China Documentaries

Winds of Change (2007)

As world leaders meet for another round of global warming talks, the focus is likely to be on big polluters like China. The country has recently become the world's biggest CO2 emitter.
Currently, 80% of China's energy comes from coal. Mindful of the pollution these power stations generate, the government is investing billions in renewable energy. "China is probably going to be the world's number one renewable energy country", predicts businessman Mark Kelleher. By 2020, 16% of the country's energy must come from renewable sources. Much of this will be generated by wind farms. "This area has really developed since the wind power station was built", enthuses one local. "When the wind power station came, people got jobs". (more)

Watch on Youtube:

Journeyman Pictures - Winds of Change

Asia's Honey Comb (2007)

In 1997 the British handed the island state of Hong Kong back to China. But we probably don't remember that two years later in 1999, the Portuguese also handed back their former colony of Macau - a typhoon-ridden dot, 50 minutes by ferry from Hong Kong, with no arable land, not even rice paddies, fewer than 500,000 people and less than a sixth the size of Washington D.C.

But now the financial press reports that Macau has actually overtaken the famous Las Vegas strip in the US as the biggest casino magnet in the world.

Watch on Youtube:

Journeyman Pictures - Asia's Honey Comb

Brits get rich in China

China, a superpower emerging at breakneck speed. It's the holy grail for risk taking entrepreneurs. Everyday, hundreds of English businessmen arrive full of hope and expectation. It's a land of opportunity, a place where dreams can come true. This is the story of three men on a mission to make their millions in China.

Watch on Youtube:

China's African Takeover

Toiling for survival in the mines of Africa, even children are forced to work here. And behind this boom, the Chinese. China needs Africa's Copper and Cobalt to feed its fast growing economy. The Chinese bring work and money, but it all comes at a tragic human cost.

Download:

Channel Five - Mao's Bloody Revolution Revealed (2007)

Documentary offering a portrait of Mao Tse-Tung, one of the 20th century's most controversial leaders. Author and former BBC correspondent Philip Short looks at Mao's life from his childhood and rise to power to his death in 1976. The programme examines the legacy of Mao's rule of China and features exclusive interviews with some of Mao's inner circle, as well as dramatic unseen footage from the period of the cultural revolution.

Download:

isoHunt

Brat Camp (2007)

The Chinese have come up with a unique way of reforming naughty children or bad students. They're sent to 'walking school' and forced to march up to 800 km across the country.

Watch on Youtube:

Journeyman Pictures - Brat Camp

Trading in Death (1995)

The Death Penalty in China is increasingly prescribed as a panacea for social ills. Prisoners with death sentences are paraded through the streets with placards advertising their crimes. We profile Muslims, Christians and artists who have suffered discrimination, intimidation and torture. Tang Boqiao fled after the Tiananmen Square massacre. A former PSB (Public Security Bureau) officer reveals that many policemen use electric batons to inflict maximum misery. In court, lawyers have inadequate time to prepare a defence for their clients. A lawyer speaks out against a legal system with a conviction rate of well over 90%. While foreign companies enjoy cheap labour, Chinese workers have few civil rights. If they complain, they are dispatched to bleak labour camps where they undergo 're-education'. Even foreign businessmen are vulnerable. James Peng was sentenced to 17 years after he argued with his Chinese partner. His fate highlights the dangers of dealing with a country that has little respect for individual life.

Watch on Youtube:

Journeyman Pictures - Trading in Death

Asian Development Bank - China's Water Challenge

Rapid economic development and population growth are putting severe pressure on water resources in the People's Republic of China. This DVD features Shanghai, Gansu Province, and the Yellow River basin as models of PRC's commitment to developing its water sector. Investments in rural and urban water services and in river basin management are underway.

Watch on Google Video:

China's Water Challenge (English Version)

Discovery Atlas - China Revealed

Official Website

In one of the few times in its 5,000-year history, the oldest, most populous nation on earth has opened its doors to the rest of the world. Coupling insightful storytelling with spectacular and groundbreaking photographic techniques, Discovery Atlas: China Revealed brings to life the fascinating and complex contemporary life of this extraordinary country. In today's China, the economics of feudalism and communism are out, while capitalism is in... with a Chinese twist. Old walls are being torn down, and a futuristic landscape of glass and steel is shooting up in their place.

Watch on Google Video (in 4 parts):

Trouble in Exile (2006)

Younger Tibetans are becoming increasingly frustrated by the Dalai Lama's message of peaceful resistance. They believe it brings them no closer to freeing their homeland.

