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The figure of the craftsman has become a popular national symbol in the past decade with tremendous discursive power. This essay explores the cult of craftsmanship and its meanings in contemporary China by examining two widely-known TV documentary series, The Artisans of the Superpower (Daguo gongjiang, 2015) and Masters in the Forbidden City (Wo zai Gugong xiu wenwu, 2016), as well as its film version under the same title (2016). The Artisans of the Superpower demonstrates the "industrial hand," which showcases how handiwork is used to symbolize the strength of a rising China and present a self-reliant, creative, and technologically advanced nation. Masters in the Forbidden City presents the "artisanal hand," which presents another form of labor, restoration, bringing antique national treasures closer to viewers in a quotidian working environment. Despite their differences, I argue that these two representations of craftsmanship — the industrial hand and the artisanal hand — jointly constitute a form of nation-crafting that presents China's hard and soft power. Moreover, the notion of "one profession, one life," promoted as a virtue in both documentaries, establishes a form of solid, stable values in response to China's intense hyper-capitalist working culture characterized by precarity and flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adds a critical lens to the vicissitudinous public remembrance of the comfort women in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the oscillating representations of comfort women in Chinese documentary films. First, it probes how the violated bodies of comfort women on the screen constantly challenge and disrupt the entrenched gender norms in the interstices of the PRC's official paradigms of "national humiliation" and "national greatness." Then, it examines the distinctive film esthetics and documentary ethics of Chinese director Guo Ke's documentary films Thirty Two (2014) and Twenty Two (2017), given that the latter harvested record-breaking box office sales and incited heated online discussions of the comfort women issue in China. In particular, this article scrutinizes how Guo's esthetically appealing, politically non-confrontational, and ethically provocative approach helps constitute survivors' private, gendered memories and encourages the viewers to contemplate his minimalist narratives. In a broader sense, this article contributes to the discussions of gender, nationalism, war remembrance, and documentary filmmaking in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines docudramatic representations of human‐pet relationships in China, applying the conversational storytelling research method. The study takes Modern Furry Tale (MFT, 2021), a controversial docudrama streamed on the Tencent Video platform as its targeted case. The article argues that contemporary Chinese docudramas do not so much "document reality" as continue a "cinematic tradition" of presenting "selected reality" by showing an idealized view of the pets" living conditions and their owners" family lives. Describing and constructing friendly and companionable pet‐human relationships, these docudramas reinforce the dominant "positive energy" state ideology, propagandistic mainstream family values, and repressive gender ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her 2022 video installation, Blast Furnace No. 2, artist Su Yu Hsin explores the history of the German factory, Henrichshütte Ironworks. Namely, the artist focuses on Henrichshütte's former blast furnace, which was bought by a Chinese steel mill in September 1989 and moved to China, where it operated until 2015. Now a state-owned museum, this former factory, located in Hattingen, Germany, is a snapshot of the past—a memorial of sorts for the region's bygone industrial prosperity. The history and intercontinental movement of this blast furnace inspires Su's affinities towards spaces located in-between shifting temporalities, identities, and changing environmental conditions within Hattingen and beyond. Su weaves archival materials, documentary film, and interview excerpts into a speculative narrative that connects the years 1989, 2022, and 2050. Blurring reality and imagination, the video follows the fictionalized trail of Lin, a Chinese translator who accompanied the dismantling of the blast furnace over thirty years ago. According to the narrative, Lin left behind an unfinished science fiction novel, which takes place in 2022. In Lin's novel, the protagonist develops a utopian machine in the form of a blast furnace. With this apparatus, she sends herself into space with the goal of finding an alternative energy source to replace coal. Blast Furnace No. 2 constellates temporal spaces of socio-political and environmental nostalgia, predicated upon both remembered and imagined understandings of the past, present, and future. The work emphasizes contradictory gaps in between socially driven ideological systems and their afterlives, determined to memorialize what most would just as soon forget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Few studies explore the progressive sociopolitical relevance of gamers. This study contributes to this exploration by investigating a common yet neglected type of gamer activism: struggles against the exploitation and control of game-worlds by game publishers. I analyze it with anti-corporate Chinese gamer activism