August 2012

The influence of China’s Party-run newspapers has been sliding steadily for almost two decades now. Ever since the mid-1990s, these “mouthpieces“, operated by top Party leaders at various levels of China’s vast bureaucracy — and full of tinder-dry accounts of their official claptrap — have been out-gamed and out-sold by a new generation of metropolitan newspapers offering a much richer variety of news and consumer fare.

In angry mass protests and subdued smaller gatherings, Chinese citizens have taken to the streets to protest the landing by Japanese activists on some barren islands that are claimed by both countries. Protesters in about a dozen cities on Sunday vented their anger at some Japanese adventurers — including conservative members of Parliament and other politicians — who swam ashore and planted national flags on a craggy chunk of the Senkaku island group. Known as the Diaoyu islands in China, they are also claimed by Taiwan.

The trial, conviction, and suspended death sentence of Gu Kailai, the wife of purged Chinese leader Bo Xilai, has called into question not only China’s legal system, but the very unity of the Communist Party leadership.

For many in contemporary China, the past is another country – and a hazy, dimly lit one at that. It’s not uncommon to meet young people in China who can recite every dynasty in the nation’s 5,000 year history, yet can barely muster more than a few lines about the Maoist era of the 1950s and 60s. Independent documentarian Hu Jie was no different – by his own admission he knew little about China’s recent past when he stumbled upon the story of the dissident Lin Zhao, executed in 1968 for her outspoken criticism of Mao’s totalitarian ways. As Hu travelled the length and breadth of China looking for those who knew Lin, he felt like he had “found the door of history, opened it and walked in.” The stories he uncovered have been fuelling his filmmaking ever since.