Worrying about China: storytelling, humanitarian intervention and the global circulation of independent Chinese documentary

ABSTRACT

This article explores the impact of cross-border collaboration on independent Chinese documentary. Through a study of Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China, I argue that the film, which passed through training events run by CNEX and the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Programme in China, bears the formal impact of the industrial-humanitarian logic central to these workshops: character-driven storytelling as the key to generating a global Anglophone public for independent Chinese documentary. Tracing this logic through the workshop mechanism, the film’s form, and audience reactions to its screening in the UK, I suggest the result is a viewer response privileging personal action over structural critique—what in this context I term “worrying about China.” This allows me to locate the documentary in relation to broader liberal arguments over China’s place in the world system and assess the limitations of this approach to “going global” for independent Chinese documentary.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• documentary
• globalization
• story
• humanitarian media

Introduction

Collaboration with overseas partners has historically been a feature of independent documentary film production in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).¹ This has taken different forms over time, from informal personal connections affecting the supply of hardware through to more formal relationships such as presales or financing. One of the newer ways in which transnational involvement manifests, however, is the training workshop. There is an established history in post-reform China of foreign NGO support for non-commercial video production workshops extending back to at least the early 2000s (Johnson 2014, 265–266). However, as non-fiction film production in the PRC has expanded and industrialized over the past two decades, events that we associate with the documentary film industry elsewhere have also emerged. From pitching forums to production seminars, these events have often been modelled on practices found overseas, at established international events such as festival or film markets, or have been set up in China by, or with, overseas partners.² With the passing of 2016's Film Industry Promotion Law, which de facto criminalized independent production at home, Chinese filmmakers are increasingly faced with a choice either to work within the system, or to find more elaborate ways to work round it. Arguably, these events have thus become increasingly important pathways for filmmakers can access funding, expertise, and even potential broadcast or exhibition opportunities outside of – or in addition to – those available domestically.

This raises questions about how such infrastructure is shaping independent documentary in the PRC that, with certain exceptions (see e.g. Tong 2017, 2020), have not been investigated. Non-fiction has consequently remained somewhat marginal to these discussions of what happens to Chinese cinema when it ‘goes global.’ This omission is surprising. The question of representation has dogged the Sino-Hollywood relationship because it is understood to be tied to geopolitics. It is central to debates over soft power, and the extent to which American media corporations, through their involvement in producing Chinese or China-friendly product, may be helping the PRC ‘sanitize’ its image for profit, to the ultimate detriment of their home country (Kokas 2019, 216). Documentary may occupy a smaller market share than the blockbuster, but, with its unique claims upon the real, how non-fiction represents its subject is arguably as, if not more, important than fiction. This is particularly the case for independently produced work, which has long been positioned as an unusually truthful window onto the PRC, while also boasting a self-consciously anti-commercial aesthetic that both reflects its artisanal production practices and the ideological and artistic commitments of its directors (see e.g. Edwards 2015; Robinson 2013; Zhang and Pickowickz 2016). In these circumstances, the involvement of overseas actors in these training events raises multiple questions. What are the motives for establishing such workshops? What preconceptions do their organizers bring to the table regarding what documentary is or should be, in China or elsewhere? What is their impact on the films and filmmakers that they work with? And how does this translate into the viewing experience of audiences, particularly those overseas?