"I'm calling upon Tibetans to go inside China and sabotage their economic structure," proclaims campaigner Lhasang Tsering. "If we don't struggle for independence, the Chinese won't give us our freedom." Like many, she's angered by the Dalai Lama's policy of pursuing autonomy not independence. Taking inspiration from the Khampa Warriors, Tibetan fighters who battled the Chinese, younger campaigners are switching to more militant tactics. As one states: "After the US occupied Iraq, the people rose up. Do we have to do this? That's what we have to think about."

Watch on Youtube:

Journeyman Pictures - Trouble in Exile

CNN Special - Made in China (2007)

Official Website

Problems with quality control in China have resulted in unsafe products being imported all over the world. CNN's John Vause special exposes medicine from China that kills, lack of control over product quality and problems with Chinese imports in Europe and the US. 60% of recalls in the US are products made in China.

Watch on Youtube:

Mardi Gras: Made in China (2006)

Official Website

Mardi Gras: Made in China follows the "bead trail" from the factory in China to Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras, poignantly exposing the inequities of globalization. First-time director David Redmon cleverly illuminates the clash of cultures by juxtaposing American excess and consumer culture against the harsh life of the Chinese factory worker.

The film confronts both cultural and economic globalism by humanizing the commodity chain from China to the United States. Redmon follows the stories of four teenage women workers in the largest Mardi Gras bead factory in the world, providing insights into their economic realities, self-sacrifice, and dreams of a better life, and the severe discipline imposed by living and working in a factory compound.

China: Land of God (Shenzhou)

A beautiful historical exposé on the path China took away from God. It is a story reflective of every nation on earth today! For China knew the One True God for the first 2500 years of her 5000-year history. For the last 2500 years they have turned away from what they had known at first.

Narrated in Mandarin Chinese, subtitled in English.

Watch on Google Video:

Radical Films - Inside Red China (1957)

The first film by an American in China following the Communist victory in 1949. In 1957, after serving in the US Army at NATO Supreme Headquarters in Paris, Robert Carl Cohen was working for the Doctorate in Social Psychology at the Sorbonne when, defying the US State Department's "travel ban," he traveled across Siberia to film throughout China for NBC-TV. His reports were televised on the "Huntley News" & the "Today Show."

Watch on Youtube:

Inside Red China

PBS - Frontline/World - Hong Kong: Chasing the Virus (2003)

Official Website

The SARS epidemic may be an early test of the ability of medical science to respond to a swiftly spreading, globalized infectious malady. Frontline/World follows one distinguished researcher to Hong Kong, and China, as he scrambles to help his colleagues around the world grapple with SARS.

Watch Online:

PBS - Frontline - The Tank Man (2006)

Official Website

The spring of 1989 saw the largest pro-democracy demonstration in the history of China's communist regime. The following timeline tracks how the protests began in April among university students in Beijing, spread across the nation, and ended on June 4 with a final deadly assault by an estimated force of 300,000 soldiers from People's Liberation Army (PLA). Throughout these weeks, China's top leaders were deeply divided over how to handle the unrest, with one faction advocating peaceful negotiation and another demanding a crackdown. Excerpts from their statements, drawn from The Tiananmen Papers, reveal these internal divisions.

Watch Online:

The Tank Man

Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion

Official Website

Ten years in the making, this award-winning feature-length documentary was filmed during nine journeys throughout Tibet, India and Nepal. Cry of the Snow Lion brings audiences to the long-forbidden "rooftop of the world" with an unprecedented richness of imagery... from rarely-seen rituals in remote monasteries, to horse races with Khamba warriors; from brothels and slums in the holy city of Lhasa, to magnificent Himalayan peaks still traveled by nomadic yak caravans. The dark secrets of Tibet's recent past are powerfully chronicled through personal stories and interviews, and a collection of undercover and archival images never before assembled in one film. A definitive exploration of a legendary subject, Cry of the Snow Lion is an epic story of courage and compassion.

CBC - The Blue Buddha: Lost Secrets of Tibetan Medicine

Official Website

Twelve hundred years ago the people of Tibet developed a comprehensive medical system. They understood how the mind affects the body. They knew subtle ways of changing the body's chemistry with medicines made from plants and minerals. They blessed their medicines in lengthy rituals. And they encoded this knowledge in a series of elaborate paintings called thangkas.

