Archive

June 13, 2011, Bridge Café (Wudaokou)

Speaker:  Prof. Dr. YAN Xuetong 阎学通, Institute of International Studies, Tsinghua University

Presentation

ThinkIn China presented the last book of Yan Xuetong: Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power. Yan is Professor of International Relations at Tsinghua University, one of the most influential foreign policy analyst and theorist of international relations in the world: Foreign Policy named him one of the world’s hundred most influential  public intellectuals.

In Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power Yan shows his massive research on ancient Chinese thinkers who wrote about governance and interstate relations during a period of incessant warfare between fragmented states, before China was unified by the first emperor of Qin in 221 bce. By looking into the past, Yan displays a new theory which basically sees political leadership as the key of national power and morality as an essential part of political leadership.

In Yan’s view, economic and military might matter as components of national power, but they are secondary to political leaders who act (at least partly) in accordance with moral norms. If China’s leaders absorb and act on that insight, they can play a greater role in shaping a peaceful and harmonious world order.

Yan is still a political realist, because he believes political leadership shapes international relations; it is the way the political world actually works, not just an ideal. Moreover, Yan believes that the global order is bound to be hierarchical, with some states being dominant and others influential. But dominance is achieved mainly by morally informed political leadership rather than economic or military power.

Q&A

(report by Enrico Fardella)

May 31, 2011, Bridge Café (Wudaokou)

Speaker: Dr. Nicola Horsburgh, Researcher, Department of International Relations, Oxford University (UK)

Presentation

Dr. Horsburgh’s thesis explores the Chinese nuclear weapons behavior  in terms of its participation in the global nuclear weapons order. Participation here relates to China’s engagement in the process of creating (during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s), consolidating (in the 1980s and 1990s) and maintaining nuclear order today. In unpacking China’s participation, I am particularly interested in the methods used and strategies adopted by China as well as the motivations driving its engagement.

This is an alternative approach to the study of nuclear weapons behavior, since most analysis has a narrow focus on issues related to proliferation, nuclear weapons development, or strategy. In relation to China, analysis typically concentrates on its poor proliferation record, the uncertain direction and depth of its military spending and modernization process; as well as opaqueness in policy. More recent studies have focused on China’s decision to sign up to major nuclear treaties such as the Non Proliferation Treaty (1992) and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (1996). While these studies have their merits they all rest on underlying negative assumptions and are set against China’s rise in international affairs. Nuclear order offers an alternative lens and background against which to assess behaviour, resulting in a more holistic (beyond a proliferation or strategy focus) and historical perspective. The historical perspective is especially important because there is little analysis in English on China’s role in the wider global nuclear history, nor of China’s interpretation of that history.

In terms of structure, the thesis is divided into two sections, the first part is conceptual, here I present my own definition of nuclear order and outline how participation in that order can be used to assess nuclear weapons behaviour. The second part of the thesis is more empiricial, it presents a chronological study of Chinese participation in the global nuclear order between 1949 and the mid to late 2000s.

Before I offer my definition of nuclear order it is useful to briefly consider the existing literature, and to note that the term is increasingly used by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and policymakers worldwide: unfortunately, many consider the nuclear order broken (due to proliferation in Iran, North Korea, the threat of nuclear terrorism, etc…). However, academically speaking, very few, with the exception of Professor William Walker, have explored the term in serious detail. According to Walker, nuclear order consists of two systems: the first, managed deterrence, is a system based on power politics in which doctrines of deterrence are key; the second system, abstinence, is based on regimes, of which the NPT is key. Both systems are held together by a reliance on deterrence and eventual promise of nuclear disarmament among nuclear weapons states party to the NPT. Walker adds that the nuclear order is currently broken, and lays much of the blame for this on the George W. Bush administration. Walker’s ideas sparked an intense intellectual debate in a 2007 edition of the International Affairs journal, with Realists highlighting instead the US role as a positive factor in upholding the nuclear order, an order defined by Realists as very much based on power politics. Unfortunately, the nuclear order debate has remained largely a Western debate, with the slight exception of some limited discussion in India and China.

So, where do I place myself in this debate? I agree with Walker that nuclear order is more than a set of deterrent relations, in fact, I argue that norms and ideas play a play a powerful role in constraining nuclear behaviour, take for instance the norm of nuclear non-proliferation and non-use. However, I define nuclear order in terms of four core elements or pillars: nuclear deterrence, arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament. I highlight the interplay between these pillars, especially how they might underpin or undermine one another. For instance, though they share the goal of strategic stability, their longer term imperatives differ. Take disarmament: its ultimate manifestation is the undoing of nuclear order, transforming it into a non-nuclear order, while at the opposite end of the spectrum, deterrence preserves the status quo, keeping the nuclear order ‘nuclear’. The current nuclear order is very much driven by the deterrence rather than disarmament imperative. This thus has important implications for the ‘nuclear weapons free world’ debate that has been raging since 2009 by suggesting that disarmament will be extremely difficult to achive because it requires the undoing of the very fabric of nuclear order, based on deterrence.

In assessing the methods and motivations behind China’s participation, I propose several sets of variables. To identity methods, I distinguish between actions that directly or indirectly contribute to nuclear order, those that are strategic, organizational and normative in nature; as well as the pace of engagement, from joining to promoting a treaty. In terms of motivations, I have two (inter-related) sets of variables: domestic and external. Among domestic variables are financial incentives, sub-state interests, normative sources of power, and historical experience; external variables include foreign pressure, institutional constraints, changes in balances of power, as well as perceptions of nuclear order.

In terms of China’s nuclear behaviour, I start chronologically, before China successfully detonated its first atomic device, between 1949 and 1964; and then assess China’s role in the nuclear order as a nuclear weapons state thereafter. So far, the main arguments include:

• During the 1949-1976 period, most analysis suggests China was a voiciferous bystander critical to treaties like the NPT, an obstacle to building nuclear order. My thesis complicates this picture: China actually came to faciliate the nuclear order as it eventually emerged by indirectly influencing the thinking of the superpowers as to how best to manage nuclear weapons and shape an order based around nonproliferation. In the early 1960s, China even saw value in a nuclear order, presenting its own ideas for order (based around what I term ‘Socialist Proliferation’).
• In the 1970s and 1980s, China’s ‘opening up and reform’ process actually had a slowing-down effect on its military efforts and nuclear programme, thus China retreated from the nuclear order.
• In the late 1980s and 1990s, China re-engaged with the nuclear order as a more confident nuclear weapons state (with second strike force capabilities: intercontinental ballistic missiles, as well as submarine launched ballistic missiles); export controls in place, and as a member of major treaties such as the NPT and CTBT. In this period, I also assess China’s decision to host the Six Party Talks;  and its commitment to dialogues, especially with the US, in the nuclear field.

Overall, this thesis intends to present a more balanced understanding of Chinese nuclear weapons behaviour, grounded in a reassessment of global nuclear history, and China’s place in that history. The thesis also develops nuclear order as a more useful academic concept (beyond the non-proliferation regime) through which to understand how nuclear arms are governed globally as well as how actors behave in that order.