In this article, I explore these issues through one specific series of Chinese workshops run collaboratively by CNEX (or China Next) and the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Programme. The former is a pan-Chinese documentary production and exhibition platform based between Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei. It was established in 2006 by financiers Ben Tsiang, Ruby Chen and Zhang Zhaowei, with input from Chen’s husband, the Taiwanese filmmaker Hsu Hsiao-ming.³ The latter is the famous non-profit organization established by Robert Redford in 1981, which now manages a number of significant documentary programmes in the US and overseas. These collaborative workshops were initiated in 2011, with their activities partly modelled on those conducted by Sundance in the USA. Drawing on interviews conducted with two key stakeholders – CNEX’s Chen and Sundance’s Rick Perez – I argue that the workshops blended ideas of documentary as creative practice with preconceptions of Chinese independent documentary as a form of humanitarian intervention. The result was an emphasis on the importance of character-driven storytelling as the key both to accessing international film markets and to building a global public for this cinema. This emphasis is consistent with contemporary debates about this documentary format, which also argue that the rise of character-driven storytelling represents a shift away from non-fiction as a collective activist practice towards one that emphasizes individualism, empowerment and, ultimately, the reincorporation of the subject into existing political and economic systems. I then analyze one of the film projects that passed through the workshops, Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China (2016), to argue that we can trace the influences of these ideas in the film’s emphasis on emotion and individual story over analysis and structural causation. Finally, using audience responses to screenings of the film in the UK, I suggest that for many viewers its impact is not dissimilar to the theoretical critiques of the form: an affective response that privileges personal action over a drive to effect systemic change, particularly in relation to global capitalism. I term this combination of affect and content ‘worrying about China,’ and conclude by arguing that it is a manifestation of broader liberal arguments over the PRC’s place in the world system which place China outside said system while simultaneously suggesting that Chinese people can be easily incorporated into it. By combining multiple methodological approaches across three different sites in the social life of the documentary – production, form, reception – I thus answer some of the questions about the role and impact of these industrial workshops on independent Chinese documentary, while also exploring the consequences for the form of this particular route to a global Anglophone audience.

Workshopping the industrial-humanitarian complex

According to publicity materials on the Sundance Institute’s website, the first workshop collaboration with CNEX took place over three days in Beijing’s 798 complex, where the CNEX salon was located. It combined public panels, open to a general audience, with smaller, private sessions focused on 11 Chinese documentary projects selected via submission from CNEX’s contacts in the independent filmmaking community. These closed sessions ultimately became pitch workshops, where invited Sundance advisors – largely foreign industry professionals – provided the participating filmmakers with feedback on initial cuts of their work. In 2016, the Sundance-CNEX Documentary and Story Edit Lab was added by Rick Perez, who took over the programme from its original manager, Cara Mertes. This was a private workshop focused on editing and narrative. Sundance had already been running versions of these workshops in the USA for some years.

Perez (2019) described these workshops as having a dual purpose. First, to encourage the development of an independent documentary filmmaking community in the PRC. Second, to help these filmmakers ‘refine and advance the narrative and storytelling of their work.’ These comments raise questions, notably: how are ‘narrative’ and ‘storytelling’ understood here, given the many ways these forms can manifest, and why should cultivating them be important for independent Chinese documentary production? Tong Shan (2020) argues that the primary aim of these events was to facilitate Chinese independent filmmakers’ access to the global non-fiction cinema market. While this was achieved in part through networking with the overseas industry guests, it was also the goal of the practical suggestions made to filmmakers during the workshops Tong attended in 2016, including suggestions made by CNEX representatives. Participants were informed that storytelling via a character-driven narrative, goal-orientated logic and the dramatic arc of the three-act structure would ensure their films were universally accessible. This accessibility would in turn increase the likelihood of selection by major global film festivals and expedite commercial deals with overseas distributors. Storytelling, in the sense of the classical Hollywood narrative, was thus presented as a universal form through which Chinese filmmakers could transform their documentaries from local to global commodities. As Brett Story (2021, 83) has recently noted, ‘A story – as we have come to use that term – belongs, confers rights, can be exchanged, and is invested with value. A story is mine or it’s yours.’ When we think of a story, we think of someone ‘owning it;’ in this sense, it already constitutes the perfect property form.

Clearly, these workshops used storytelling as a tool to shape documentary films – and filmmakers – so they might circulate more easily through global creative industry networks.⁴ In North America in particular, the story form has been the dominant model for documentary seeking a market release since the turn of the millennium, when, in the wake of Michael Moore’s phenomenal commercial success, both traditional studios and emerging indie players pivoted to non-fiction as a low cost, high return investment (Glick 2021, 62; Juhasz and Lebow 2018, 2). The rise of platforms like Netflix, first as distributors and then as a producers of documentary content, has only reinforced this dominance (Glick 2021). And yet, Sundance also understood these workshops as a civil society project. Perez (2019) described the Sundance Documentary Institute as being ‘founded on freedom of expression, and the independent artist and the independent voice.’ This is striking in the way it echoes Ruby Chen’s (2019) description of the ideal CNEX filmmaker – an ‘independent individual’⁵ – but it is ‘voice’ that character-driven narrative particularly helps shape. Perez first encountered Chinese independent documentary at CNEX’s own Taipei pitch forum in 2013. He said (2019) he was especially fascinated by the work of PRC filmmakers because of what he described as their ‘spectrum of audacity:’ the range of their material from conservative to socially and politically challenging. Sundance could help these directors ‘articulate the story they were proposing to tell’ – assist them to locate their subject vis-à-vis the bigger socio-political picture. This is a goal the organization clearly shared with CNEX: Chen (2019) describes one of the stimuli for founding the platform as being simply, ‘Could we present all the stories of the development of modern China?’ Perez (2019) acknowledged that there would be differences between the narrative forms needed to address domestic and foreign viewers, stressing that the three-act structure would be needed ‘if your goal [i.e. the filmmaker’s goal] is to try to draw international attention to something that’s going on in your country or story, but if it’s to speak to your fellow community or countrymen, there may be a different pacing, syntax, etc.’ Here, classical Hollywood storytelling is crucial to non-fiction filmmaking, but not solely as a means to monetization. It also galvanizes documentary’s capacity for ‘humanitarian intervention’ (Rangan 2017, 8): its ability to mitigate the impact of a hostile or absent state, in this instance by drawing global attention to its subject matter. Attracting such interest, however, comes at the expense of conforming in style and substance to the ideological expectations of western liberal humanism.

This interweaving of character-driven storytelling and documentary as capacity building is a characteristic of what Paige Sarlin (2021, 39) calls the ‘Non-Profit Industrial Complex.’ Sarlin maintains that the not-for-profit sphere has been as important as the for-profit in promoting the story-driven documentary form. Drawing on the work of Sujatha Fernandes (2017), she argues that, since the 1990s, storytelling has become the primary medium through which NGO social and political work is executed. Large-scale human rights events, such as national truth commissions, to which storytelling and testimony were central, propagated the idea of the individual’s story as a contribution to the formation of publics and audiences (Sarlin 2021, 42). In doing so, storytelling was abstracted from the broader goals of mass movement politics, instead becoming ‘a highly reproducible vehicle for producing consensus, the common, and the universal, through the endorsement of the “personal”’ (Sarlin 2021, 39). As non-profits and NGOs moved increasingly into non-fiction funding during this period, they brought these ideas with them. It should therefore be unsurprising that Sundance’s China programme was underwritten by a grant from the Open Society Foundations (OSF), the organization that, according to its own website description as of 13 November 2022, was founded by George Soros precisely to support ‘justice, democratic governance, and human rights’ work round the world. When the OSF ceased to sponsor projects in China, the money for the programme stopped – one of the reasons why it is no longer running (Perez 2019). This funding clearly came with certain expectations. According to Perez (2019), the OSF stipulated all the workshops include a public element, suggesting the funder’s underlying commitment to the public sphere as a concept. Arguably, the logic of humanitarian intervention was thus integrated into the programme from its inception.