Blue Buddha: Lost Secrets of Tibetan Medicine traces the odyssey of traditional Tibetan medicine from it's roots in ancient Tibet, to a worldwide interest in it's traditional medical wisdom. We meet several leading physicians in India, as the program introduces us to the basic concepts of this ancient system of healing. We also trace the fate of the 77 thangkas that comprise the Atlas of Tibetan Medicine, the great mnemonic device that encodes the entire system of healing. From the snows of Siberia and the Himalayas to the vital culture of Tibet in exile, in Dharamsala, India, this is a stunning high-definition look at where Tibetan medicine has come from.

Download:

The Yogis of Tibet (2003)

This documentary film follows the lives and practices of Yogis in Tibet, people who have spent their lives in rigorous and secret training in order to gain the ability to exert control over their bodies and minds. Living exceptionally isolated lives, Yogis have been relatively unstudied by outsiders in the past.

CBC Archives - Revolution and Evolution in Modern China

Official Website
(streaming audio & video)

"When the sleeping dragon awakes," Napoleon once said of China, "he will shake the world." In the 20th century, multiple upheavals shook the Asian giant. The rule of emperors gave way to civil war and the Communist revolution, closing China to the world. The doors slowly opened in the 1970s with new diplomatic ties and economic reforms. The crackdown on democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989 barely checked China's growth, and today the world's most populous nation is on its way to superpower status. CBC Archives presents China as CBC journalists have seen it over the decades.

Watch Online:

History Channel - Declassified: Tiananmen Square (2005)

It started out as China's answer to Woodstock, but it ended like Kent State. Here, using unseen footage and declassified diplomatic sources, we present a previously shrouded story of the battles and deaths of hundreds of young Chinese students in June 1989 -- martyrs for democracy at Tiananmen Square--and the imprisonment of many others. Watch the birth and death of a movement, and learn how the demonstrators changed China forever.

History Channel - Declassified: Chairman Mao (2006)

Mao was the 20th Century's answer to Napoleon: a brilliant tactician, a political and economic theorist, and a statesman who ruled a billion people for three decades. In death, he has become divine, worshiped as a god in a godless country. Considering who and what he ruled, Mao, with his Little Red Book, might just be the single most powerful human being who ever lived. We mine formerly guarded vaults and archives to reveal untold stories in a relentless search for the truth behind the legend.

PBS - Frontline - China in the Red (2003)

Official Website

Filmed over the course of three turbulent years, "China in the Red" is a two-hour documentary that tells the stories of 10 Chinese individuals -- factory workers, rural villagers, and a millionaire entrepreneur -- caught up in China's dramatic, ongoing effort to modernize its economy. Through their intimate personal stories, camera work capturing the unique feel of their cities and homes, and with a soundtrack that includes Chinese rock music reflecting the rawness and energy of a nation in great flux, "China in the Red" offers a view of China that is rarely seen in the West.

"People in the West tend to view China as an impenetrable, alien culture, but we have far more in common than most people think," says producer/director Sue Williams in a behind-the-film interview. "We wanted to show this and the huge changes taking place in China by filming ordinary Chinese citizens over a period of years. And almost everyone we asked agreed to open their homes and their lives and share their stories."

Watch Online:

China in the Red

PBS - Rough Cut - China: The New Wave (2007)

Official Website

I first heard about China's independent film movement in 2000, when the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis held a special screening of Jia Zhangke's film Platform. I had spent a semester studying in Beijing a few years earlier and was itching to go back to China any way I could. So I bought a ticket and settled into a seat at the back of the theater, hoping to ease my wanderlust with a cinematic journey.

It took a few scenes before my American eyes, accustomed to the fast pace of MTV-style editing, adjusted to the rhythm of Jia's filmmaking. Each take lasted a minute or more, with the camera holding steady while events and conversations unfolded. It felt more like a documentary than a feature film.

But soon I was wrapped up in Jia's story of the Peasant Culture Group from Fenyang, a troupe of musicians and dancers traveling from village to village in the central Chinese province of Shanxi. The film follows the troupe through the 1980s, a decade of great change in China as economic reforms loosened the government's grip on society and allowed capitalistic influences to slowly spread across the country.

Watch Online:

China: The New Wave

PBS - Frontline/World - China: Silenced (2005)

Official Website

Frontline/World reporter Serene Fang visits a remote Chinese province, Xinjiang, to investigate growing tensions between the government and the Muslim people known as the Uighurs. Her clandestine interview with a Uighur man turns into a reporter's nightmare when Chinese authorities arrest Fang and her source, confiscate her videotape, interrogate her for 24 hours, and take the Uighur man away to an unknown fate. In her story, Fang reveals the name of the man in an effort to bring attention to his plight.

Watch Online: