“What does the Committee of the People’s Political Consultative Conference do?”

“Well, the Committee of the People’s Political Consultative Conference is like your grandma,” Mom replies. “She complains about everything, but she has no power to change anything.”

The girl asks her last question. “Then what does the commission of discipline inspection do?”

“The commission of discipline inspection is like you,” Mom replies. “You are sheltered, clothed, and fed by all of us, but all you do is check on us.”

For Guo Yongchang, since he is the party secretary of Gushi County, he has more power than Gushi County’s County Chief Fang Bo, who belongs to the county government. This explains why at the beginning of the documentary, many people, including businessmen and petitioners, are seen to go directly to Guo’s office to elicit information, seek advice, and beg for help. At one point in the documentary, Guo likens the role of a party secretary to that of a godfather. The analogy is not a stretch in reality.

A number of instances in the documentary support this analogy. For example, Guo half-suggested half-instructed a two-man envoy about their construction project that instead of building a 26-story building, they should make it 33-story to get his approval. For another, he visited the Bureau of Letters and Calls of Gushi County and approved visitors’ requests without consulting the proper procedures used by the bureau.

In fact, the latter incident echoes Chinese Premier Wen Jiaobao’s generous donation of 10,000 yuan to a two-year-old boy suffering from leukemia. Premier Wen was said to have met the body’s poverty-stricken parents at Tianjin Train Station during an inspection trip to Tianjin in September 2009. Although both Guo and Premier Wen have helped the victims in these cases, such single acts of heroism will not bring structural changes to China’s political system.

"The Transition Period"

This is why Guo lives in contradictory terms with himself. In one of his reflective moments, he said that he supported a new policy by the standing committee of both the municipal and the provincial party committees in China, which was to handpick party officials with law degrees to join their league. He believed this to be a positive change because China should follow the rule of law, rather than the rule of people.

However, his words do not often match his actions. The biggest breach to his own words are probably the dinner parties and drinking parties that he has frequently attended. At one of the meetings, he urged the civil servants in Gushi County to help cut government spending by drinking less. According to the government report, Gushi County’s income amounted to 280 million yuan in 2008, but its spending surpassed 12 billion yuan in the same year. Yet, these reminders about frugality were never taken seriously, even by himself. Every time he was at a party, we see him emptying glasses after glasses and cups after cups of alcohol.

But as Zhou points out at the beginning of the documentary, Chinese civil servants have two major responsibilities, one being that of attracting investors. To do so, they often need to drink excessively at meals as drinking is an integral part of socialization, and deals are broached and sealed in drinking parties.

This convention inevitably applies to Guo. He confessed in a farewell party with the People’s Congress of Gushi County that he had big ambitions for Gushi when he was appointed its party secretary. He chose to socialize with businesspeople because he wanted to convince them to invest in Gushi.

In the same confession statement that Guo made in front of the retired officials, he said in tears that the work that he had done for Guishi had never been for his own career advancement. In fact, it all harmed his career. What he meant was that the central government would likely consider him a corrupt official who spent much without making a profit because Gushi’s spending far exceeded its income. However, the businesspeople he had entertained at various meals and parties thought differently. They considered Guo the best government official to work with and Gushi the best place to invest. Why? It is probably because Guo showered them with many forms of government concessions and subsidies.

Sadly, Guo’s understanding of government concessions and subsidies is rather limited. He told a story twice in the documentary to illustrate the relationship between government and businesses. The story goes that in 1958, heavy deforestation in Huzu Town of Gushi County caused a local reservoir to slowly dry out, and subsequently it stopped migrating egrets from coming. However, in the 1990s, after trees were planted back, the birds also came back. In Guo’s negotiations with businessmen, he usually offered money-related incentives as a welcome sign, be it a waiver on electricity or a generous monetary gift. If this is not an overstatement, then he seems to have naively treated trees as a metaphor for money in his story.

Yet money cannot buy everything. Local governments are supposed to bring systematic improvements to their districts, counties, etc. Human capital and infrastructure are only two examples of the areas that local governments can help improve.

Director Zhou Hao

Guo planned to leave his office before the Chinese New Year in 2009. News of his transfer naturally caused unease in the county government as well as in the municipal and provincial party committee because new officials needed to be appointed. Who would get appointed in what positions was always a potential source of resentment in the Chinese government and it could obstruct work within the government.

This can be reflected in a complaint made by Guo’s secretary. She mentioned that a civil servant working at the grassroots level did not want to be transferred to the committee of people’s political consultative conference because he would have no future there. Instead, he expressed wishes to work in the general office of the party committee or in the local labor bureau, which has become the ministry of human resource and social security today.

A complication is also involved in such transfers. Guo spoke jokingly about a personal encounter. He said that one time when he was in Beijing, a high-ranking government official met him and some others for dinner. After the meal, he saw him packing up all the food and riding off with his bicycle with many bags. Compared to the official, a county-level party secretary or a county chief lived much better materially.

It is certainly not true that all high-ranking officials are as thrifty as the one in Guo’s story. But most Chinese will agree that Chinese civil servants are not as egalitarian as Gary Locke. As some of you have probably read the following quote by Mencius: “One either does mental work or manual work. The one who does mental work rules, and the one who does manual work is being ruled.” The idea that a civil servant must not labor physically like a physical worker is deeply entrenched in the Chinese mentality. This explains why in the documentary, when the buses and cars that some officials rode got stuck in the New Year snow, they only helped with clearing the icy road begrudgingly, if they did so at all. They returned to their comfortable seats soon after making some gestures of help. County Chief Fang, who later becomes Party Secretary, even exclaims, “This is hard work!”

For the construction workers who blocked the government building of Gushi County to protest not getting paid for their hard work, they certainly have an indisputable screen image of “being ruled.” Outside the government building, they openly argue with Guo about their delayed payment. But once inside the government building, and their number reduced from a big group to a small clique of five representatives, they appear tamed, docile, and very quiet. Party Secretary Fang lambasts them for blocking the gates and obstructing government work, and he threatens them with tougher measures if they refuse to cooperate. The representatives leave with promises from Fang, though Fang seems more motivated to save his job than to help them with their problems.

For those who are curious about Guo Yongchang and want to find out more about his life, his Baidu entry states that he works at the bureau of letters and serves as an inspector now. However, he himself has been inspected by the State Bureau of Letters and Calls and the Ministry of Inspection under the State Council for corruption, and he was found to have received bribes of 740,000 yuan and an additional 10,000 USD. This may puzzle those who’ve seen the film, because in one secretly filmed scene he actually orders someone to return the money that had been sent to him as a bribe. Perhaps he returned some bribes and kept others; how he decided which to accept is left undisclosed. The reality is always more complicated than it seems.

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Zhou Hao presents his film "The Transition Period" at the China Documentary Festival in Hong Kong (photo: Associated Press)

The 2011 Chinese Documentary Festival in Hong Kong concluded earlier this month with awards given to The Transition Period by Zhou Hao and One Day in May by Ma Zhandong. The Transition Period will be distributed later this year by dGenerate, which already distributes one of Zhou’s earlier films, Using.

In a report on the festival for the Associated Press, Min Lee describes The Transition Period as “a rare, fascinating look at how the Chinese government operates:”

Guo Yongchang, who is currently serving a seven-year prison term for accepting bribes of 2 million Chinese yuan ($310,000), is shown discussing how to split tax revenue with lower-level officials, meeting with constituents as well as smearing birthday cake onto the face of an American businessman and wining and dining with Taiwanese businessmen in another drunken episode. A secretly recorded sound section shows Guo ordering an aide to return certain bribes.

Zhou said he met Guo at a dinner and the former official quickly agreed to be filmed. He said he got full access — although avoided shooting Guo’s family life. Guo has seen the documentary — minus the secretly taped section — and didn’t object, Zhou said.

When asked if he worried if such a film could cause trouble for him with the authorities, Zhou responded: “my understanding is that you can basically film everything you want to film. The key question is whether you want to shoot something. If you want to shoot something, you can definitely do it.”

In the context of recent troubles experienced by socially critical artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhou said that he and other artists have benefitted from the sacrifices made by such figures. “There are many people taking the heat for us … What should we be afraid of?” Zhou said. Zhou also cited the example of  Xu Xin, whose six-hour Karamay investigates a heavily censored story about 300 children who died in a fire while performing for government officials.

Fellow director Ma Zhandong agreed with Zhou’s position: “If you like what you are doing, you can overcome the hurdles.” Ma’s film One Day in May, which won the festival’s top prize, follows a family’s recovery from the deadly 2008 earthquake in southwestern Sichuan conference. Its unflinching depiction of the social and economic fallout from the earthquake recalls that of the award-winning film 1428 by Du Haibin, which is part of the dGenerate catalog.

Read the full version of the Associated Press report.

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Using (dir. Zhou Hao)

Southern Metropolis Daily has a proud reputation as one of the very few newspapers in mainland China with real teeth, so it’s perhaps not surprising the paper’s ranks have also produced such sharp-eyed documentarian as Zhou Hao. Zhou’s stories focus on minor, charismatic players in contemporary Chinese society, honing in on small stories to make broader points about various social milieux, from the world of heroin addition in Using (2008) to small town politics in The Transition Period (2009). More intriguingly, Zhou’s films also highlight the uncertain, often fraught relationship between documentary makers and their subjects.

Using

Using opens among a group of emaciated junkies living under a highway overpass, a concrete island home in a sea of traffic. The casual presence of death is immediately apparent as we see Ah Long, a man in his 30s, chatting on the phone with a family member of an ailing addict. “He won’t last long,” Ah Long states bluntly. “I’m saying you should come to see him… You can come and have a last look…”

Drug addiction is not an issue that gets much coverage in the Chinese media, and it’s hard to know how widespread the problem is in China. Using delves into this murky world in the southern city of Guangzhou, tracing the friendship between Zhou Hao and a heroin addict named Ah Long over the course of several years.

After the opening sequence, we follow Ah Long and others back to a derelict structure beside a railway track. The uneasy, distrustful camaraderie among the drug users is immediately familiar to anyone who has encountered heroin addicts in reality, or seen their zoned out expressions on screen before. In fact, one of the striking aspects of Using is the way it shows heroin to be a cultural leveler, creating subcultures of users who always tell the same lies to themselves and those around them, to feed a habit they know will destroy them. The language of addiction, it seems, is the same in any culture.

In this sense, Using adds little to previous films about the culture surrounding heroin, apart from revealing its existence in present-day China. The film’s emotional nexus, however, lies elsewhere, in the knotty relationship between filmmaker Zhou Hao on the one hand, and Ah Long and his girlfriend Ah Jun on the other. The on-again off-again nature of their “friendship” is established straight after the film’s introductory sequence, when inter-titles tell us police cleared out the derelict building shortly after Zhou Hao filmed there. Ah Long disappears for six months and Zhou Hao gives up hope of ever seeing him again – until Ah Long calls out of the blue and they are reunited over a meal.

It’s a pattern repeated throughout the film, as Ah Long disappears time and again only to call Zhou Hao a few months later and tell the director he is “his one true friend” – before asking for money. After one prolonged disappearance the director finds Ah Long and his girlfriend Ah Jun living in a room shared with a puppy. Ah Jun asks the filmmaker for RMB 500, and he grudgingly hands over 200, saying firmly “This is all I have.” The couple laugh, as Ah Long comments, “I told her you’d only have 200 yuan… I said there’s no way you would bring 500 yuan here.”

It’s clear the filmmaker is being played for cash, but Zhou Hao is no fool – and neither is Ah Long. At one point Ah accuses the director of feeding his habit so that Zhou can coolly observe the results through his lens. But just as Zhou is repeatedly drawn back into Ah Long’s orbit by his fascination with the junky’s world, Ah Long clearly enjoys the attention and validity the camera lends his otherwise rather squalid existence. As this web of interdependence grows increasingly tangled, it becomes less and less clear who is “using” who.

Towards the end of the film Ah Long’s girlfriend, Ah Jun, tells the filmmaker that many of the most dramatic scenes we’ve witnessed – including Ah Long coughing up blood after he’s supposedly swallowed razor blades – were simply staged to extract money. “You never thought his acting was just a little too good?” she asks pointedly. And it’s true – Ah Long is quite a performer. And like all actors he seeks out an audience, just as director Zhou Hao wants to be on hand to capture his best moments.

It’s this blurring of truth and lies, calculated drama and a very real addiction, that makes Using such an emotionally discomforting experience. Like the filmmaker, we want to switch off but we just can’t look away.

Inevitably Ah Long’s addiction leads him to a grim dead end, and takes him places Zhou Hao’s camera can’t follow. After narrating the final stages of the addict’s downward spiral, Zhou Hao leaves us with a final flashback that perfectly captures the uncertain boundaries that have framed his friendship with Ah Long throughout the film. As the addict edges along a dangerously high wall beside a railway track, he looks down at Zhou filming from the safety of ground level. “I could jump down,” he says jokingly. “You’d get your perfect shot.”

With a final wave, Ah Long climbs down onto a side road and leaves Zhou Hao filming from the far side of the wall. As he disappears into the distance we’re left to ponder – have we been observers of his fate, or accomplices to his decline?

The Transition Period

A quite different, though also quietly reflexive film, The Transition Period follows a county-level party secretary during his last months in office. From the opening scenes we get a sense of the way personal relations stand in for institutional procedures and structures in China, as the party secretary personally meets with peasants whose homes have been forcibly demolished, dolling out ad hoc compensation in response to their complaints. Later we see local business luminaries visiting the secretary’s office and coyly ask for favours while inviting him to dinner.

The secretary’s domain is in Henan, a land-locked province in central China where the economy lags far behind the coastal regions. Although the area has a county chief, as at all levels of government in China, it’s the party secretary who holds real power.

As well as the cronyism that infects China’s corridors of power, The Transition Period lays bare the repressive dynamics of the nation’s top-down power structures, as the central character informs a meeting of township-level party secretaries that if anything “happens” on their patch, they will take the blame.

It’s this vague yet pervasive emphasis on “stability,” combined with a weak system of law, that leads to some of the worst abuses by authorities in China. Low-level cadres tend to follow a deeply-instilled instinct to suppress any sign of social disturbance, lest it reflect badly on their superiors and undermine their own career prospects. The lack of legal means by which citizens can resolve conflicts means ordinary people and the authorities are in a constant dance of negotiation, appeasement and repression, that puts as much strain on cadres as it does ordinary citizens.

One protracted sequence illustrates how these dynamics play out on the ground, as the party secretary’s car is surrounded by an angry mob of builders who have not been paid by a private contractor working on a government job. Despite the crowd’s fury, the secretary skillfully defuses the situation by agreeing to see a small delegation of workers at the local government office.

The representatives are brought to a meeting room where they are greatly outnumbered by officials and silenced by the intimidation of their surrounds. The secretary berates them for causing a disturbance and promises severe repercussions if they instigate another protest. At the same time he promises to obtain their wages, which he does later in the film by threatening the contractor.

Director Zhou Hao

Although the episode reveals the unrelenting pressure placed on officials by China’s haphazard system of administration, it also underscores why China’s political system is so resistant to reform. Any meaningful strengthening of institutional procedures would require a separation of powers, threatening the very basis of the immense arbitrary power wielded by local cadres.

In a disturbing indication of the extent to which this power is taken for granted, the party secretary quite deliberately flaunts his influence and privileges for Zhou’s camera. We see him planning his own succession in cahoots with other officials, openly making a mockery of Beijing’s talk of “intra-Party democracy.” Only when the discussion moves on to the exchange of large sums of money does he casually ask Zhou to turn off his camera.

Although such scenes indicate serious corruption is rampant, other abuses of power seen in the film are simply puerile. Like most officials in China, a considerable slice of the party secretary’s working life seemingly comprises publicly-funded banquets fueled by copious amounts of alcohol. On one occasion he celebrates the birthday of a local Western businessman by becoming utterly inebriated and happily smearing the businessman’s face, as well as his own, with cake.