April 26, 2011, Bridge Café (Wudaokou)

Speaker: Prof. Dr. ZHANG Qingmin 张清敏, Peking University, Center for International and Strategic Studies

Presentation

Peking University Professor Zhang Qingmin addressed the Thinkin China community on the history and debates around the continued applicability of China’s Foreign policy approach of taoguang yanghui. Taoguang yanghui has various translations into English, but it is largely conceived of as China’s quiet foreign policy approach of “bide our time, build/hide our capabilities” as described in Deng Xiaoping’s 24 character foreign policy strategy of the early 1990s.

Zhang elucidated the history of the concept as a foreign policy approach in China. He notes that after the Tiananmen Incident of 1989, Deng Xiaoping directed foreign policy towards an emphasis on keeping a low profile in international affairs –an avoidance of flashy politics and grandiose demonstrations of leadership. This was incorporated an avoidance of “carrying the socialist flag” as well as an eschewing of the adoption of positions of leadership amongst developing countries despite calls from the developing world for China to adopt a predominant role. While some argue that this approach has changed its character since its inception, it remains the official foreign policy doctrine of China.

This rhetoric stands at odds with the view of many Western scholars associated with the China Threat School. Much of the misconception about this policy, argues Zhang, stems from a lack of conceptual clarity about its content and the obfuscations resulting from its translation. Some translations offered have included “hide our capabilities”, “bide our time and build our capabilities” or “hide brightness, nourish obscurity.” Some of these interpretations suggest to many Western scholars duplicity or quiet but significant rise without transparency. Zhang argues rather that it was intended to imply the adoption of a low profile and self-effacing demeanour in foreign policy dealings and is a “style” rather than a strategy.

Zhang highlighted the debates surrounding whether China should maintain this policy of quiet diplomacy or abandon it in favour of a more assertive stance. On the one hand, he notes that official policy and mainstream scholars are largely of the view that taoguang yanghui should be maintained. Proponents of this argument note that China remains a developing country and is presently not in a position to shift this policy. In addition, advocates argue that it has been a successful approach and has aided China’s development thus far and as such, it should be maintained.

Outside of the mainstream, a variety of arguments are offered in favour of abandonment of taoguang yanghui. Some critics argue that with China’s increasing power and economic muscle in the international system, it should adopt a more responsible and outspoken foreign policy. Others argue for the maintenance of the policy in practice, but the avoidance of making this policy known. Advocates of this view argue that once the continued existence of the strategy is known, the strategy loses its efficacy. A third school of thought on the matter suggests that China has already abandoned taoguang yanghui. Its increasingly active participation in international groupings such as the G20 is used as evidence in support of this claim. Further, China’s particularly assertive approach to foreign policy in 2010 –including a vociferous stance on the South China Sea Issue, the fishing boat incident and The US’s arms sales to Taiwan– lends credence to this claim.

In conclusion, Prof. Zhang offered his own interpretation on the debate. In so doing he revisited the essence of taoguang yanghui as embodied by Deng Xiaoping. He reaffirmed the notion of keeping a low profile in both international and domestic dealings as central to Deng’s approach of avoidance of high status leadership and deferral to others. He then examined the sustained salience of this low profile approach in the aftermath of Deng’s leadership arguing while approaches have been stylistically less self-effacing, the official policy remains intact.

(report by Kelly-Jo Bluen)

March 22, 2011, Bridge Café (Wudaokou)

Speaker:  Dr. Matt Ferchen, Associate Professor, Department of International Relations, Tsinghua University

Presentation

The mixture of illusions, plans, hopes, and fears that arise out of the China–Latin America relationship are as powerful in their impact on Latin America as are the deals and events themselves…the greatest impact of China will come from what it leads the region to dream, and what Latin America finds when it awakens.

This statement, part of a recent but growing wave of academic, media, government, and business interest in China’s burgeoning economic and political relations with regions of the developing world from Latin America to Africa to Southeast Asia, captures an important but often underappreciated idea. Specifically, the perceptions and expectations of government and business leaders as well as everyday citizens of countries in Latin America will play a crucial role in determining the development of economic and political relations between their countries and China.

For its part, China has consistently and positively characterized its expanding trade and investment relations with regions of the developing world, in particular with Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, as ‘win–win.’ Through official diplomacy and media out-lets, China has emphasized that mutually beneficial ties with these regions are a logical outcome of relations with China, itself a developing nation. Such a win–win scenario, China contends, should thus be lauded as a natural outgrowth of ‘South–South’ interaction.

However, within Latin America and Africa, as well as for other interested observers from around the world, perceptions of developing country relations with China span a wide range. At one end of the spectrum is optimism that China constitutes a new and alternative driver of trade and investment for developing countries. Such optimism is sometimes linked to the notion that China also serves an alternative model of economic development and international diplomacy. At the other end of the spectrum is skepticism and fear about China’s rising economic and political intentions and influence. Much of this contentious debate is reflected in the rapid increase in academic and media discussion of the twin ideas of a ‘Beijing Consensus’ or ‘China Model’ of development.

One of the key issues at stake in these debates is whether or not China’s rapidly expanding trade and investment relations with the developing world are of a more equal and sustainable nature than historical relations between developed and developing countries.

NEW CINEMA ‐ NEW PRACTICE  

by Eduardo Gagliardi

When we talk about ‘Chinese independent cinema’, we refer to an alternative mode of film production realized outside the official system, but also to a kind of cinema that gives priority to self expression, individual perspective, and artistic value. Born in the nineties, the Chinese independent cinema has seen in the last ten years further developments and changes, so that nowadays it should be distinguished by the cinema of the Sixth generation directors.

1- Nineties: the Sixth generation

This mode started in China in the early nineties with those directors, after known as the Sixth generation directors, like Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai and He Jianjun. These directors were Beijing Film Academy graduated. Despite their training instead of working in the official film production system, they began, for the first time in China, to realize their movies with private capital and without submitting the work for the censorship approval; hence they had to find alternative ways to show those works. One of these ways was the international film festival circuit where the movies found positive criticism and foreign producers. After some conflicts with the authorities these directors started to realize movies sanctioned by the censorship, and hence finally shown in China. In 1997 emerges Jia Zhangke that marks the passage of independent cinema toward a new phase.

2 – 2000: “New” Chinese Independent Cinema

With the turn of the century due to the rapid spreading of digital technology, film production finds a huge change. The DV (digital video) is widely commercialized in China and allowed virtually to everyone to engage in film production, without needing a specific or professional training and a consistent production capital. Movies are now shot on site (xianchang) and use non-professional actors, very often the production crew is narrowed to few members if not to the only director. By a stylistic point of view in general in these movies is preferred a form of documentary-realism, with some influences from neo-realism, where the an episodic narrative that avoids any complex dramatic construction.

The DV opens to new possibilities of representation, and documentation. Independent cinema find itself as an instrument to document new aspect of contemporary China, especially the marginalized and the ones that are neglected by the official discourse. In this context independent works can be distinguished in three main film forms emerge: the narrative or fictional, the documentary and a new kind of film where the DV is used as a way to image experimentation.

