China’s River- China’s Future (ZDF, 2002)

China’s River - China’s Future (Chinas Stroeme – Chinas Zukunft) was filmed by German ZDF correspondents Dietmar Schulz, Thomas Euting and Joachim Holtz. It was first broadcast by ZDF on 1^st of August, 2002. The documentary series comprises three episodes: ”The Yangtze”, ”The Pearl River” and “The Yellow River”.

The storyline follows the travel route of the production team. They stop at the large or medium size cities along the Yangtze River to interview locals and present their stories of life in contemporary China. Interwoven with their stories, the history and culture in relation to these cities is also presented.

6.1.1 Episode One – The Li & Pearl River

In the first series of China’s River (Li River), we can identiy a lot of signifiers in the documentary, just as in China Revealed. For example, in the beginning of the first series, we can see very similar images of rice paddies in China’s Guangxi Provice.

Like Mrs. Liao, we see female peasants standing in the muddy field with bare feet, planting rice. Again, there are no machines in this sequence, which signifies the stagnation of China’s agricultural life. When the production team visit a migrant

worker’s hometown in the countryside, we see a narrow road, presented in this montage as filthy, muddy, and difficult to walk down. Unlike the rural areas in the West, which are seen as a quiet and beautiful world for relaxation, Chinese rural areas are positioned as backward and undeveloped in Western media representations, but also as in a way representing Chinese antiquity. The contrast between antiquity and modernity becomes even clearer and sharper when an agricultural image of this kind is followed by a shot of modern life in the cities along China’s coastline.

Although agricultural life in China is presented as harsh and tough, it is always portrayed as possessing the beauty of authentic primitivity for Westerners. Local people living on the land maintain their traditional agricultural life. The director intends to present a rural land in an artistic way, just as in China Revealed. Here the director relates the images of the rural land to traditional Chinese landscape painting, and includes typical Chinese folk music in the corresponding soundtrack, so that both agricultural land and the traditional art of Chinese painting can be taken to represent China’s antiquity.

The film moves on to an observation of Chinese social life. The next significant element we are shown is the montage of a Cantonese restaurant. As we have learned from the analysis of historical images and the film images in the previous case study, here we see again a cliched image of Chinese food that could make a Westerner vomit – in this case, chicken feet, which remind us of the images of fish heads, peeled snakes and worms shown in China Revealed. All these codes in the film deliver a message that Chinese people eat everything. For Westerners, these images might seem more like television entertainment than documentary, and they establish a belief that the Chinese are entirely alien from Western culture. As always, we see images of Chinese people sitting in a restaurant and enjoying their meal.

Again, we learn that Chinese socializing is likely to be in a restaurant – enjoying the food and drinking rice wine or beer with friends and business partners.

After this picture of Chinese eating customs, the documentary moves on to portray

Chinese Buddhism. The monks wear traditional costumes, just like Master Liu’s red and yellow robe in China Revealed. In this series, we are also shown a traditional prayer ceremony in a temple in Guangdong province. The red flying roof and gold budda in the temple again fit into the Western idea of an ancient Chinese architectural complex.

China’s traditions date back thousands of years, but in the contemporary era, tradition has encountered modernity, a trend coming from the Western world. The contrast of tradition and modernity is one of the main focuses of Western representations of China – the image of Chinese life in the context of globalization.

Thus, once again we see here a shot of a city at night, a materialist world full of advertisements promoting cosmetics from Christian Dior and many other Western lables. A modern dancer has been selected as a representative to be interviewed at this point in the documentary. The documentary shows that she welcomes Western culture, by filming her receiving modern dance training and going to a disco at night, in just the same way in which young Westerners entertain themselves. From her case, it can be seen that the Chinese have been affected by Western culture and lifestyle. Tradition and modernity are to a certain extent mixing and co-existing in Chinese society.

This documentary series touches on the same topics as China Revealed: an ancient civilzation, with unique and distinct traditions, is undergoing transformation and transition. Along with the economic rise, a widening gap has sprung up between rich and poor, coastal cities and inland areas. From the media images in this documentary, a signified myth can be interpreted - the uneven development in China will be the root for a series of social problems, and this ancient country still has a long way to go.

6.1.2 Episode Two – The Yangtze River

With China’s economic development, a small number of people are becoming very wealthy and moving upward to the affluent upper class. This widening gap between rich and poor has encouraged a wave of migration from countryside to cities. The

narrator of China Revealed tells us that the peasants’ annual income is roughly RMB 5000 (about Euro 700). With this amount of money, they cannot live a decent life. In order to improve their standard of living, they have to leave their homes in the rural areas and swarm into the cities to seek better paid jobs. In Episode Two, we come across a story of another window cleaner, Mr. Chen, who is also working in Shanghai to wipe the windows of magnificient skyscrapers, just like China Revealed’s Sun Feng. Both Sun Feng and Chen are representatives of millions of China’s migrant workers and their stories are epitomes of China’s ongoing internal migration.

