Red China, or the Red Dragon, are special terms coined to describe Communist China. During the Cold War Era, Communism was seen as an evil and cruel regime.
Such a huge land under the communist regime was of course seen as a foe to the Western capitalist world. China is a populous country, and the large population is intimidating to European countries whose lands are smaller and who have fewer people. In the late seventeenth century, Napoleon once stood in front of a map and pointed to the location where China lay, and then said, “Behold the Chinese Empire.
Let it sleep, for when this dragon wakes the world will tremble.”183 The fear of this threatening dragon breathing fire continued until the beginning of the twentieth century when the growing influx of Chinese immigrants into Europe and the States earned the Chinese a reputation as the “yellow peril”. This image of the Chinese army as a threatening yellow peril was further enforced during the Korean War, as the huge Chinese “human sea” definitely outnumbered the American army. In brief, contemporary Western images of China are derived from historical images and additionally affected by the interactions between the West and China. These images follow certain patterns, based on the sum of all the historical images of China in the West.
Western media representations of China, it would therefore seem valuable to analyze the images covered in documentaries in this thesis.
In order to acquire an in-depth understanding of the visual media’s images of China, I will analyze the specific case of a documentary made for the Discovery channel which portrayed China from different angles. In this dissertation, the documentary will be examined from the cultural perspective, looking in turn at the film’s production, primary storyline, characters, before moving onto a detailed semiotic analysis of key sequences. Based on this analysis, we will consider whether or not contemporary televisual images follow the historical image pattern summarized in the second chapter. The reason why only one Discovery documentary was chosen for in-depth research is that the programs broadcast by this channel can reach a large international audience, and the channel is a very important player in the world documentary film community. Founded by John S. Hendricks in 1982, “the Discovery Channel reached over 86 million subscribers in the United States in 2003, and was the most widely distributed television brand in the world, reaching over 425 million homes in 155 countries”.185 These numbers show the extensive scale of the audience network of the Discovery Channel around the world.
Furthermore, this documentary did not merely focus on one single topic about China, such as its economic rise, environmental pollution or only about one historical site;
rather, it offered a comprehensive overview composed of visual observation of this huge country in less than two hours. The producer therefore had to select the most enlightening perspectives to portray this old country. The documentary thus forms a visual link between China’s antiquity and modern development, and further delivers a great many messages about China in transition to the target audience.
Audiences from different cultural backgrounds will decode the signified messages delivered by a film from their own unique perspective. What is more, the way in which different media channels encode images and narrations to communicate messages to their target audience is also highly varied. The Discovery Channel, for
185 Ellis, Jack C & McLane, Betsy A. 261
instance, prioritizes commercial interests with the objective of attracting more viewers, whilst the BBC, a public broadcast station, ensures its documentary films can focus on meeting satisfaction with a much smaller target audience. If we take these behind-the-scenes intentions into consideration, the filming style including the editing technique and filming composition must differ from a Discovery documentary to a BBC documentary accordingly.
3.1 Discovery Atlas – China Revealed introduction
Launched by the Discovery Channel, Discovery Atlas is a television documentary series which is scheduled to film three seasons of four episodes covering eleven countries, including Japan, Italy, Brazil, Australia, and Russia. All the documentaries were filmed to bring an actual picture of the social development and individual struggles in these countries to the audience. Meanwhile, the filming explored historical and ethnic customs and unique cultural traditions. The whole project took about five years and targeted around twenty countries.
The People’s Republic of China was the focus of the first episode to air. On the 1st October, 2006, the first episode, China Revealed, was broadcast on the Discovery channel. The television documentary played for one hour and forty minutes, and took an in-depth look at the stories of more than ten individuals. Their lives and their struggles reflected the dramatic transition taking place in both the economic and social sphere which are now affecting contemporary China as a whole. Based on individual personal struggles and the disparities between their dreams and reality, the documentary portrays a picture of local Chinese people and their real contemporary life.
Recently, China, the world’s oldest continuous civilization, has been swept by a transformation influenced by systems of Western values. In the process of social adaptation, tradition has encountered modernity. The Western lifestyle is successfully and persuasively promoted by the spread of Western, and in particular American, culture, including Hollywood films and television dramas, whereas the
ancient Chinese arts are losing their historical dominance. While the Chinese economy has boomed, astonishing the rest of the world with its surging GDP, the gap between rich and poor is also widening dramatically. China in the new twenty-first century is then a land in transition.