But along with the increasing number of independent film productions, emerge in China also a sort of independent film culture as a development of filmclubs and film buffs circles appeared in the major Chinese cities at the turn of the century. In fact, a film culture mainly devoted to art-house movies and the works of world-great directors emerges in some Chinese cities, but it will focus soon on the Chinese cinema and in particular the independent one, also as form of resistance against the commercial movies, including the Hollywood imports, promoted by the Film Bureau.

These filmclubs organize public screenings, Q&A with directors and in general constitute a space for dialogue and exchange for members and general audience. Usually their activities are held in public space alternative to the usual movie theatres, such as bars, cafes, libraries and even universities, and by the vast majority these activities are free of charge for the audience. Among these filmclubs worth to mention Practice Society, founded in Beijing in April 2000 by some students of Beijing Film Academy. If at the beginning association as Practice Society focus on international art-house cinema they soon turn their attention to the Chinese independent cinema, also as consequence of the spreading of the cheap – mostly pirate- Dvds of that world cinema that at the beginning was at the core of their activities.

After Practice Society, closed in 2003, not only new associations exclusively devoted to the promotion of independent cinema (especially documentary) come out, but also a new kind of structures emerge. Aiming to promote Chinese independent cinema, through a series of different strategies and orientations these structures contribute to the creation of a new and marginal form of popular culture. Collective activities like screening, workshops and talks become part of a wider promotion of independent cinema spirit and are extended to the production, (non-theatrical) distribution and the creation of a network connected with the circuit of international film festivals, film funds, distributors and art institutions.

Chinese independent cinema is today a space that has gone far beyond its own initial definition, becoming a space of dialogue and self-expression of an emerging Chinese civil society.

New Chinese Documentary – A Demolition on-the-spot

by Tyra Diez

As we Beijing’s residents all know, the chai (拆) phenomena, that is, the physical demolition of the space, has dramatically reshaped our everyday landscape: cranes and rubbles, streets half built or half destroyed, new slums, entire neighbourhoods that have disappeared overnight, faster than ever before. In one sense or another, this modernization process, physically expressed in the urbanization process, is at the core of both the emergence and development of the Chinese independent documentary. The reflection about space is at the core of the Chinese independent documentary: historically, aesthetically and ideologically speaking. It inaugurates an alternative reflection about it, which determines both its new form and content. Therefore I am going to take the chai phenomena, that is, the transformation of the space as well as the different conceptions that it entails as my connecting thread in this talk.

First I am going to talk about the demolition of the public space. Here I refer to the change from a socialist space to a post-socialist one, and how this dramatic transformation gave birth to a new documentary form.

Then, in the second part, I focus on the demolition of the private space, and how the increased speed of the urbanization process that took place over the 90’s generated a redefinition of the new documentary form.

At the end, I am going to introduce briefly the proposals that this new form of documentary offers in response to the various demolitions that it faces and shows.

1.The emergence of the Chinese independent documentary: The demolition of the public space.

The first Chinese independent documentary is Bumming in Beijing, one hour and a half 35 mm film where Wu Wenguang records the semi-vagabond life of five of his friends. They come from several provinces, and the film is about the artistic aspirations and vital frustrations that they find in the city. It shows us in a crude, “direct” style, the bumming of two painters, one writer, one playwright and one photographer. Although unseen, Wu Wenguang is the sixth character of the film. As the rest of his friends he wanders around looking for a meaning and a role different from the one he was supposed to assume some years earlier. Here, “bumming” (流浪) is not just a title but a new way of thinking and living, at the same time chosen and forced. It serves as a metaphor of a generation; explains some of the traumas and impulses that crystallized in the new documentary form. The fact that one has to be wandering, bumming or drifting around implies a new spatial configuration and a new way to be related to it. To be a vagabond is to lack the physical space where one can be located in all senses. And then the other part of the title, The last dreamers, comes to reinforce the existential side of the situation: What were their dreams? And why are they the last dreamers and not the first ones?

Wu Wenguang started filming Bumming in 1988 and finished it in 1990, so among other things it is a visual testimony of the memories and anxieties that the Tiananmen incidents brought to the young generation. Tiananmen 1989 is behind their cryings and desperation; it is behind their bumming and is among the reasons for them to refuse the party state jobs assigned, together with their desire to go abroad. They wanted to be independent (from the state) in all senses, even spatial.

As Chris Berry and Yomi Braester point out1, Tiananmen Square has for the early documentarians a specific cinematic iconology, it is a political symbol, being the June Fourth incidents a “structuring absence” that pierces all of them. That could be better understood if we take into account what Tiananmen Square has signified until now. From May Fourth on, it has been China’s centre of political expression, and then the political heart of the proletariat dictatorship. Since Mao announced the establishment of the People’s Republic, people has marched to the Square any time they were required to express, or they wanted to achieve, something political. The young documentarians were among that people. They marched to the square either as red guards in 1966, as Zhou Enlai’s mourners in 1976 or as students in 1989.

We can find some visual background in another documentary of Wu Wenguang, 1966: My time at the red guards, where five former red guards recall their experience. It is, of course, the experience of disenchantment. But what is not so often stressed is that the precondition of disillusion is illusion itself, and that’s exactly what this documentary reveals: the joy, the excitement, the faith, the, as one of the character says in the film, “time for making revolutionary things has at last come for us” that all of them felt at the beginning. In other words, all the early documentarians belong to a generation, as the red guards in the film, born at the heyday of maoist, collectivist rhetoric. This means that is a generation that was raised to believe not just in the glorious construction of the socialist nation, but also in the political role that they had in contributing to its success. We already know how this story ends: the former illusion and the “make history” promises ended up as a kind of betrayal that took the form of the father devours his children nightmare.

Nonetheless, over the 80’s, new promises, and therefore, new roles, were created. The modernization discourse was once more reinforced by the state, although the discourse itself was substantially subverted: the people’s public responsibility was not anymore through political, collective action, but through the individual (economic) efforts. And therefore, individuality and self expression were allowed. Culture fever and commercialization of culture began, and a new public space seemed possible; a public oppositional movement formed by individuals, and no masses, was formed through these years. And we now as well how this story once again ended up. In I’ve graduated, a series of interviews to graduates produced in 1992, we hear the song “I have been betrayed” while we see people marching over the avenue that ends at Tiananmen. Suddenly, they start to run and the screen turns black, in a clear reference to the incidents. The new hopes and new promises created over the 80’s were once again broken. Most of the graduates that appear in this documentary, as happened with the ones in Bumming, rejected the officially given jobs. And as in Bumming, the other song that appears in the documentary is “Going abroad”. They young generation, two times betrayed, wanted then to be independent (from the state) in all senses, even spatial.

The Square’s closure entails a new order, a post-socialist one, where the political primacy is subverted into an economic one, and where the public space in this socialist sense is closed for the people. After 1989, the market oriented system is implemented. State factories are shut down one after another; among them are of course the cultural state-run enterprises. And so “independent” productions, that is to say “non-state” productions, emerge. New documentaries are independent not just in an ideological, chosen, sense, but also, and by force, in terms of production and distribution: they do not rely anymore, as filmmakers have done until now, in the state funds to carry out their personal projects (there were not such a thing as “personal projects” under Maoism).