Rather than seeing the industrial-commercial and humanitarian facets of these training workshops as contradictory it is perhaps better then to view them as complementary. Both Sundance and CNEX clearly understood the aim of these specific events as the production of independent filmmakers for the global – and particularly Anglophone – film and TV industries.⁶ Sundance and the OSF seem also to have seen the programme as a way of producing filmmakers as civil society agents: individuals who could use filmmaking to capacity build at a local level, while also using non-fiction as a form of consciousness-raising for a global public. It is storytelling, understood as a universal commodity to which all individuals have rights, that draws these discourses together, for it becomes the perfect vehicle through which the rights-bearing individual can both find their (creative) voice and build their public. This distinguishes these events from other China-based, not-for-profit video production workshops.⁷ But what might this imply for the films produced through the CNEX-Sundance collaboration? If the workshops incorporated not just film industry but also NGO logics into their training, how might we trace the influence of the latter on the screen world of the documentaries that passed through them? Pooja Rangan argues that the work of humanizing in humanitarian documentary relies on the exclusion of the in- or non-human to establish the boundaries of the human. As she notes, ‘if humanity is the "ultimate imagined community," … then documentary immediations can be regarded as part of the ritual, tropic performances of belonging to this community’ (Rangan 2017, 7–8). The formal conventions underpinning the humanitarian documentary impulse thus help define certain documentary subjects as worthy of being heard, of having their lives valued. But we can take this line of argument further. Paige Sarlin suggests that as contemporary documentary storytelling shifted from a social movement to an NGO practice, it came to promote an idea of politics outside the political. With a focus on the individual rather than the structural, on particular people rather than the social, political and economic systems within which they are embedded, ‘documentary storytelling has become a practice through which contradictions are harmonized, inequality and social justice are personalized, and social reconciliation is effected’ (Sarlin 2021, 39). Character-driven storytelling in the contemporary humanitarian documentary not only gives voice to particular people: it establishes a framework for interpreting or responding to their stories. This framework does not emphasize mass mobilization or class struggle; instead, it emphasizes catharsis and compromise. Ultimately, as Sujatha Fernandes (2017, 31) points out, it links non-fiction storytelling ‘to discourses of participation, empowerment, and social capital,’ enabling such stories to be more easily recuperated by the existing political and economic system.

It is precisely these issues that I now want to explore, through a particular example: Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China. This documentary is one of the works that Perez (2019) flagged as a product of the CNEX-Sundance collaboration. At face value a film about global waste handling, the documentary is often read as politically engaged and eco-critical. I argue that Plastic China actually elevates personal story over structural enquiry, voicing a particular kind of subject who elicits empathy and emotion over conflict or critical reflection. Wang Jiuliang achieves this precisely by combining a character-driven storytelling schema with standard tropes of humanitarian filmmaking – in particular, a focus on the child as a central character in the film. The result, however, is a more conservative film than one might allow for based on the documentary’s subject matter. It is this conservatism that will be addressed in the fourth section of this article, when I consider the case of the film’s reception overseas.

Plastic China: storytelling and its humanitarian inflections

Plastic China is one of the works that Perez (2019) flagged as a product of the CNEX-Sundance collaboration. The second film by photographer and filmmaker Wang Jiuliang, Plastic China focuses on the foreign waste processing business in the PRC and proved a hit on the international film festival circuit. The film was awarded a Jury Award for First Appearance at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2016 and was selected to screen at Sundance the following year. It also won multiple awards at a range of other festivals, from Taiwan’s Golden Horse to the specialist ecological film festival in Bozcaada, Turkey, and, in addition to being distributed by CNEX, was picked up online by most of the major US platforms, including Amazon, Vimeo, Google and iTunes. Domestically, the official response was more conflicted. Though a twenty-six-minute version received Chinese television coverage, the full-length film was banned on release, and a video of Wang’s Yixi talk on environmental issues was scrubbed from the internet after going viral (Liu 2020, 182).

Wang’s film is set in Shandong Province, in northeast China, in a small town where thousands of households function as small factories processing imported foreign plastic waste. It focuses on one of these businesses, owned and managed by Kun, a former farmer and a local. Kun employs a family of rural migrants, from Sichuan Province in southwest China, to work for him processing plastic. It is the daughter of this family, eleven-year-old Yijie, who is Plastic China’s other primary protagonist. One strand of the film follows Kun and his family, as he works to save enough money to buy a car; the second follows Yijie, as she struggles with homesickness and the desire to attend school. The latter is highlighted through comparison with Kun’s son, Qiqi, who is allowed to start primary school. In contrast, Yijie’s father wishes her to remain at home, working. The social and environmental consequences of the plastic recycling business are thus mediated through a character-driven narrative increasingly focused on two small children, their distinct personal trajectories, and the role that education is understood to play in gendered social immobility.