3.2 Film storyline
The documentary’s storyline charts the personal stories of ten different representative individuals from various social backgrounds. Their personal stories and interviews in the film are interwoven with montages.
Antiquity versus modernity
The documentary begins with a montage of a Chinese peasant’s life in Guangxi, subsequently followed by a migrant worker working in Shanghai. Some peasants living a life by rice-planting happily enjoy their agricultural life, while others living in similar rural areas prefer to migrate and work in big cities.
Tradition versus present reality
The second part of the documentary revolves around the topic of China’s traditions, with the story of a Kung Fu master and his most talented student at the Shaolin Temple. Instead of staying in the Temple to pass down the traditions of martial arts, this student hopes to become a police guard or enlist in the army.
It is deeply rooted in traditional Confucian philosophy that children must obey their parents. Here we see, in contemporary China, a child athlete following her father’s severe training regime for the honour and reputation of the nation.
A bow-maker explains how hard he tried to preserve the art of traditional bow production throughout the Cultural Revolution. A property tycoon discusses building
modern properties in the city, which evidently changes the traditional look of the city and introduces a new Western lifestyle.
Ethnic diversity
The film director chose to film the Mongol minority group living on grassland, thus exploring China’s ethnic diversity, and the challenges to this minority’s way of life under the impact of Chinese modern development.
Women’s transition
Three women were interviewed in this section of the documentary to portray a picture of contemporary Chinese women’s real life. China is in a state of transition, and new development has brought many challenges to the role of Chinese women.
In this context, they have to find a balance between their traditional role and the fulfillment of new responsibilities.
Cultural tradition
As the most important annual celebration in China, the Chinese New Year is the most frequently mentioned topic of Chinese cultural tradition. In the final part of this documentary, the camera shows how the Chinese celebrate their most crucial annual festival.
3.3 Characters
There are altogether nine individual stories of nine representatives, in which general images of China are intermingled with their footage.
Two central characters (privileged characters):
Sun Feng - a window cleaner in Shanghai (migrant worker)
Jin Yang - a twelve-year-old gymnast preparing for the 2008 Olympic Games (athlete)
Other main characters:
Male:
Liu Jieshan - a Kung Fu master in the Shaolin temple (master)
Yang Fuxi - a traditional bow-maker living in Beijing (artist)
Vincent Luo - a property tycoon in Shanghai (businessman)
Huai Han - a Mongolian living on the grassland (Mongol) Female:
Mrs. Liao - a female peasant in Guangxi province (peasant)
Elisa - an employee in a computer firm in Shanghai (white-collar business woman)
Zhou Lin - a policewoman working in the drug squad in northwest China (police-woman)
Supporting characters:
z Mrs Liao’s daughter and her husband z Xiao Cui
z Jin Yang’s father
z Eliza’s boyfriend and her mother z Zhou Lin’s mother
z Sun Feng’s wife
3.4 Filming locations
The filming locations of China Revealed cover a large area of Chinese regions and cities. From Inner Mongolia in the northwest to Hong Kong in the South, the documentary displays a variety of Chinese landscapes, customs and ethnic cultures.
On the map of China (Appendix 9), the provinces or cities selected as filming locations in the documentary are marked in red ovals. From these signs, we can see that the filmed places are mainly located in the area along the east Chinese coastline.
In the vast Western area, two other well-known yet controversial autonomous minority regions, Xinjiang and Tibet, are not covered in this documentary, and nor were the huge in-land provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan.
If we carefully look at the details of all the cities marked on the map, we can discover that the filming locations were selected to develop a storyline representing typical
“Chineseness” in Western perceptions. Famous Chinese cities such as Beijing,
Shanghai and Hong Kong are indispensable in Western documentaries on China, as they are regarded as convincing representations of fast economic development and thus an epitome of the whole country. Following the long-existing Western attraction to Chinese peasants, the terrace in Guangxi province located in Southern China would of course be included as the best option to represent the antiquity of an agricultural land. The selection of the Shaolin temple in Henan province allowed the director to include an ancient setting for the mysterious martial art of Kung Fu, which has gained much popularity in recent years in the West. Last but not least, to portray a picture of a diverse ethnic culture in China, Inner Mongolia was a must, for the Mongols live in this vast region. On the whole, a large part of China’s east area from North the South is covered in this documentary film.
CHAPTER 4