The documentary series Tiananmen Square, produced in 1991 by Chen Jue and Shi Jian, reflects the kind of interchanges and negotiations between the official and the to-be-born underground media that took place over the 80s. It was at first planned as a CCTV program, but once the series were rejected to public exhibition due to the recent incidents, they took (kind of stole) the previous material and edited the footage in a way that questions the official narratives of the square as a political arena. Along its 8 chapters, it mixed past images and direct interviews of the anonymous passer-byes, together with episodes from the TV archive with long-shoots of the common people in the square. By doing so, they confront the official history with the popular stories, opening a space in the documentary to challenge the two narratives or different versions about the significance of the square, historically and politically speaking.

So the good news, although a paradoxical one, is that after the very symbol of the political centre was closed for good, that’s to say, after the Tian’anmen Square was shut down for the people to demonstrate, the centre fell back into multiples and disconnected centres that, as so, became peripheries. The early independent documentary of the 90s is itself one of those fringes. It comes from the margins and devotes itself to speak out on their behalf in an attempt to make them recover the voice and therefore to make it public, make it politically and socially significant.

We find this “peripheral conscience” or conscience of periphery in all the early trends of the new documentarians. Some of them went to remote regions in search of other spaces, as Duan Jinchuan did in Margins of the world, where we see enormous Tibetan plateaus and lakes and nomads whose way of life seem untouched by the recent turmoil, a place out of the Chinese recent historical space. Others remained in the cities, where the new born peripheries were more present and yet more invisible: newcomers from the countryside, as in Out of Phoenix Bridge, unemployed as in Beijing Cotton Fluffing Artisan, elders as in Old Men, and in short all of those millions of extras that have been left without any role in the spectacular blockbuster that China leads.

And all this crystallizes in a new documentary format. The aesthetic principle that best summarizes the founding ethos of the Chinese independent documentary is xianchang (现场). Usually translated as “on-the spot” it represents itself a spatial concept. It is meant to be a “right here and right now” record of reality, one that avoids, or that seeks to avoid, all the traditional directorial devices of image and subject control. Its premises are thought to be consciously different from the dominant official genre, the socialist realism. Socialist realism is now widely identified as mere propaganda, or at best, as the representation of reality as the authorities want it to be. In this new approach, usually there is no script, voiceover, nor comment from the director to provide us with an explanation or solution to what is shown. The “common people” own space, and the structures that conform their actions (or lack of actions) in it, regardless if they are vagabonds artists, disenchanted students, Tibetan nomads or anonymous passer-byes, are now taken as the primal material, one that does not have to be conformed with any official or party discourse. Xianchang is not a closed or fixed set of film techniques. It is more of a proposal, an attempt to find the most flexible and least intrusive filming practices to show the heterogeneity of reality itself. It is, in short, an attempt to open for the public record multiple “on-the-spots” that are significant precisely because they are able to confront and question the want-to-be one and only record from above.

2.Chinese Independent documentary from the mid 90’s onwards: the demolition of the private space.

The Chinese independent documentary emerges from a gradual closure of the public space as it has been understood during the maoist period. Therefore, it became by force the starting point of the exploration of the endless infinite, that is, the individual and what is called its geren fengge (个人风格), its individual style, self-expression, “independent” view. Although this has not changed, from mid 90’s onwards the stress has arguably gone more intimate, more self-reflexive and performative. What the xianchang form emphasized at the beginning was a reflection of how the political events constricted the fates of the individuals, the public context seen from a private point of view. From the mid 90’s onwards, new styles and new aspirations came to modify and enrich this trend. Individuality wants to reinforce itself in more extreme ways, sometimes at the expense of the public. In There’s a strong wind in Beijing, the documentary that arguably inaugurates the second phase of the independent documentary, the filmmaker intrude on a man in a public toilet, literally caught with his pants down, and asks “Is the wind in Beijing very strong?” In The box (2001), the filmmaker records the very private life of one lesbian couple. Public bathrooms and intimate bedrooms are crudely offered to public sight. Interaction, intrusion, and a reinforced understanding of “individuality” force some documentarians to present themselves not just behind the camera, but also in front of it. Individuality is more a subjective matter than an objective one.

West of the tracks, Wang Bing’s 2003 masterpiece about the decline of a factory in northwest China is a good visual record of the transition from the collective to the individual, the individual understood now as a new existential, significant measure. It is a three episodes documentary, nine hours long. In the first and second part, Rust and Remnants, the protagonist, as Wang Bing has explained, is the factory itself, the common space that determines the fates of the people within it. In these two episodes, people is not regarded as “individuals”, instead, they conform a net of relations that are conditioned by the position they occupy in the factory. The factory is not just a place of work, but a space that entails a collective way of living, a common understanding and a set of shared values. The individuals as such appear in the third part, Rails, once we have witnessed in the previous chapters the shut down of the factories and the correlated demolition of the workers’ neighbourhood surrounding them. The third part is the story of the Dus, a father and a son trying to make a living out of the rails, selling stolen coal from the wagons, doing little jobs here and there, exhausted and all by their own, alone. The third part is also the shorter one, two hours long instead of the four hours of the first chapter, and the three of the second, implying metaphorically the actual duration of each historical period: 30 years living under the hammering promotion of socialism (1949- 1979), 20 years under its officially run disarticulation (1979-1999), and a bunch of years since its apparently total replacement for a capitalist system.

In this “economical” sense, turning back to the worldly context that is the primal matter of documentaries, the demolition process that had began with the (politically determined) public space continues its way down to the private space, that is, at first, my house, your neighbourhood, their village, and then, the very sense of identity that the demolished spaces entailed. Recently born individuality is also threatened. The speed of the economic transformation that began with the modernization process of the 80’s is exponentially increasing. It seems that it literally leaves no time to reflect on the transformation itself. It seems that only allows to record, document, and eventually, try to save the same thing that disappears while is being saved. In short, a desperate capture of the millions of “on-the-spots” that have no future. A shared conscience of urgency emerges and the independent documentary production soars since the mid 90s. The new DV cameras, cheap and easy to use, allow more and more people to record their environment, their interior, looking for identity itself. Thus the ethic and aesthetic xianchang principle is from now on complemented with a growing and perplexed awareness of the demolition that is taking place around. A chai not only in terms of space, this building or that siheyuan, villages becoming cities and cities devouring themselves in the endless loop of consumerism, but also in terms of the subject -filmmaker, neighbour or migrant- that has to be re-located against the destruction that threatens their very identity.