Interpretations of Plastic China often focus on its critical potential. Margaret Hillenbrand uses it as an entry point for a discussion of precarity and waste in contemporary Chinese visual culture. She suggests that the film’s ‘against-the-grain depiction of the ragpicker as artist’ (Hillenbrand 2019, 263) – embodied most completely in the figure of Yijie – sets it apart from a broader trend in contemporary Chinese art to elide the human face of waste collection, and so suppress associated class conflict. Jin Liu (2020) considers the film through Yi-fu Tuan’s theories of space and place, arguing that Wang’s diegetic use of space functions as a critique of global capitalism and the position of Chinese workers within it, while Winnie Yee (2023, 13) positions the film as one that ‘highlight[s] the parallels between exploited people and plastic garbage.’ These readings recuperate the documentary’s ability to catalyze structural and class analysis. Nonetheless, the film is organized such that its individual character-driven stories supersede broader structural reflections as the narrative progresses. Plastic China’s post-title montage sequence moves from images of COSCO container ships arriving and unloading at Qingdao, Shandong’s major port, to COSCO lorries carrying plastic refuse travelling to Kun’s hometown, but also incorporates an intertitle stating that ‘China is the leading importer of plastic wastes [sic] from Japan, Korea, Europe, and USA.’ The film’s opening thus explicitly positions its story as the product of transnational waste logistics. Thereafter, however, direct analysis of this system takes a back seat to its inference through, for example, the foreign brand labels that the children save and repurpose from the rubbish. Our focus shifts to Yijie and her family, and Kun and his, with a more thorough-going exploration of their individual desires and intra-familial relationships than their comparative positions within the global labour market. In this regard, the film’s ending is an instructive contrast to its opening. In Beijing with his family on a sight-seeing trip to the nation’s capital, Kun sits in the back seat of a taxi, facing the camera, instructing his son: ‘Study hard, come to Beijing for college. Then buy a car and an apartment in Beijing. Then we will live rich people’s lives.’ We then cut back to Shandong, where Yijie lies on a bed of plastic, and explains to camera that she will go out to work at thirteen, to support her brothers and sisters to go to school. Her dreams remain unrealized. Although Plastic China’s concluding sequence, in which the children join together to put out fires lit to burn the rubbish, is ambiguous and evocative, by this stage the personalization of the political has been established in a manner distinct from the structural critique that launches the documentary. Where we started with a film about the inequalities of the global recycling industry, we finish with one that is focused more on a little girl who simply wants – indeed, has the right – to get an education.

Such a narrowing of political focus is reflected in the documentary’s formal choices. As Jin Liu (2020, 186–187) points out, initially the film makes careful use of mise-en-scène to highlight the pervasiveness of rubbish in the lives of its subjects. In particular, the use of low-angled shots creates an imbalance between Yijie and her environment, dwarfing the former with the refuse of the latter. Liu suggests that this spatial inequality reflects how the lives of the film’s characters ‘are dominated by the invisible forces of global consumerism and capitalism’ (Liu 2020, 187). But, as the film progresses, it transitions towards more mainstream commercial editing and cinematographic techniques. Aside from the types of conversational address to camera that we might associate with TV documentary, Wang makes use of close-ups to draw our attention to the characters: for example, in the sequence towards the end when Kun, his wife, Yijie and her father attend a car show, Yijie is framed in a series of extreme close-ups as she gazes around at the merchandise. While Liu (2020, 191) interprets this as a symptom of the girl’s dislocation – a migrant child in an alien environment – the technique is also clearly intended to encourage the viewer to empathize with Yijie. As Tyler Strickland, the composer of the film’s post-production soundtrack, notes of the score, one of its primary aims is to highlight Yijie’s perspective and the ‘strong mix of emotions that stem from her curious awareness of the extent to how bad those living conditions are, her dreams for the future, and her sadness of being away from home’ (quoted in Liu 2020, 191). Though this knowledge does not exclude a more critical reading, it is clear that Plastic China’s formal choices are intended to draw us into the personal story playing out on screen, rather than direct our attention to the complex structural dynamics that underpin it.

This tendency suggests that the film’s aim, if not exactly catharsis, is most definitely an empathetic or affective response. The child at risk is a crucial trope of the humanitarian imagination. The universal ethical response such a figure is assumed to elicit enables it to subsume the specificities and contradictions of its subject matter (Rangan 2017, 31). Such a subsumption is most obvious in the way that the film avoids exploring in any detail the socio-economic tensions at the heart of its narrative. As Liu (2020, 192) astutely points out, the film is a product of the class stratification emerging within a rural labouring class forced out of agricultural work during China’s industrial transition. Kun and his family have done comparatively well from this process; Yijie and hers have not. And yet, while the interweaving of the two families’ stories makes such a comparison possible, Wang’s choice of subject and form soften the social violence here, shifting our attention from the structural to the individual, and from conflict to empathy.⁸ Rather than address the logic of inequality built into the economic system, we can, instead, sublimate that discomfort by feeling sorry for the story’s victims.

Plastic China thus stands in contrast to Wang’s first documentary, Beijing Besieged by Waste (2011). The latter is also concerned with refuse, in this case the multiple waste disposal sites that ring Beijing. Unlike Plastic China, the documentary started life as a photographic project. Riding a motorbike around the city, Wang followed rubbish trucks to waste management centres, landfills and incineration points. With the additional help of satellite imagery and GPS data, he managed to locate some 500 waste dumps, legal and illegal, surrounding the city. He began visiting them, initially to take photographs; then, with his friend, videographer Fan Xuesong, he started to shoot video of these sites and those living on them. After two years collecting footage, he edited all his material together into a seventy five-minute documentary (Huang 2023, 418; Hui 2021, 197–198; Rojas 2019, 23).

As this brief description implies, Beijing Besieged by Waste is more directly interested in systemic issues than Plastic China. It seeks to map the economic processes that have created and sustained the dumps, and to make visible those hidden stages in the social life of consumer goods that they represent. Formally, Wang’s first film is thus distinct from his second. It is not a character-driven narrative about specific individuals or families which presents us with a conundrum (will Yijie be sent to school?) that the film’s ending may potentially resolve. Instead, it is a multi-media document incorporating still photographs, Google Map images and live footage of the dumping sites, held together by the director’s voiceover. As Corey Byrnes notes, through this juxtaposition of landscape shots, cartographic representation and commentary, ‘Wang shows his viewers the invisible segments of the full life cycle of the everyday objects, food waste, and construction refuse that make their lifestyles possible’ (2019, 129). Unlike Plastic China, the documentary attempts what, in Sarlin’s terms, we might understand as a structural analysis of its subject matter; to do so, it must employ techniques that exceed those of the character-driven story form.

At this point, I should stress that I do not see a focus on the individual, or on the personal, as inherently foreign to Chinese independent documentary production: Beijing Besieged by Waste’s voiceover track, which shifts between first-person singular and plural perspectives, belies that fact. Wang Qi (2014, 139–146) has argued that the personal in the form of the subjective has been present in independent documentary since the very early 1990s, tracing this tendency back to Wang Guangli’s I Graduated! (1992). From the early 2000s, women documentary filmmakers like Tang Danhong (Nightingale: Not the Only Voice, 2000), Wang Fen (More Than One is Unhappy, 2000) and Yang Lina (Home Video, 2001) began to explicitly foreground autobiographical gendered experience in their work, producing early examples of what Kiki Tianqi Yu (2019) terms ‘first person documentary practice’ (2019, 11). Equally, a range of filmmakers, from Wu Wenguang, to Zhu Chuanming, to Wang Bing, to Zhao Liang – naming but a few – use a focus on individuals other than themselves to explore social and political issues ranging from urban migration and social exclusion to history and memory in the PRC. But, as with Beijing Besieged by Waste, the most critically engaged of these of these do not adopt the character-driven story format. Zhao Liang’s experimental Behemoth (2015), for example, explores the social and ecological consequences of mining in China, while making use throughout of a single individual figure who threads the film’s distinct sections together. But, the documentary is structured as a journey, with this figure progressing through what the director has termed the ‘“supply chain” of urban construction’ (Sorace 2016, 41) – from open cast mine, to factory, to the newly-built ghost town of Ordos in Inner Mongolia – allowing viewers to trace the production system underpinning the environmental and human devastation captured on camera. Here, the presence of a focal individual as a documentary trope does not detract from the film’s exploration of systemic causation and conflict; it is instead used to draw attention to it.⁹