between 2003 and 2010. I found seven recurring battlefronts on which gamers carried out violent protests, clicktivism, media campaigns, connective action, political consumerism, and litigation. They involved technical problems, publisher staff's rent-seeking, termination of game-worlds, abusive game design, and the mishandling of the problems of duping, bots, and virtual property theft. Numerous groups including gold farmers and consumer associations were involved in these complex struggles. This study's core dataset was collected between 2007 and 2011 from media reports on gamer activism, game industry reports, in-game observation, and documentary and video records of gamer mobilization. Supplementary data were collected between 2012 and 2015 and again in 2018 and 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses issues surrounding the social construction of internet addiction, focusing on conceptualisations of reality, escape, hope, and time. Drawing on a critical realist account of semiosis, the framing of internet addiction in China is analysed using the documentary film Web Junkie as an empirical pivot and point of departure. A contextual overview of relations, interests, and tensions surrounding youth and the internet in China is provided, and the film Web Junkie is briefly presented. The main body of the article consists of a critical analysis of conceptualisations of "reality" and "escape." The core tension focused on in the analysis is the struggle over time, necessitating engagement with critical thought on hope and utopia. The analysis concludes that struggles over temporal autonomy underlie conflicting claims about "reality" and "escape" that are central to "internet addiction" and its treatment in China today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the cooperation with the Evergreen Education Foundation in the United States, the Tongwei rural library network has been set up and a cooperation service alliance between a public library and school libraries has been built; using project funding by Evergreen, it reached out to the local communities, and meanwhile, it carried out small projects to enhance its service capacity. Through participation in the Evergreen-sponsored international conferences, training, and projects, librarians have improved their service capabilities and sharpened their awareness of library services. Based on the local cultural characteristics and user needs, and funded by a grant from Hangzhou Library Foundation, Tongwei County Library has established a reading room as a space where people can read calligraphy and painting materials. In addition, it carried out special collections services, shot the documentary film "Autumn Story," and held "Tongwei impression." It is the first county library to achieve management automation, and the national-level library in the fifth national public library assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Mass Communication Research is the property of Guoli Zhengzhi Daxue Xinwenxue Yanjiusuo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Razón Crítica is the property of La Fundacion Universidad de Bogota Jorge Tadeo Lozano and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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 article analyzes deep entanglement between cinema and material productions in industry, agriculture and infrastructure and investigates the intertwined histories of media practice and social transformation. Topics discussed include Great Leap Forward, a mass campaign of China to speed up industrialization, Documentary films witnessing the greatest growth of 1958–1959, social transformations in existing class structure of China and impact of cinema on practices of labor and technology.

This article highlights pioneering dancer, choreographer, and multi-media artist Wen Hui's unique contribution to Chinese independent cinema and first person documentary by analyzing her two films made with her 'forgotten' third grandmother. The close reading is grounded in her explorations in intermedia performance and documentary theater centered on body as archive of memory and women's experience. I argue that Listening to Third Grandmother and Dancing with the Third Grandma experiment with an intimate-public camera for constructing a female kinship outside the patriarchal family tree and re-writing women's history through oral storytelling and choreography of the everyday. [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 essay explores how landscape forms are used by writers, photographers, filmmakers, and other artists from inside and outside of China to represent environmental problems in that country. It considers the "landscape of desolation" as an ecocritical mode designed to change how people see and act in the world in relation to both the shifting status of "Chinese tradition" and to earlier moments in Euro-American landscape art, particularly the so-called New Topographics Movement of the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the changes in the Chinese independent film festival scene and reviews the challenges faced by the Beijing International Film Festival. The author offers an “update from the ruins,” as government censorship, an absence of institutional support, and finds hope for the future at the Shanghai International Film Festival, the Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival, and the West Lake International Documentary Film Festival.