And so, many new documentaries take the chai phenomena as their films topic. One early example is Zhang Yuan 1993’s Demolition and relocation, which records the few “nail houses” left in a traditional Beijing neighbourhood that is being demolished. Since then, countless documentaries with the same demolition subject have been produced, be it in urban or rural areas (Meishi Street, Dingzi hu, Bing Ai). Moreover, whether explicit or implicit, the chai glides in virtually all of them. It is not just about physical space, but also about the interactions between the individuals living in it. The record of personal tragedies related with the demolition of the space serves to show how people’s behaviour can be affected by a change of space. It also entails another recount of modernity: the modernity that was supposed to allow the raise of individuality can also reject it. Li Ning’s Tape comes here as a good example. Tape is a documentary made by fragments. Half urban experiment, half performance, half personal story, it mixes images of Li Ning’s theatre group performing in the street, remnants of his personal life and some lyrical constructions of Li Ning hurting himself on the rubbles of a demolished building. The result is a self-portrait documentary that illuminates the interactions between the three demolitions: collective, familiar, individual. Or, one may say, spatial, cultural, existential.

Nevertheless, every demolition, be it spatial, emotional, cultural or the kind, should find its ways of relocation. Now I am going to speak briefly about what kind the independent documentary offers.

3. From demolition to relocation: the search for a people’s space

Chinese independent documentary offers, as other contemporary artistic and cultural expressions do, common images and reflections about past and present demolitions, and in doing so intends ways of relocation, spatial, cultural or the kind.

And it intends it in at least two ways: 1) creating new spaces for those in the margins to talk and to be seen through film festivals, cafes, new nets of screening, public meetings and so on; 2) creating, in those spaces and through those social nets, a collective reflection, and for that reason, political in nature, about past and future, about recent memories and new alternatives.

It is being argued by some scholars2 that the incipient self-indulgence that could be found in some early independent documentaries (the tedious recount of the self) tend to be among the new generation of documentarians, with their performative and self-reflexive preferences, even more self-indulgent and private, more and more amateur and obsessed with showing the filmmakers’ personal miseries. I agree in a sense; documentary is not a separated entity. It influences its environment as much as it is influenced by it. There is no wonder then that a general depolitization and massive consumerism find their ways in the new self-images that independent documentary reflects. Nevertheless, I do not think that the original aim that inspired the emergence of Chinese independent documentary has changed with the arrival of the so- called “age of the amateur”, the safe refuge of individuality. Rather, it comes to add new dimensions to the problematic of private and public, political awareness and so on, and a great number of recent documentaries continue to be political in nature. By that I mean explicitly political, nor in the sense “everything is political” or “the personal is political” formulas of the more intimate, artistic or experimental-oriented documentaries, as for example could be the marvellous Liu Jian’s series of Ox hide.

Recent examples of the first category are Zhao Liang’s Petitioners or Du Haibin’s 1428, the social oriented works of Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie and many others. In this trend are included also all the documentaries that have devoted themselves to reconstruct what they call a folk memory (民间记忆), a reflection and recount of history from the ones that till now have had any voice in its retelling. Wu Wenguang’s 1966…, was one early example of historical reflection. Recent ones are Zhang Ming’s 60, Wang Bing’s Feng Ming: a Chinese memoir or Hu Jie’s Searching for Lin Zhao’s soul.

Chinese independent documentaries, as documentary genre in general, are responsible for making visible, that is, for bringing to the common realm of public space, all which resists to be forgotten. They also reveal that in spite of the conditions, social bonds continue to be created, sometimes precisely as a consequence of such conditions. The “social fabric” rebels against disappearance and oblivion by inventing new ways of solidarity and survival. The huge amount and the overwhelming variety of independent documentaries produced in the last decade leaves us with the same kind of perplexity that I find in the rationale of the movement itself: as it happens with the same reality they are trying to capture, it may need time to understand what it records and proposes about the changes of the Chinese space, aesthetically, historically and politically speaking. We may need time to rethink the processes frozen by the documentaries of this vertiginous transformation; images, stories and proposals that are waiting for us to slow down and rethink what we -or them- are doing and could do within our common space, public and private.

December 28, 2010, Bridge Cafe (Wudaokou)

Speakers: Tyra Díez, Researcher, Department of Theory of Literature, University of Granada, Spain
and Dr. Edoardo Gagliardi, Researcher, Department of Oriental Studies, University Sapienza Rome, Italy

Presentation by Tyra Diez 

New Chinese Documentary – a Demolition on-the-spot

As we Beijing’s residents all know, the chai (拆) phenomena, that is, the physical demolition of the space, has dramatically reshaped our everyday landscape: cranes and rubbles, streets half built or half destroyed, new slums, entire neighbourhoods that have disappeared overnight, faster than ever before. In one sense or another, this modernization process, physically expressed in the urbanization process, is at the core of both the emergence and development of the Chinese independent documentary. The reflection about space is at the core of the Chinese independent documentary: historically, aesthetically and ideologically speaking. It inaugurates an alternative reflection about it, which determines both its new form and content. Therefore I am going to take the chai phenomena, that is, the transformation of the space as well as the different conceptions that it entails as my connecting thread in this talk.

First I am going to talk about the demolition of the public space. Here I refer to the change from a socialist space to a post-socialist one, and how this dramatic transformation gave birth to a new documentary form.

Then, in the second part, I focus on the demolition of the private space, and how the increased speed of the urbanization process that took place over the 90’s generated a redefinition of the new documentary form.

At the end, I am going to introduce briefly the proposals that this new form of documentary offers in response to the various demolitions that it faces and shows.

1.The emergence of the Chinese independent documentary: The demolition of the public space.

The first Chinese independent documentary is Bumming in Beijing, one hour and a half 35 mm film where Wu Wenguang records the semi-vagabond life of five of his friends. They come from several provinces, and the film is about the artistic aspirations and vital frustrations that they find in the city. It shows us in a crude, “direct” style, the bumming of two painters, one writer, one playwright and one photographer. Although unseen, Wu Wenguang is the sixth character of the film. As the rest of his friends he wanders around looking for a meaning and a role different from the one he was supposed to assume some years earlier. Here, “bumming” (流浪) is not just a title but a new way of thinking and living, at the same time chosen and forced. It serves as a metaphor of a generation; explains some of the traumas and impulses that crystallized in the new documentary form. The fact that one has to be wandering, bumming or drifting around implies a new spatial configuration and a new way to be related to it. To be a vagabond is to lack the physical space where one can be located in all senses. And then the other part of the title, The last dreamers, comes to reinforce the existential side of the situation: What were their dreams? And why are they the last dreamers and not the first ones?

Wu Wenguang started filming Bumming in 1988 and finished it in 1990, so among other things it is a visual testimony of the memories and anxieties that the Tiananmen incidents brought to the young generation. Tiananmen 1989 is behind their cryings and desperation; it is behind their bumming and is among the reasons for them to refuse the party state jobs assigned, together with their desire to go abroad. They wanted to be independent (from the state) in all senses, even spatial.

As Chris Berry and Yomi Braester point out1, Tiananmen Square has for the early documentarians a specific cinematic iconology, it is a political symbol, being the June Fourth incidents a “structuring absence” that pierces all of them. That could be better understood if we take into account what Tiananmen Square has signified until now. From May Fourth on, it has been China’s centre of political expression, and then the political heart of the proletariat dictatorship. Since Mao announced the establishment of the People’s Republic, people has marched to the Square any time they were required to express, or they wanted to achieve, something political. The young documentarians were among that people. They marched to the square either as red guards in 1966, as Zhou Enlai’s mourners in 1976 or as students in 1989.

We can find some visual background in another documentary of Wu Wenguang, 1966: My time at the red guards, where five former red guards recall their experience. It is, of course, the experience of disenchantment. But what is not so often stressed is that the precondition of disillusion is illusion itself, and that’s exactly what this documentary reveals: the joy, the excitement, the faith, the, as one of the character says in the film, “time for making revolutionary things has at last come for us” that all of them felt at the beginning. In other words, all the early documentarians belong to a generation, as the red guards in the film, born at the heyday of maoist, collectivist rhetoric. This means that is a generation that was raised to believe not just in the glorious construction of the socialist nation, but also in the political role that they had in contributing to its success. We already know how this story ends: the former illusion and the “make history” promises ended up as a kind of betrayal that took the form of the father devours his children nightmare.

Nonetheless, over the 80’s, new promises, and therefore, new roles, were created. The modernization discourse was once more reinforced by the state, although the discourse itself was substantially subverted: the people’s public responsibility was not anymore through political, collective action, but through the individual (economic) efforts. And therefore, individuality and self expression were allowed. Culture fever and commercialization of culture began, and a new public space seemed possible; a public oppositional movement formed by individuals, and no masses, was formed through these years. And we now as well how this story once again ended up. In I’ve graduated, a series of interviews to graduates produced in 1992, we hear the song “I have been betrayed” while we see people marching over the avenue that ends at Tiananmen. Suddenly, they start to run and the screen turns black, in a clear reference to the incidents. The new hopes and new promises created over the 80’s were once again broken. Most of the graduates that appear in this documentary, as happened with the ones in Bumming, rejected the officially given jobs. And as in Bumming, the other song that appears in the documentary is “Going abroad”. They young generation, two times betrayed, wanted then to be independent (from the state) in all senses, even spatial.

The Square’s closure entails a new order, a post-socialist one, where the political primacy is subverted into an economic one, and where the public space in this socialist sense is closed for the people. After 1989, the market oriented system is implemented. State factories are shut down one after another; among them are of course the cultural state-run enterprises. And so “independent” productions, that is to say “non-state” productions, emerge. New documentaries are independent not just in an ideological, chosen, sense, but also, and by force, in terms of production and distribution: they do not rely anymore, as filmmakers have done until now, in the state funds to carry out their personal projects (there were not such a thing as “personal projects” under Maoism).

The documentary series Tiananmen Square, produced in 1991 by Chen Jue and Shi Jian, reflects the kind of interchanges and negotiations between the official and the to-be-born underground media that took place over the 80s. It was at first planned as a CCTV program, but once the series were rejected to public exhibition due to the recent incidents, they took (kind of stole) the previous material and edited the footage in a way that questions the official narratives of the square as a political arena. Along its 8 chapters, it mixed past images and direct interviews of the anonymous passer-byes, together with episodes from the TV archive with long-shoots of the common people in the square. By doing so, they confront the official history with the popular stories, opening a space in the documentary to challenge the two narratives or different versions about the significance of the square, historically and politically speaking.

So the good news, although a paradoxical one, is that after the very symbol of the political centre was closed for good, that’s to say, after the Tian’anmen Square was shut down for the people to demonstrate, the centre fell back into multiples and disconnected centres that, as so, became peripheries. The early independent documentary of the 90s is itself one of those fringes. It comes from the margins and devotes itself to speak out on their behalf in an attempt to make them recover the voice and therefore to make it public, make it politically and socially significant.

We find this “peripheral conscience” or conscience of periphery in all the early trends of the new documentarians. Some of them went to remote regions in search of other spaces, as Duan Jinchuan did in Margins of the world, where we see enormous Tibetan plateaus and lakes and nomads whose way of life seem untouched by the recent turmoil, a place out of the Chinese recent historical space. Others remained in the cities, where the new born peripheries were more present and yet more invisible: newcomers from the countryside, as in Out of Phoenix Bridge, unemployed as in Beijing Cotton Fluffing Artisan, elders as in Old Men, and in short all of those millions of extras that have been left without any role in the spectacular blockbuster that China leads.

And all this crystallizes in a new documentary format. The aesthetic principle that best summarizes the founding ethos of the Chinese independent documentary is xianchang (现场). Usually translated as “on-the spot” it represents itself a spatial concept. It is meant to be a “right here and right now” record of reality, one that avoids, or that seeks to avoid, all the traditional directorial devices of image and subject control. Its premises are thought to be consciously different from the dominant official genre, the socialist realism. Socialist realism is now widely identified as mere propaganda, or at best, as the representation of reality as the authorities want it to be. In this new approach, usually there is no script, voiceover, nor comment from the director to provide us with an explanation or solution to what is shown. The “common people” own space, and the structures that conform their actions (or lack of actions) in it, regardless if they are vagabonds artists, disenchanted students, Tibetan nomads or anonymous passer-byes, are now taken as the primal material, one that does not have to be conformed with any official or party discourse. Xianchang is not a closed or fixed set of film techniques. It is more of a proposal, an attempt to find the most flexible and least intrusive filming practices to show the heterogeneity of reality itself. It is, in short, an attempt to open for the public record multiple “on-the-spots” that are significant precisely because they are able to confront and question the want-to-be one and only record from above.

2.Chinese Independent documentary from the mid 90’s onwards: the demolition of the private space.

The Chinese independent documentary emerges from a gradual closure of the public space as it has been understood during the maoist period. Therefore, it became by force the starting point of the exploration of the endless infinite, that is, the individual and what is called its geren fengge (个人风格), its individual style, self-expression, “independent” view. Although this has not changed, from mid 90’s onwards the stress has arguably gone more intimate, more self-reflexive and performative. What the xianchang form emphasized at the beginning was a reflection of how the political events constricted the fates of the individuals, the public context seen from a private point of view. From the mid 90’s onwards, new styles and new aspirations came to modify and enrich this trend. Individuality wants to reinforce itself in more extreme ways, sometimes at the expense of the public. In There’s a strong wind in Beijing, the documentary that arguably inaugurates the second phase of the independent documentary, the filmmaker intrude on a man in a public toilet, literally caught with his pants down, and asks “Is the wind in Beijing very strong?” In The box (2001), the filmmaker records the very private life of one lesbian couple. Public bathrooms and intimate bedrooms are crudely offered to public sight. Interaction, intrusion, and a reinforced understanding of “individuality” force some documentarians to present themselves not just behind the camera, but also in front of it. Individuality is more a subjective matter than an objective one.

West of the tracks, Wang Bing’s 2003 masterpiece about the decline of a factory in northwest China is a good visual record of the transition from the collective to the individual, the individual understood now as a new existential, significant measure. It is a three episodes documentary, nine hours long. In the first and second part, Rust and Remnants, the protagonist, as Wang Bing has explained, is the factory itself, the common space that determines the fates of the people within it. In these two episodes, people is not regarded as “individuals”, instead, they conform a net of relations that are conditioned by the position they occupy in the factory. The factory is not just a place of work, but a space that entails a collective way of living, a common understanding and a set of shared values. The individuals as such appear in the third part, Rails, once we have witnessed in the previous chapters the shut down of the factories and the correlated demolition of the workers’ neighbourhood surrounding them. The third part is the story of the Dus, a father and a son trying to make a living out of the rails, selling stolen coal from the wagons, doing little jobs here and there, exhausted and all by their own, alone. The third part is also the shorter one, two hours long instead of the four hours of the first chapter, and the three of the second, implying metaphorically the actual duration of each historical period: 30 years living under the hammering promotion of socialism (1949- 1979), 20 years under its officially run disarticulation (1979-1999), and a bunch of years since its apparently total replacement for a capitalist system.

In this “economical” sense, turning back to the worldly context that is the primal matter of documentaries, the demolition process that had began with the (politically determined) public space continues its way down to the private space, that is, at first, my house, your neighbourhood, their village, and then, the very sense of identity that the demolished spaces entailed. Recently born individuality is also threatened. The speed of the economic transformation that began with the modernization process of the 80’s is exponentially increasing. It seems that it literally leaves no time to reflect on the transformation itself. It seems that only allows to record, document, and eventually, try to save the same thing that disappears while is being saved. In short, a desperate capture of the millions of “on-the-spots” that have no future. A shared conscience of urgency emerges and the independent documentary production soars since the mid 90s. The new DV cameras, cheap and easy to use, allow more and more people to record their environment, their interior, looking for identity itself. Thus the ethic and aesthetic xianchang principle is from now on complemented with a growing and perplexed awareness of the demolition that is taking place around. A chai not only in terms of space, this building or that siheyuan, villages becoming cities and cities devouring themselves in the endless loop of consumerism, but also in terms of the subject -filmmaker, neighbour or migrant- that has to be re-located against the destruction that threatens their very identity.

And so, many new documentaries take the chai phenomena as their films topic. One early example is Zhang Yuan 1993’s Demolition and relocation, which records the few “nail houses” left in a traditional Beijing neighbourhood that is being demolished. Since then, countless documentaries with the same demolition subject have been produced, be it in urban or rural areas (Meishi Street, Dingzi hu, Bing Ai). Moreover, whether explicit or implicit, the chai glides in virtually all of them. It is not just about physical space, but also about the interactions between the individuals living in it. The record of personal tragedies related with the demolition of the space serves to show how people’s behaviour can be affected by a change of space. It also entails another recount of modernity: the modernity that was supposed to allow the raise of individuality can also reject it. Li Ning’s Tape comes here as a good example. Tape is a documentary made by fragments. Half urban experiment, half performance, half personal story, it mixes images of Li Ning’s theatre group performing in the street, remnants of his personal life and some lyrical constructions of Li Ning hurting himself on the rubbles of a demolished building. The result is a self-portrait documentary that illuminates the interactions between the three demolitions: collective, familiar, individual. Or, one may say, spatial, cultural, existential.

Nevertheless, every demolition, be it spatial, emotional, cultural or the kind, should find its ways of relocation. Now I am going to speak briefly about what kind the independent documentary offers.

3. From demolition to relocation: the search for a people’s space

Chinese independent documentary offers, as other contemporary artistic and cultural expressions do, common images and reflections about past and present demolitions, and in doing so intends ways of relocation, spatial, cultural or the kind.

And it intends it in at least two ways: 1) creating new spaces for those in the margins to talk and to be seen through film festivals, cafes, new nets of screening, public meetings and so on; 2) creating, in those spaces and through those social nets, a collective reflection, and for that reason, political in nature, about past and future, about recent memories and new alternatives.

It is being argued by some scholars2 that the incipient self-indulgence that could be found in some early independent documentaries (the tedious recount of the self) tend to be among the new generation of documentarians, with their performative and self-reflexive preferences, even more self-indulgent and private, more and more amateur and obsessed with showing the filmmakers’ personal miseries. I agree in a sense; documentary is not a separated entity. It influences its environment as much as it is influenced by it. There is no wonder then that a general depolitization and massive consumerism find their ways in the new self-images that independent documentary reflects. Nevertheless, I do not think that the original aim that inspired the emergence of Chinese independent documentary has changed with the arrival of the so- called “age of the amateur”, the safe refuge of individuality. Rather, it comes to add new dimensions to the problematic of private and public, political awareness and so on, and a great number of recent documentaries continue to be political in nature. By that I mean explicitly political, nor in the sense “everything is political” or “the personal is political” formulas of the more intimate, artistic or experimental-oriented documentaries, as for example could be the marvellous Liu Jian’s series of Ox hide.

Recent examples of the first category are Zhao Liang’s Petitioners or Du Haibin’s 1428, the social oriented works of Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie and many others. In this trend are included also all the documentaries that have devoted themselves to reconstruct what they call a folk memory (民间记忆), a reflection and recount of history from the ones that till now have had any voice in its retelling. Wu Wenguang’s 1966…, was one early example of historical reflection. Recent ones are Zhang Ming’s 60, Wang Bing’s Feng Ming: a Chinese memoir or Hu Jie’s Searching for Lin Zhao’s soul.

Chinese independent documentaries, as documentary genre in general, are responsible for making visible, that is, for bringing to the common realm of public space, all which resists to be forgotten. They also reveal that in spite of the conditions, social bonds continue to be created, sometimes precisely as a consequence of such conditions. The “social fabric” rebels against disappearance and oblivion by inventing new ways of solidarity and survival. The huge amount and the overwhelming variety of independent documentaries produced in the last decade leaves us with the same kind of perplexity that I find in the rationale of the movement itself: as it happens with the same reality they are trying to capture, it may need time to understand what it records and proposes about the changes of the Chinese space, aesthetically, historically and politically speaking. We may need time to rethink the processes frozen by the documentaries of this vertiginous transformation; images, stories and proposals that are waiting for us to slow down and rethink what we -or them- are doing and could do within our common space, public and private.

Presentation by Dr. Edoardo Gagliardi

New Cinema – New Practice  

When we talk about ‘Chinese independent cinema’, we refer to an alternative mode of film production realized outside the official system, but also to a kind of cinema that gives priority to self expression, individual perspective, and artistic value. Born in the nineties, the Chinese independent cinema has seen in the last ten years further developments and changes, so that nowadays it should be distinguished by the cinema of the Sixth generation directors.

1- Nineties: the Sixth generation

This mode started in China in the early nineties with those directors, after known as the Sixth generation directors, like Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai and He Jianjun. These directors were Beijing Film Academy graduated. Despite their training instead of working in the official film production system, they began, for the first time in China, to realize their movies with private capital and without submitting the work for the censorship approval; hence they had to find alternative ways to show those works. One of these ways was the international film festival circuit where the movies found positive criticism and foreign producers. After some conflicts with the authorities these directors started to realize movies sanctioned by the censorship, and hence finally shown in China. In 1997 emerges Jia Zhangke that marks the passage of independent cinema toward a new phase.