Just as there is a window cleaner like Sun Feng in this documentary as a representative of poor migrant workers, there is also a successful business figure to provide contrast. Ms. Wen Bao, an investment banker working in an office of the Jinmao Building, is as successful in her career as the property tycoon Luo in China Revealed. They have a different understanding of the Chinese dream. For Chen, his dream is to work in a prosperous city and earn more money to pursue a decent life, whereas Bao’s ambition is to keep moving upward in society. She is aggressive, ambitious, educated in an elite American university, and speaks fluent English. In her sequence, she swims and goes roller skating on the Shanghai. In the evening, she goes to a local bar to have some fun. From her montage, the audience learns that she shares a lot common with Westerners. The images of roller skating, foreign lanauge proficiency and going to a bar and drinking wine indicate her Westernized way of life, and thus the sense of an increasing Western cultural influence over China is further strengthened by her story. Bao symbolizes the Chinese version of the success story. The juxtaposition of Bao’s working scene inside the skyscraper and the image of Chen cleaning the windows of the same skycraper forms a sharp contrast of rich and poor, urban success and rural migration. The country is in a state of transition.

In Bao’s sequence, we can also identity a couple of images which represent Chinese antiquity and tradition. We notice that there is a gold dragon as her corporate image in the office. She is probably quite Westernized, but still keeps some of her Chinese

identity - for we know from our analysis of historical images how significant the image of the dragon is to the Chinese. The signification of the dragon as a symbol of wealth in Chinese culture is delivered to the audience by the narration. After we see her closing a deal with a client, Bao and the client talk about Confucius and admit his strong and persuasive influence on Chinese culture and society even nowadays.

6.1.3 Series Three – The Yellow River

The Yellow River originates in the Qinghai Plateau and flows aross China’s inland region, where the economy is not well developed and the natural environment has been severely depleted. This series begins with images of Tibetans, a controversial topic which is currently one of the most popular political topics in Germany – and as such would never be ommitted from a European documentary about China. The Tibetans live in the Plateau area where the climate and environment are harsh. In the beginning of this series, the camera shows us the whirling sand in the sky through poor visibility. The river bed is cracked and dry. The peasants are farming with primitive agricultural tools, with no sign of modern machinery. This image of a field is highly different from the rice paddies always present in Western documentaries on China. Here, the field is completely covered in sand, there is no water, not one green plant. The combined message of these images is that the Tibetans’ life is vastly different from that of the Han Chinese, and that they live in a very harsh enviornment.

Yet, as one of China’s rivers with a long history, any documentary on the Yellow River will witness the inheritance of tradition. The Shanglin Temple is located in Henan provice, which the Yellow River passes through. As we saw in film case study, Chinese Kung Fu has an incredible appeal for Westerners. As a representation of the Chinese religious tradition, Shaolin’s martial arts performances are frequently presented in documentary films. Martial art practice for physical fitness has a long history in China, and over time Kung Fu has become a combination of martial art, religion and traditional Chinese medical principles. Since the 1970s, the Chinese Kung Fu has been well-received in the Western world, owing to the popularity of Hong Kong Kung Fu films and film stars. The charisma of this mysterious martial art

has fascinated Western audiences in films, and has led to a great enthusiasm for integrating Chinese Kung Fu elements in Hollywood action films. The art of Kung Fu is perceived as a symbol of the exotic by Westerners, which explains its frequent implementation in Western media. Among all martial art practitioners, the monks from the Shaolin Temple are the favorite filming target for documentary production on China. Here in this series, again we see the familiar images of the monks’ martial arts performance, just as in China Revealed.

In the final sequence of this series, the director films a noodle factory. The camera captures the potraits of Mao, Stalin, and Lenin displayed outside the factory. Then the camera brings the audience’s attention via a montage to the female employees of this noodle factory in their uniform, standing in lines and singing a Maoist song, which draws on Western cultural memories of the Chinese as seen in the seventies – always in uniform and without any individuality.

At the end of the series, Mr. Wang, a village party secretary, is interviewed. In the background of his office, we see a Chinese painting hanging to the wall, which symbolizes his literati identity. In this montage, the camera dwells on the various statues of Mao standing on Wang’s desk. He wipes them carefully and gives the interviewer Mao’s “little red book” as a present. The whole montage portrays an image of a devoted local party official working in China’s rural area who firmly admires Mao. His image fits into the Western image of the “brain-washed” Chinese, who have extreme reverence and admiration towards China’s late Chairman Mao.