Intersecting both fields of film festival studies and transnational cinema studies, this article examines how Asian documentary film festivals help to configure and orchestrate regional documentary/film connections. In particular, this work examines Asia’s earliest documentary film festival, the biennial Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF), established in 1989 in Japan, and one of its visionary founders, documentarist Ogawa Shinsuke. This project first traces how YIDFF articulated Ogawa’s ideal of establishing a creative alliance of young generations Asian filmmakers toward the region’s post-Cold War transition. Subsequently, the YIDFF, intertwined with the changing political economy of global and regional film festivals since the 1990s, has taken up Ogawa’s legacy and renewed efforts to generate an Inter-Asian film network. This article leverages Anna Tsing’s conceptualization of global connections to distinguish the YIDFF’s region-making project and rethink the discursive framing of international film festival network. Additionally, it grasps the political significance of the YIDFF’s region-making by explaining how, as an idiosyncratic festival model, it has disturbed and reframed the given configuration of global image consumption and circulation, and has been retained and reinvented through intra-festival connections across Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts with the “encounter” between feminists in the “International Symposium on Chinese Women and Visual Representation” and Chinese documentary filmmaker Xu Tong’s Wheat Harvest, and explores the viewpoints and standpoints of feminist actors. With the analysis of the similarities and differences between the independent documentary perspective and the feminist stance, the author elaborates more deeply on why Chinese female directors do not have the consciousness of “feminism.” China’s independent documentary shows how the issue of feminism in China is intertwined with China’s various complex socio-political issues. The way of Chinese documentary filmmaker as “living with the bottom rung” is a kind of practical behavior that seeks truth by integrating itself with it. This requires great courage and idealism, as well as social experience. The bottom layer is where the dark side of the society exists which is beyond the law and morality. The question raised is precisely how to promote the development of feminism and documentary together to work for an equal and just society itself. The more urgent task of Chinese feminism is how to rethink the relationship between the reality of China and feminism, and how to re-establish effective dialogue and cooperation with various critical forces in this society. In the historical perspective of the feminism development of China over one century, gender and women's issues have never existed in isolation, but have moved forward with various social and political movements. How to re-examine this historic heritage to face China's problems and crises today is an uncompleted answer that China's feminism must hand over. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

However, where Hui shows true insight is to point out that Jia does more than show how little connection there is between the people who make the clothes for Ma by hand and the audiences that go to the exhibition. However, Hui's assumption that social scientists ignore or reject the power of culture is not completely convincing, not least because he frequently cites the work of social scientists to support his own claims. [Extracted from the article]

By the middle of the 2000s, a new wave of documentary works on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) topics started to appear in China. In contrast with the previous body of LGBTQ documentaries, they are made by filmmakers explicitly identifying as LGBTQ, with many of them closely involved in LGBTQ social activism. Affirming the decidedly ‘activist’ nature of the new wave of documentary filmmaking, this article discusses a selection of contemporary LGBTQ documentaries and their filmmakers in light of recent activist community debates. It does so by employing an activist dichotomy that emerged throughout these debates, a dichotomy centering around the rejection/the embracing of normative politics in LGBTQ visibility strategies. This activist dichotomy, and its subsequent application to documentary film, is reminiscent of and is often related to the opposition that originated and developed in Euro-American contexts between ‘queer’ and ‘homonormative’ approaches to activism and LGBTQ cinema. Emphasizing local filmmaking agency, and paying specific attention to local meaning-making and strategic activist processes, this article highlights the local hybridization of this transnational discourse, and proposes a lens to look at contemporary Chinese LGBTQ documentary filmmaking practices that moves in-between the ‘queer’ and the ‘homonormative’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Zhang Zhen has recently brought Jane M. Gaines’ notion of ‘political mimesis’ to bear on a young lineage of Chinese activist documentaries. This article considers the appropriateness of political mimesis as a critical tool for understanding Chinese activist works, arguing it needs to be heavily qualified. The article proposes that Laura Rascaroli’s theorisation of the essay film can help us understand the critical dialogue Chinese activist documentaries seek to open with viewers, through a close analysis of Hu Jie’s pioneeringSearching for Lin Zhao’s Soul(2004). The article considers how Hu Jie encourages the forging of an emotional bond between viewers and his film’s absent subject – the murdered dissident Lin Zhao – via the filmmaker’s embodied presence on screen. It then analyses how Hu Jie uses a mode of direct, embodied address to insert viewers into a politicised dialogue in the film’s concluding moments, via an act of dialogical interpolation similar to that which Rascaroli describes in relation to the essay film. It is through its emotive representation of a political ‘martyr’ and the interpolation of the viewer into a politicised dialogue relevant to the present thatSearching for Lin Zhao’s Soulachieves is efficacy as an ‘activist’ text. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discussing Ai Weiwei's new documentary about the refugee crisis. [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]