2 – 2000: “New” Chinese Independent Cinema

With the turn of the century due to the rapid spreading of digital technology, film production finds a huge change. The DV (digital video) is widely commercialized in China and allowed virtually to everyone to engage in film production, without needing a specific or professional training and a consistent production capital. Movies are now shot on site (xianchang) and use non-professional actors, very often the production crew is narrowed to few members if not to the only director. By a stylistic point of view in general in these movies is preferred a form of documentary-realism, with some influences from neo-realism, where the an episodic narrative that avoids any complex dramatic construction.

The DV opens to new possibilities of representation, and documentation. Independent cinema find itself as an instrument to document new aspect of contemporary China, especially the marginalized and the ones that are neglected by the official discourse. In this context independent works can be distinguished in three main film forms emerge: the narrative or fictional, the documentary and a new kind of film where the DV is used as a way to image experimentation.

But along with the increasing number of independent film productions, emerge in China also a sort of independent film culture as a development of filmclubs and film buffs circles appeared in the major Chinese cities at the turn of the century. In fact, a film culture mainly devoted to art-house movies and the works of world-great directors emerges in some Chinese cities, but it will focus soon on the Chinese cinema and in particular the independent one, also as form of resistance against the commercial movies, including the Hollywood imports, promoted by the Film Bureau.

These filmclubs organize public screenings, Q&A with directors and in general constitute a space for dialogue and exchange for members and general audience. Usually their activities are held in public space alternative to the usual movie theatres, such as bars, cafes, libraries and even universities, and by the vast majority these activities are free of charge for the audience. Among these filmclubs worth to mention Practice Society, founded in Beijing in April 2000 by some students of Beijing Film Academy. If at the beginning association as Practice Society focus on international art-house cinema they soon turn their attention to the Chinese independent cinema, also as consequence of the spreading of the cheap – mostly pirate- Dvds of that world cinema that at the beginning was at the core of their activities.

After Practice Society, closed in 2003, not only new associations exclusively devoted to the promotion of independent cinema (especially documentary) come out, but also a new kind of structures emerge. Aiming to promote Chinese independent cinema, through a series of different strategies and orientations these structures contribute to the creation of a new and marginal form of popular culture. Collective activities like screening, workshops and talks become part of a wider promotion of independent cinema spirit and are extended to the production, (non-theatrical) distribution and the creation of a network connected with the circuit of international film festivals, film funds, distributors and art institutions.

Chinese independent cinema is today a space that has gone far beyond its own initial definition, becoming a space of dialogue and self-expression of an emerging Chinese civil society.

November 30, 2010, Bridge Café (Wudaokou)

Speaker: Prof. Dr. ZHANG Jian 张健 , Associate Professor, School of Government, Peking University

Presentation

On 30th November 2010, Prof. Zhang Jian, a professor at the School of Government of Peking University addressed the Thinkin China community on the topical subject of nationalism in China. Prof. Zhang received his BA in International Studies from Peking University and his PhD in Political Science from Columbia University. He has served as Editor for Strategy and Management for the China Society of Strategy and Management and written for the Heartland, Eurasian Review of Geopolitics.

Prof. Zhang presented the concept of nationalism vis-à-vis Chinese domestic politics. He presented an account of the historical evolution of the idea of statehood and nationalism in China; observing that throughout China’s dynastic history, there was no notion of the Chinese state, rather, to be Chinese implied being a subject of the dynasty. The notion of a state in the Westphalian sense and the associated nationalism was largely thus, a product of the Republican era.

Addressing a nuanced topic, Prof. Zhang presented a diffuse view of Chinese nationalism as a contemporary concept. He isolated four different types of nationalism observed in China today; namely, Tibetan nationalism, Uighur nationalism, Taiwanese nationalism and Chinese or Zhongguo nationalism. He argued that what distinguishes the latter from Tibetan and Uighur nationalism is that Zhongguo nationalism does not refer to ethnicity.

A clear distinction was between the Han ethnicity and “Zhongguo” (中国, China) nationalism. He emphasised this point by noting that in his empirical research, he found that 40% of ethnic Uighurs consider themselves as “Zhongguoren” (中国人, Chinese) or of Chinese nationality before they consider themselves Uighur.

He ultimately argued that the CPC has come to embody the Chinese nationalism and assessed this notion of nationalism in juxtaposition with shifting ideologies and social contexts. Finally, he assessed the challenges and opportunities associated with the interaction of these diverse nationalisms.

Q&A

As was to be expected from so textured a subject, Prof. Zhang’s talk was followed by an animated Q&A session. Attendees posed questions regarding the role of ethnic minorities in Chinese society, the impact of culture and the interaction of such nationalisms with a potential shift towards democratization. The ensuing discussion contextualised and reconstellated the ideas addressed in Prof. Zhang’s talk.

event #04
November, 30 2010

“Nationalism and Politics in China”

Supplementary Materials

Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2nd edition, 1999, pp. 139-488

“In this widely acclaimed history of modern China, Jonathan Spence achieves a fine blend of narrative richness and efficiency. Praised as “a miracle of readability and scholarly authority,” (Jonathan Mirsky) The Search for Modern China offers a matchless introduction to China’s history.” – W.W. Norton & Company

China’s Ethnic Policy and Common Prosperity and Development of All Ethnic Groups, Information Office of the State Council of the PRC, Sept. 2009, available here 

“Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, following the guideline of unity among all ethnic groups for common prosperity and drawing on China’s historical experience and the useful practices of other countries, always with a view to China’s actual situation, the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese government have carved out a path for the successful solution to ethnic issues with Chinese characteristics, exercised the ethnic policy featuring equality, unity, regional ethnic autonomy, and common prosperity for all ethnic groups, thus forming a relatively complete ethnic policy system.

This correct ethnic policy in line with China’s actual situation has fostered the unity and harmonious coexistence of all ethnic groups who are striving with one mind for economic development, political stability, cultural prosperity and social harmony. The ethnic minorities, minority areas, and relationships among ethnic groups have all experienced tremendous historic changes.” – from the Preface

Lowell Dittmer and Samuel Kim, “In Search of a Theory of National Identity”. China’s Quest for National Identity. Lowell Dittmer and Samuel Kim, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 1- 31

“How to define a Chinese national identity remains as hotly contested a question among today’s Chinese citizens as it has been among foreign observers. This volume brings together ten new essays by an interdisciplinary group of leading sinologists and offers a comprehensive framework for understanding the nature of Chinese national identity in past and contemporary settings.” – Cornell University Press

October 26, 2010, Bridge Café (Wudaokou)

Speaker: ZHANG Lijia 张丽佳, Writer, Journalist, and Public Commentator

Zhang Lijia is the author of the best-seller Socialism is Great, an interesting portrait of social change in contemporary China. Now a writer, journalist, social commentator and TV show host; Zhang Lijia spent the 1980s in a factory in Nanjing that produced inter-continental missiles capable of reaching North America. To escape the oppressive routine, she taught herself English.

Zhang Lijia summarized the stations in her journey from being a disillusioned worker at a Nanjing rocket manufacturing site to an organizer in support of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. She illustrated the sea-change sweeping China in the reform era using her biography. Zhang Lijia discussed her book, her personal experience of change in China over the past three decades and her thoughts on China’s position in the world.