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This article examines the digital and cinematic mediation of queer memory in four independent Chinese documentaries: Queer China, “Comrade” China (dir. Cui Zi’en 2008), Our Story (dir. Yang Yang, 2011), We Are Here (dir. Shi Tou and Jing Zhao, 2016) and Shanghai Queer (dir. Chen Xiangqi, 2019). All these films have been made by queer identified filmmakers and have used the digital video documentary format as an activist strategy; all have strived to record China’s queer history in the post-Mao era. However, because of the filmmakers’ gender and sexual subjectivities, together with the historical and social contexts in which these films were made, the four documentaries remember China’s queer history in different ways. Together, these documentaries contest a heteronormative and a homonormative narrative of Chinese history by constructing alternative memories; they also insert queer people’s voices and experiences into that history. All these mediations testify to the heterogeneity of queer people’s experience, as well as the overdetermination of queer memory as a result of a contingent assemblage of factors such as time, place, technology and filmmaker’s gender and sexual subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the "weak state" regime of modern China, it was difficult for the country's modernization process to develop without the effective intervention of a centralized state. In the process of government governance, absorbing social organizations and civil forces as agents had proved to be an effective method. Beiyang government's governance strategy of 'using agents to regulate agents' in the documentary railway billing business could be regarded as typical of the diversity of government management. Qing Dynasty, government departments were not directly responsible for railway freight for various reasons, instead, they allowed railway transshipment companies to act as agents for freight management. Then transshipment companies gradually became an obstacle to Beiyang government's reform on freight transport. However, under the Republic of China, the new-style bank discovered a benign opportunity to develop documentary railway billing service and created a bottom-up institutional reform model. Through the service, the bank became the new agent for the supervision of the transshipment company, which not only regulated the operation, but also forced railroad bureaus in the Yangzi Delta to be primarily responsible for railway freight. The Central Ministry of Transportation of Beiyang Government decided to promote this agency governance model and billing service nationwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article focuses on the politics of representing HIV/AIDS in the 2011 documentary The Lucky One (宠儿), jointly made by Chinese filmmaker and queer activist He Xiaopei and Zhang Xi, a woman living with HIV/AIDS. The film was made using a participatory approach as Zhang took up the video camera to document her own life. By situating the film in the global development industry and focusing on the political economy of the filmmaking process, this article examines the complex power relations embedded in how people living with HIV/AIDS are represented on screen and in the context of the development industry. Informed by critical scholarship in and a queer approach to development studies, this article identifies strengths and weaknesses of the participatory approach, together with the role of media and communication technologies, in international development and health communication. This article hopes to present a nuanced understanding of empowerment and agency through studying the use of participatory videos in development projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The October of 2018 saw the creation of BBC Earth Tribe, a global online brand representing BBC Natural History Unit (NHU)'s programming on Tencent Video, one of China's leading online streaming services. Besides providing over 650 hours of BBC documentaries to Chinese online audiences, BBC Earth Tribe delivers unprecedented access to creators from BBC NHU through interactive screen forms and offline events. This article offers a study of BBC Earth's global strategies in its partnerships with one of the largest Chinese digital platforms, Tencent, in terms of coproduction and online community building beyond traditional canned television distribution. It examines Project Penguin, which has formalised coproduction partnerships between BBC Studios and Tencent Online Media Group (OMG) since October 2018. The distribution partnerships involve not only pre-sales of BBC Earth's flagship documentaries but also coproduction and online community building on Tencent-run platforms, from streaming services to social media platforms. By examining BBC Earth's distribution strategies in the Chinese media landscape from the early 2000s, the paper aims to theorise distribution strategies between BBC Studios and Tencent Video and its socio-cultural implications on television distribution in the digital, multiplatform era of convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the principle of truth, the documentary exchanges knowledge and conveys emotions. The documentary Wild China has received strong attention from domestic and foreign audiences since its launch on National Geographic. However, due to the differences between Chinese and Western cultures, most Chinese viewers need subtitle translation to have a better understanding of this documentary. Unlike the subtitle translation of films and TV plays, the content of the documentary has strong professionalism and knowledge. Thus, documentary subtitle translation requirements are also higher than those of films and TV plays. Meanwhile, it is necessary to discuss the subtitle translation of documentaries. Ecological translation was first proposed by Professor Hu Gengshen. In the past ten years, many remarkable research results have been achieved. Taking ecological translation as the theoretical support, this paper chooses the subtitle translation of the documentary Wild China (CCTV) as the