Although the field of international relations (IR) is arguably in the midst of a ‘visual turn’, few scholars have directly discussed research methods for studying visual international politics. This article follows the aesthetic turn’s call to resist the rational methods that frame our understanding of ourselves and the world. Yet it also argues that the visual turn is more than an elaboration of the aesthetic turn. While analyses of visual culture are characteristically suspicious of the power of images, this article argues that making films can provide an innovative method for studying IR. In particular, the visual turn can better examine the IR of self/Other relations in terms of affect, bodily sense and experience. The article thus goes beyond such theoretical discussions to offer an autoethnographic account of the methods used to produce a documentary film about being the Other in China: toilet adventures. It argues that fieldwork that employs on-camera interviews does not just gather the ‘facts’ of people’s experiences, but can also illustrate the affective politics of the estrangement, the giddiness, and thus the excess evoked by such experiences. The goal of this article is to show what documentary filmmaking can ‘do’ by providing an innovative method for creating new sites and senses of international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hong Kong's two terrestrial broadcasters, Asia Television (ATV) and Television Broadcasts Ltd. (TVB), are uncharacteristic of other broadcasters in a number of respects, and this influences the documentary films that they produce. This unusual aspect is largely due to Hong Kong's almost unique situation as a Western non-democratic British colony in the East which went on under duress to become a component entity of an Eastern totalitarian communist State. Though this colonial and post-colonial totalitarian context rarely affected documentary film-makers at ATV and TVB in a blatant manner, and broadcasting staff within the organisations also resisted political encroachment when it arrived, that context nevertheless ensured that restrictions were placed upon the ability of the film-makers to produce critical, impactful films. This article will first explore how these two broadcasters can be associated with models of relations between the media and the state. The relationship to mainland China will then be referred to. Following this, an outline of the television documentary films of these broadcasters will be given, before a more in-depth account of particular films is provided. The article will conclude via reference to Habermas’ notion of the public sphere, and by offering proposals for change and improvement to this broadcasting output. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Independent documentary film projects dealing with history have recently multiplied in China. While all seek to shed new light on personal experiences of the Mao era, they vary greatly in form, method, and scale. Launched in 2010 by Wu Wenguang at the Caochangdi Workstation, a space devoted to contemporary dance and documentary film, the Folk Memory Project aims at producing various textual and visual records of the historical experience of rural populations, especially during the Great Leap famine. Of special interest are the 20 documentaries of the Folk Memory Project's film section – a body of works constantly growing following yearly returns by filmmakers to their "home" villages. These films are characterised by a performative aspect that is rare in other Chinese documentaries on similar topics. This contribution examines this body of documentaries and the role of performance and performativity in the recording of collective memory of the famine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following text is an introduction to the Folk Memory Project (Minjian jiyi jihua), a multidisciplinary memory initiative aiming at producing textual and visual records of the historical experience of rural populations, especially during the Great Leap famine. Written by its founder, independent documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang, the article presents the project and the works of individual filmmakers, four years after its launch. It provides an account of the work method and goals of a specific unofficial memory project, which is further discussed in the article "Performance, Documentary, and the Transmission of Memories of the Great Leap Famine in the Folk Memory Project" pp. 17-26. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The figure of the artist is an important subject of Chinese independent documentary and feature film, but while some of the aesthetic and political implications of this figure have been discussed, its gender dimensions have received little attention. This article puts gender at the centre of an investigation of documentary representations of troubled artists, beginning with Wu Wenguang'sLiulang Beijing[Bumming in Beijing, 1990] and ending with Gu Yaping'sQin'ai de[My Dear, 2007]. The figure of the troubled artist serves as a trope of the entanglement of immediacy and mediation that constitutes the core formal tension of Chinese independent documentary film. How various instances of this figure are inflected by notions of gender difference, how they embody the tension between art and everyday life and between madness and sanity, and the kinds of performance they engage in are fundamental questions that help reassess the heterogeneous ‘poetics of presence’ shaping this vibrant field of contemporary visual culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]