Official Website
'Young and Restless in China' is a stunning, sweeping look at a country amid a frenzied thoroughly compromised process of self-reinvention, but even a little historical context would have gone a long way in grounding the narrative journey of its subjects. Then again, utterly unrecognizable, this brave new China hardly seems grounded.
Watch Online:
More than in any other country, coal is the lifeblood of China's booming economy. Coal-fired power plants provide 70 percent of the country's electricity, and more than 30,000 mines operate throughout the country -- about 20 percent of which are illegal and, thus, unregulated.
China is also the most dangerous place in the world to be a coal miner. On average, 13 people a day die in mine accidents there, and more than 80 percent of mining deaths worldwide happen in China.
Watch Online:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
The neon lights of modern-day Shanghai are so bright that you can wear sunglasses even in the darkest hour of night: The city, the largest and wealthiest in China, has changed enormously in recent years. Frontline/World reporter Nguyen Qui Duc, a native of Vietnam, is no stranger to the changing face of communism. And he has come to Shanghai because he has heard that young people, especially artists, are no longer accepting the old rules. He wants to see how far they've been able to push the limits.
For a guide, Duc turns to one of China's most celebrated young writers, Mian Mian, who has offered to take him inside her world, the youth underground of Shanghai. Government censors call Mian Mian "a poster child for spiritual pollution," but inside the city's nightclubs, she's a pop diva, queen of the clubs. She's notorious for writing openly about sex, drugs, and rock and roll -- still touchy subjects in China. The government banned her novel, Candy, which only made the "bad girl of Shanghai" more famous and her novel a clandestine best-seller.
Watch Online:
Official Website
They live crowded together in factory dormitories where water has to be carried upstairs in buckets. Their meals and rent are deducted from their wages, which amount to less than a dollar a day. Most of the jeans they make in the factory are purchased by retailers in the U.S. and other countries. China Blue takes viewers inside a blue jeans factory in southern China, where teenage workers struggle to survive harsh working conditions. Providing perspectives from both the top and bottom levels of the factory’s hierarchy, the film looks at complex issues of globalization from the human level.
The film which was made without permission from the Chinese authorities, offers an alarming report on the economic pressures applied by Western companies and the resulting human consequences, as the real profits are made - and kept - in first-world countries. The unexpected ending makes the connection between the exploited workers and U.S. consumers even clearer.
Official Website
(streaming video)
Newshour correspondent Paul Solman traveled to China in the summer of 2005 to produce a seven-part series on the Asian nation's rise as a global economic contender and America's anxiety that China will overtake the United States as a superpower in the 21st century.
Poised to surpass the United States as the largest economy in the world, yet facing mounting domestic and international pressure for a fair and transparent framework of laws, China is racing to reshape the rules of society. In the past quarter century, the country has opened nearly 400 law schools, trained hundreds of thousands of judges and lawyers, and launched education campaigns to encourage people to bring their grievances to court rather than taking to the streets. But the transformation is incomplete and the judiciary far from independent. Senior judges are appointed by, take orders from, and receive their paychecks from the one-party state. Hundreds of Chinese lawyers have been jailed in recent years while citizens are taking to the streets in record numbers to protest land seizures, corruption, pollution, or unpaid wages. And China executes more prisoners each year than the rest of the world combined.
WIDE ANGLE gained exclusive access to film in Chinese courts - a first for a Western documentary. Profiling itinerant judges, law students, a human rights lawyer, and ordinary citizens, The People's Court examines China in flux, revealing the lengths to which Chinese people must go to obtain justice and raising crucial questions about their emerging system of law.
Download/Watch Online (in 4 parts):
Official Website
This PBS documentary examines some of the major challenges facing contemporary Chinese society.
Episode 1, "Power and the People," focuses on the Communist Party's rule of China. Topics include government opposition to separatism in the heavily Muslim province of Xinjiang; the Party's efforts to create a prosperous society; the governance of Tibet; the National People's Congress, which puts the Party's decisions into action; the election of a village committee; and corruption in the Party.
Episode 2, "Women of the Country," focuses on the difficulties faced by Chinese women, especially in rural areas (where two-thirds of China's population lives). The episode examines birth planning, marriage, women who live in the country while their husbands work in the city, women in Tibet, the hopelessness of many young women in China, the Muslim women of Xinjiang, and the opportunities and hardships for women in cities.
Episode 3, "Shifting Nature," focuses on pollution brought on by rapid industrialization and on massive water diversion projects that involve resettling the populations of entire towns.
Episode 4, "Freedom and Justice," examines the limits on religious and political freedom of the press, AIDS deaths that the government could have prevented, the displacement of poor people by land "development," and the justice system.