research object, and combines the theoretical discussion and the case analysis to focus on the translator's "adaptation" and "selection" in the linguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions, thus verifying the guiding significance of eco-translatology to the subtitle translation of the documentary and supplementing the theoretical research perspective of subtitle translation of the documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the documentary series Faces of Africa, broadcast on CGTN Africa, the African branch of China Global Television Network (CGTN, formerly known as CCTV International) since 2012. Using in-depth interviews and content analysis, we canvas the layers of supervision, censorship, agency and cross-cultural collaboration that lead to a creative dialogue between filmmakers and Chinese commissioning producers. We argue that, compared to news programs on both CGTN and other global networks, the documentary series allows a more positive and humane portrayal of African people. However, given that CGTN often engages non-Chinese filmmakers and seeks to emulate global production values to attract non-Chinese viewers, the extent to which CGTN’s documentaries on Africa contrast to those of other global networks remains a question for further debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's transformation in the reform era has been most immediately experienced by many ordinary citizens in spatial terms, as existing urban communities have been dispersed and their environments levelled, to be replaced by 'spaces of flows' that prioritise speed, mobility and circulation. A wide range of Chinese films have represented this experience from the perspective of existing urban communities. This article argues that in certain 'unofficial' documentaries produced outside China's state-sanctioned channels of production and distribution, using small, highly mobile digital video cameras, an engagement with grassroots communities has opened up a new space on screen, in which a critical questioning of the developmental ethos driving contemporary China becomes evident. A close analysis of Ou Ning's Meishi Street (2006), Shu Haolun's Nostalgia (2006) and Du Haibin's A Young Patriot (2015) will illustrate how the unofficial spaces of localised, grassroots cultures (minjian) are represented in these works as sites of resistance to the coercive imposition of a globalised modernity on Chinese cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the discursive disciplining of photography and film production and reception in China during the revolutionary era after 1949. By critically comparing works produced locally by Chinese photographers and Antonioni's documentary film Chung-Kuo it will be argued not only that visual culture in China during the revolutionary period was not only unrealistic in its depiction of life and narrowly conceived in terms of its aesthetics, but that it also failed to signify the diversity of social existence and a democratization of social consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the increasing visibility of new collectives in contemporary China has shaped independent documentaries. Countering a prevalent approach to documentary studies that emphasizes the individual and the subjective, this article suggests that how to represent collectivity has preoccupied Chinese documentary filmmakers from the inception of this art form. Yet early independent documentary filmmakers of the 1990s did not have a clear agenda on the representation of collectivity. The crowd in their films appears as an indistinguishable entity, akin to a passive or inactive social agent. More recent documentaries present significantly more complicated interactions between the camera and the crowd and deliberately tap into the problem of representation of contemporary crowds not just from a formal perspective, but from a political perspective as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines media presentations in the People's Republic of China (PRC) of PRC-Taiwan marriages or 'cross-Strait marriages' (liang'an hunyin) as they are known colloquially. The paper is presented in three sections. First, it outlines the political history of cross-Strait relations from 1949 to the present, from overtly confrontational politics to the normalization of economic and trade relations, and its influence on growing rates of cross-Strait migration and marriage. Second, it analyzes print media coverage of cross-Strait marriage from the 1990s to the present, tracing a shift from concerns about the disadvantaged and marginalized position of 'mainland [PRC] brides' living in Taiwan to positive stories about their desirability, and of a reversed migration trend wherein many Taiwanese now live with their PRC spouses in the PRC. The third section discusses presentations of cross-Strait marriage in PRC television documentaries, focusing on Yuanfen, a documentary series shown on Channel 4 of China Central Television Station from 2006 to 2009. These documentaries offer new constructions of cross-Strait marriage, emphasizing the desirability of the 'contemporary mainland bride', who offers their Taiwanese spouse love, support, and the opportunity to live and work in the PRC -- the new land of opportunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the Maoist-class figures in Jia Zhangke's 24 City (2008) and compares them with those found in Maoist-era visual culture. It examines how the films record the destruction and redevelopment of the social order, and the ways that the Maoist figures in the film have been made wretched or have disappeared. It argues, however, that the echo of their importance still remains, since the middleclass figures that appear in the film fuse previous Maoist elements with the contemporary success of economic reforms. They thus serve as a symbolic solution that combines the Maoist past with the Reform era present, therefore evoking the past to serve the present and the anticipated future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects upon my experience of filmmaking in a public park in Beijing where I learned to write Chinese calligraphy in water. The essay is committed to the idea that people simultaneously produce persons and worlds in practices that result in the material mediations within which those selves are entangled, and also powerfully engage the environment. Thus, the film features aesthetics that form through the embodiment of a certain kind of politics. It emerged in performance but now exists as an artifact, an example of what philosopher Jane Bennett calls 'enchanted materialism.' By combining moments of liveness and objectification, it mimics, in a small way, the production of the social itself. Ethnography, I argue here, should account for as much of this dialectical process as it can. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship of "real" and the documentary is always the focus of debate. Chinese documentary film has developed 30 years, and in the 30 years, the meaning of "real" is always discussed. Enumerate Chinese documentary several transitions, we can find that they are showed as a "real" over correct. The way to let the world know China through TV media is documentary. And this is the only hope that Chinese culture can show its creativity. Therefore, it is necessary to analysis the documentary and its current situation and future development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The colours that appear in documentary films from China and Taiwan construct 'water imaginaries' with specific eco-critical connotations. Colourful screens are not only an instrument to show different aesthetics but they are also a device for interrogating the ecological relationship between humanity and water/nature. By giving a brief historical account of documentaries from mainland China and Taiwan concerning water networks, rivers and the sea, this article illustrates how the 'green screen' relates to the socialist ecology, how the 'colourless screen' isolates water from rivers to help imagine a national water network, how the 'blue screen' of the undersea world engenders a specific form of ecosophy, and finally how the 'black screen' of the transnational sea imaginary proposes and oscillates between inter-nationality and ecological post-nationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Independent documentary flimmaking in contemporary China offers an alternative vision to official, mainstream, and commercial productions. This essay shows how the practices of independent filmmakers constitute alternative perspectives by first exploring representations of the AIDS epidemic and AIDS orphans in China, and then by examining reconstructions of sociopolitical history silenced by official discourse and ignored in collective memory. Also discussed are gender politics in documentaries which use women as discursive or visual subjects and the question of why the perspective of gender remains marginal to the documentary film practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Chinese independent documentary film industry. Many Chinese documentaries feature demolition, animal slaughters, and images of Christianity which are meant to depict the change which Chinese society is experiencing and the turmoil involved and what is not shown in mainstream Chinese media. Chinese documentaries follow the direct cinema method originally implemented by Frederick Wiseman as well as methods similar to those used by Ogawa Shinsuke. The two most popular film festivals in China are the Yunnan Multicultural Visual Festival and the China Documentary Film Festival.

This essay examines the development of DV practices as micro-cinema in China. It calls for a reflection on Chinese screen culture, not simply from the perspective of film studies but also from a cultural studies approach that incorporates Chinese DV practices into popular culture and youth culture analyses. It argues that technological empowerment does not easily translate into artistic and social power. The Internet and the various innovative forms of Chinese micro-cinema, while offering people lightness and evocative visual pleasures, also risk being `toned down' through DV practitioners' willing and cooperative incorporation by the mainstream and the establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost immediately after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution commenced in China in the 1970s, two left-wing artists, the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni and Dutch director loris Ivens came to China to make documentaries at the invitation of the Chinese government. This article analyzes their different relationships with China, their different motivations and methods in film-making, as well as the different standpoints and the consequential differences in film language and points of view as reflected in the commentaries etc. The last section of the article discusses the question of making an appropriate historical appraisal of How Yukong Moved the Mountains and its significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ivens spent most of his life drifting between two roles, one role as a cinematic poet and the other as a cinematic combatant. During his fifty-year relationship with China, ivens alternated between these two roles. The four documentaries he made about China served as milestones for the four stages in the relationship. There are four stages in the relationship between Ivens and China. This is the route from ideological ally to the merging of eastern and western cultures, and Ivens' transformation from 'Cinematic Combatant' to 'Cinematic Poet'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1938 both loris Ivens arid Pumio Kamei went to China to make a documentary about the war that was going on there between China and Japan. Ivens, sympathizing with the Chinese people, made The 400 Million. Kamei made Fighting Soldiers, intended as propaganda for the home front. Two films thus on the same war, but with opposed views. What does this mean for the representation and the interpretation of reality? Sketching a hermeneutic approach, this article tries to develop some possible answers this question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]