Yingchi Chu

Documentary has played an important role in nation building in China. Nowadays, however, the role of documentary is changing, as are its practitioners and investors. While retaining its role as a vehicle of state propaganda, documentary makers are embracing new formats and seeking out audiences in keeping with the challenges of ‘cultural system reform’ (wenhua tizhi gaige) on the one hand, and ‘going out’ (zou chuqu) on the other. As a cultural industry sector that has largely underachieved in comparison with international counterparts, the challenge now is for documentary makers to seize the moment. If we accept John Grierson’s definition of documentary as ‘creative treatment of actuality’ (Izod and Kilborn 1998: 427), China is one of the biggest documentary producers worldwide, generating between 7,000 and 10,000 hours annually for television alone (He et al. 2014: 6). These figures include traditional documentary formats as well as reality shows and travel documentaries. Television remains the most prolific producer of documentary. At the same time there is a noticeable decrease in film formats and an increase across digital media platforms.

Between October and December 2010 the world witnessed China's reaction to the Nobel Prize Committee's decision to award Liu Xiaobo its annual Peace Prize. Ironically, China has been longing for the award of a Nobel Prize for decades, yet this particular honour bestowed for the first time on a Chinese citizen has proved to be less than welcome to the government in Beijing. After all, Liu Xiaobo had been sentenced in 2004 to spend 11 years in prison for subversive activities, such as a plea for government reforms and human rights. Yet it is still surprising that in the view of the Chinese government the award was nothing less than "an obscenity." Beijing accused the Nobel Prize Committee of interference in China's internal affairs and infringement of China's judicial sovereignty. At the same time China warned the Norwegian government that it would have to face serious consequences for permitting the award to be bestowed in this manner. The Chinese government also prevented Liu Xiaobo and his family from attending the ceremony, launched a campaign in order to boycott the award, and imposed a blackout on BBC and CNN coverage of the ceremony in Norway. In addition, the Chinese government hastily created its own Confucius Peace Prize, awarded immediately prior to the 2010 Nobel Prize ceremony.

There is no doubt that in spite of a rapidly expanding market economy in China today, large portions of the population. especially among the peasantry. migrant workers, “working sisters” (dagong mei), laid-off workers and other disadvantaged groups. have been unable to significantly raise their living standards and participate meaningfully in decision-making (see Chapter 3 by Wanning Sun in this volume). Nor should it be surprising that the Chinese mass media, especially television, have not been able to do much to bring about radical changes in this respect. However, what is not supported by evidence available about the current state of’ the media in China is that the “authoritarian” and its cultural “technology of visuality” expresses “only narrow, elitist, corporate, and state interests” and so contributes to rather than alleviates the suffering of the underprivileged (Jhally 2002: 334). The current situation of the visual media in relation to social and political relations in China appears to be rather more complex in that television programming. production, ratings and policies are at present undergoing significant transformations that are beginning to impact upon viewing audiences in the millions. In this chapter, 1 argue that documentary films and programs in particular are a good indicator of such changes taking place in China’s vast television arena.

The current popularity of Chinese cinema in the West has been sparked in the main by the fiction films of such directors as Zhang Yimuo, Chen Kaige, Feng Xiaoning, Zhang Yang or Feng Xiaogang. However, their movies constitute only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger volume of Chinese cinema the vast bulk of which is made up of documentary films. Relatively little has been written in English about Chinese documentary cinema in any comprehensive sense. This is a gap which I wish to fill at least partially in presenting Chinese Documentaries to the reading public. In China, on the other hand, there is now a burgeoning industry of critical literature on documentary film and television programmes. A secondary aim then is to bring some of that literature to the attention of the Anglophone readership. A third aim is to redress an imbalance in many Western analyses of contemporary Chinese media. I have been struck by a certain asymmetry in at least some of that literature where a relatively small body of data serves as illustrative material for the exposition of approaches informed by a lively theoretical debate in such fields as politics, media research, and film studies. Useful as many of these theories are in lending the debate about the current state of the media in China a higher degree of precision, when the data are overwhelmed by theorisation what we are able to learn about China can be jeopardised. Accordingly, my investigation is informed foremost by a respect for the data as much as has been possible, without falling into the trap of assuming that data can stand on their own or that they contain their own theorisation. With this caution in mind I propose a modest kind of conceptualisation throughout the book, looking at documentary cinema from the 1920s to the present from the perspective of a loosely conceived spectrum stretching between the poles of highly constrained and dogmatic film making at one end of the scale and a multi-voiced or polyphonic form of cinema, at the other. I will return to these terms for clarification in Chapter 1.

With China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) imminent, fears for the film industry are intensifying. At the June 1999 Film and Literature Conference in Chengdu in Sichuan Province, film director Chen Kaige declared that China’s film industry is at the crossroads between survival and collapse (Lu [Shaoyang] 2000: 1). Since 1995, ten imported Hollywood films have taken 60 per cent of China’s annual box-office revenue. With China’s entry into the WTO, the number of Hollywood ‘blockbusters’ will double. As a consequence, Chen fears the domestic industry will be destroyed within one or two decades.