Another stiff meeting with a visiting Taiwanese business delegation is followed by an inevitable drinking session, in which one of the Taiwanese drunkenly slurs down the camera, “Business and government want the same thing. First: POWER! Second: MONEY! They sound almost the same in Chinese – the two are indivisible!” The speech neatly sums up the twin drivers of China’s particularly avaricious system of state-controlled capitalism.

Complicity with the Camera

The most disquieting aspect of Zhou’s cinema is not so much what he shows us – though this is often disturbing enough – but his subject’s willingness to act as they do for his camera. Far from being a fly-on-the-wall observer, Zhou deploys his lens as a kind of proxy audience, encouraging his subjects to play heightened versions of themselves for the screen. The characteristics his subjects chose to reveal speak reams about the particular social worlds they inhabit, from the petty abuses of power infusing the political realm of The Transition Period, to the insecurities and escapist desires underlying addiction in Using.

Even as the camera’s gaze lays bear the contours of these characters’ worlds, it calls into question our own complicity as consumers of their on-screen behavior. For all their willingness to perform for the camera, these are not actors – they are real people, whose actions have real consequences for the world around them. We may find their actions amusing, titillating or even abhorrent, but their eagerness to act as they do never lets us forget that we tolerate a world that makes these scenes possible.

Dan Edwards is a critic and journalist who contributes regularly to RealTime and The Beijinger. In 2011 he will be commencing a PhD project on the Chinese independent documentary movement.

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Perfect Life (2009, dir. Emily Tang)

In the online film journal Electric Sheep, John Berra reports on the China Independent Film Festival held last October in Nanjing. He describes the festival, now in its seventh year, as a semi-secret state of affairs:

As not every film in the line-up has received the stamp of approval from the Film Bureau of the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), this celebration of Chinese cinema occurs under the political radar, and the lack of the promotion means that many students of Nanjing University are not aware that an important film festival is taking place on their campus until a few banners appear in the days leading up to the event. However, the festival organisers somehow manage to make this ‘invisible’ festival sufficiently noticeable and 2010 screenings were well-attended, leading to a series of productive Q&A sessions with the filmmakers in attendance and valuable networking events.

Berra singles out several films for praise, starting with Perfect Life, directed by Emily Tang and executive produced by Jia Zhangke:

Jia Zhangke served as the executive producer of Perfect Life, and the fusion of fact and fiction recalls his masterpieces Platform (2000) and 24 City (2008), but Tang steps out of the shadow of her financial benefactor by imbuing proceedings with an element of magical realism as the real and the imagined eventually come to co-exist.

Berra also praises  Zhao Dayong’s The High Life, Zhou Hao’s Cop Shop (both directors have films distributed by dGenerate), as well as Rivers and My Father, Piercing, Single Man, Red White, On the Road and Once Upon a Time Proletarian.

Berra concludes with some thoughts on the evolving political significance of holding such a festival, and its shift from being totally “underground” to “independent,” as reflected in its “hidden in plain sight” status, and in the content of the films:

The 7th China Independent Film Festival served to emphasise that alternative production in China is very much in a state of transition, moving from an ideologically charged ‘underground’ movement to a self-sustained ‘independent’ sector. Although still politicised, the sector is not only showing signs of the formation of its own industrial networks but an awareness of how to work around the state, rather than to stubbornly work against it. This is evident in the manner in which a wider political context was absent from many of the films and documentaries in the festival, although this presumptive measure to side-step the restrictions of SARFT is also a political statement in itself.

Read the full festival report at Electric Sheep.

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Using (dir. Zhou Hao)

Chris Hawke profiles documentary filmmaker Zhou Hao in the Global Times. In the past, Zhou’s probing work has screened on CCTV and other Chinese mainstream broadcast outlets, but his three most recent documentaries “on drug users, policemen, and a cadre accused of corruption” have been off-limits as of yet. Zhou maintains that his purpose in filmmaking is not politically motivated: ”My films have no political purpose. I observe people, I don’t judge them.”

Zhou’s films Using, The Transition Period and Cop Shop screen this weekend at the UCCA Contemporary Art Center in Beijing.

Using is part of the dGenerate Films catalog.

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Using (dir. Zhou Hao)

A former Xinhua News Agency and Southern Weekly photographer, Zhou Hao began making independent films in 2002. Among his perceptive and socially-conscious documentaries are Houjie Township (2003), about migrant workers in a Chinese export-processing zone; Senior Year (2005), about high school students preparing for the gaokao, college entrance exams; Using (2008), about a couple struggling with heroin addiction; The Transition Period (2009), about an outgoing county party secretary; and Cop Shop (2010), about a small police station next to the Guangzhou Railway Station. Zhou Hao’s films have been screened at film festivals in Amsterdam, Paris, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Yunnan, Chicago and other cities, as well as at the 2004 Shanghai Biennial and 2005 Guangzhou Triennial.

This weekend from October 29-31 the UCCA will present Zhou’s films Using, The Transition Period, and Cop Shop, with the director present to discuss his work.

Film Schedules
Friday, Oct.29
19:00 Using,104 min + director Q&A
Saturday, Oct.30
18:00 Cop Shop,67 min + director Q&A
Sunday, Oct.31
16:00-18:30 The Transition Period,114 min + Indie Film Forum Discussion
Moderator: Liu Shu (indie workshop)
Guests: Zhou Hao (director); Professor Cui Weiping (Beijing Film Academy)

Details can be found at the UCCA website.

Using is distributed in North America by dGenerate Films.

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Crime and Punishment (Zui Yu Fa), directed by Zhao Liang

Crime and Punishment (dir. Zhao Liang)

Amidst the barren wintry landscape of Northeast China, Chinese military police officers rigidly enforce law and order in an impoverished mountain town. They raid a private residence to bust an illegal mahjong game, casually abuse a pickpocket accused of throwing away evidence, and berate a confession out of a scrap collector working without a permit. The police switch between precise investigative procedure, explosions of violent fury, and moments of comic ineptitude, all captured incredibly before the camera.

A prime example of how independent documentaries are on the vanguard of Chinese cinema, Crime and Punishment is an unprecedented look at the everyday workings of law enforcement in the world’s largest authoritarian society. With penetrating camerawork, Zhao Liang (Petition, 2009 Cannes Film Festival) patiently reveals the methods police use to interrogate and coerce suspects to confess crimes – and the consequences when such techniques backfire. With a cold, objective eye that depicts reality in great detail while withholding judgment, “Zhao’s artistry is instantly apparent.” (Robert Koehler, Variety)

In the January 2010 issue of China Perspectives, Jie Li of Harvard University has a lengthy appreciation of Zhao Liang’s documentaries Crime and Punishment and Petition. Here is an excerpt on Crime and Punishment:

With patient long takes and an ambivalent gaze that is in turn complicit, compassionate, or critical, Crime and Punishment shows us the human beings in military uniforms—their capacity for rage, sympathy, and fear—as well as how the power authorised by these uniforms might dehumanise—through violence and humiliation—not only those suspected to be criminals but also the police officers themselves. Apart from discipline and punishment, much police power resides with surveillance, but a sustained look at the other can also generate empathetic recognition, and returning the gaze may well be the first step for the powerless to empower themselves.

Film Clip:

Using (Long Ge), directed by Zhou Hao

Using (dir. Zhou Hao)

For three years, filmmaker Zhou Hao chronicled the lives of Long and Jun, a couple struggling with heroin addiction in Guangzhou. Zhou captures Chinese junkie subculture, its members languishing in a slum flophouse, the equivalent of a modern day opium den. When Long is hospitalized after a failed robbery, Zhou speaks out from behind the camera to intervene. Still, Long and Jun persist, soon dealing drugs full-time to make ends meet. As the couple increasingly offers lies for answers, Zhou must confront his ethical responsibilities to them, as a friend and a documentarian.

Using probes a dark, cruel reality of contemporary Chinese society that has rarely been seen by any audience. Addicts disclose techniques for dealing with police, confronting sham suppliers and staying high throughout the day. Zhou’s unflinching depiction of his friends’ repeated attempts to quit blurs the line between filmmaker and subject, and raises provocative questions about the ways in which each uses the other.

Film Clips:

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Zhang Xianmin (photo courtesy China Independent Film Festival)

One of our key partners in China is Zhang Xianmin, who is a leading figure of the independent film scene.  Film producer, writer, programmer: these are just a few of his credentials. And now, Zhang will be contributing a series of articles for our website, offering his own perspective on Chinese indie cinema.

To kick things off, here are his thoughts on six recent Chinese independent documentaries, offering his own insights into the background on the films and filmmakers. A couple titles happen to be dGenerate titles.

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Using directed by Zhou Hao.
Zhou Hao always cross-produces several projects at the same time. When this documentary was made, he was also working on other subjects, such as the cotton industry and Olympic youths. The central character is known as Brother Long by other social outcasts. Originally from Northeast China, he makes his living by dealing drugs in Guangzhou, and eventually he is trapped in drug addiction himself. He helps others, but also requests help from others all the time, especially from the filmmaker Zhou Hao. But what Zhou Hao offers cannot save him. The story is astonishing and thrilling.

Survival Song directed by Yu Guangyi
Yu Guangyi used to be a painter for several decades. But his documentary-making is close to writing: a personal work, made step by step with integrated narrative and vivid characters. It is not until recently that Mr. Yu switched to digital filmmaking. His daughter helped him edit his first film Last Lumberjacks before she went to university. His works are deep and solid.

Empty City directed by Ji Dan
Ji Dan is not an ethnic Han Chinese. She lived in Beijing for almost ten years and developed a close relationship with Feng Yan, Li Ying and Fujioka Asako. After she returned to China, she became good friends with Sha Qing and other documentary makers and made several documentaries about marginalized people in China, such as the Japanese who stayed in China after the Second World War, old people, Tibetans. Her works includes long-term documenting, as well as chance encounters. This film is based on her long-term observation on different people in a nursing center for the elderly and the film focuses on one single character she selected among them.

Utopia directed by Wang Yiren
Wang Yiren is a newspaper journalist. He writes social news, as well as prose. This documentary is based on the phenomenon in mainland China that “special” patients are separated from others in the medical system. In the south and northwest, it mainly concerns people who were infected with smallpox thirty or forty years ago; whereas in Wang Yiren’s hometown, disabled people, (especially those with mental disabilities) are kept in a desolate area in the countryside. But this work is not about suffering; on the contrary, these people formed a community where they complement and help each other in the past years. There’s no other word but utopia that can describe this weird, warm, small community that lacks a future. This film reflects the grotesque trend beyond realism in that has emerged in Chinese documentaries over the past two or three years.

Bing Ai directed by Feng Yan
Feng Yan spent years following a peasant woman, Bing Ai, who refused to give up her own land in the Three Gorges area. Feng Yan was greatly moved by her uncompromising personality. Feng says, most Chinese people give up their own land too easily. It’s too futile. Meanwhile, the ongoing effort Feng Yan put in this documentary is comparable to Bing Ai’s persistence of the land. In this sense, the filmmaker and her subject are unified in this documentary: Bing Ai is a counterpart of Feng Yan; Feng Yan is a reflection of Bing Ai.

Crime and Punishment directed by Zhao Liang
Zhao Liang documents the routine work of a small police station in Northeast China (on the border between China and North Korea). He is a local there, but has lived in Beijing as a conceptual and visual artist for many years. The everyday scenes of work and violence themselves do not provoke spiritual thoughts, as the title indicates. But the omission and extension of certain narratives, the philosophical discussion of different possibilities in human relation are all important issues that face contemporary documentary making.

The forms of these six documentaries are all different from each other. Besides their fundamental realism, some of them question the practical function of documentary; some establish a new relationship between the filmmaker and the subject; some make the most realistic everyday life appear absurd and abstract through skillful editing. They honestly represent the diverse reality in contemporary China, and they are also the pioneers of documentary innovation.

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