In this section, I have tried to connect the practices and logics of the CNEX-Sundance workshops to Plastic China as a product of these workshops. I have argued, against the grain of existing literature on the film, that the documentary combines commercial narrative and humanitarian tropes to ‘give voice’ to its subjects in ways that emphasize their individuality, interiority and rights (to an education, for example), while formally directing an audience towards an empathetic response that channels the film’s politics in particular ways. Now, I wish to shift my focus from the documentary text to its reception. If, as I have been arguing, there is a relationship between the practices encouraged in the Sundance-CNEX workshops, the form and content of the films that passed through them, and a particular kind of political subjectivity, then the question arises – how do audiences abroad respond to these films? I want to address this issue through consideration of a UK film tour, in which I was involved, where a range of CNEX films were screened, including Plastic China. Using audience responses to the film, collated through questionnaires after its various screenings, I argue that the reaction to the film confirms some of the initial theorizing about the politics of the character-driven story format: namely, that it encourages an emotive, personal response that does not challenge existing political or economic structures, but can be easily assimilated into them. I then locate the film’s particular structure of feeling – or ‘worrying about China,’ as I call it – within a broader liberal continuum of engagement with ‘global China.’ This tradition assumes China exists outside the global system, while also, in this specific iteration, representing Chinese people as ‘just like’ western viewers. Locating Plastic China thus not only illuminates the documentary as an exemplar or a broader trend, but also suggests what the costs might be to Chinese independent documentary of ‘going global’ in this manner.

Watching documentary, worrying about China

The film tour was organized by the Chinese Independent Film Archive, of which I am a team member, and took place from 7 to 21 November 2019. Entitled ‘Earth in Crisis,’ it toured four independent Chinese documentaries, all loosely addressing environmental themes, to seven screening locations in six British cities (London, Newcastle, Nottingham, Manchester, Edinburgh and Sheffield). Aside from Plastic China, the other films screened were Wang Libo’s Oh, the Sanxia (2013), and Fan Lixin’s The Next Life (2011) and The Second Child (2019). All these films are distributed by CNEX, who helped us to secure the screening rights. In addition to the films, all three filmmakers also toured the different cities, fielding Q&A sessions on their work after specific screenings. The aim of the event was to raise awareness of independent Chinese documentary film production in the UK.

After tour screenings, we asked viewers to fill out forms in which they could discuss responses to the film they had just seen (131 did so, out of 616 total admissions). The form contained demographic questions (gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity); some logistical questions (how viewers had heard about the screening you attended); and then questions about the film itself. Audience members were asked to indicate whether subject, style, or filmmaker Q&A most attracted them to the film; whether they had seen an independent Chinese documentary before; whether they would do so in the future; and whether they had learnt anything new or unexpected about environmental issues in China from the screening. Finally, if they were given space for an open-ended response, in which they were asked, ‘What words would you use to describe this documentary and your experience of watching it?’

As this brief summary suggests, these forms were quite simple, and primarily intended to gather basic attendance and impact statistics for the project funder. Nevertheless, the responses demonstrated certain patterns. Overall, the word most closely associated with all the films was ‘moving’, used on 22 separate occasions by respondents to talk about their responses to screenings. This was over twice the number of times words more closely connected to documentary’s traditional epistophilic function (Nichols 1991, 205) appeared, such as ‘informative’ or its derivatives (e.g. ‘information’) (10 in total) – and that is before considering responses that also used terms similar to moving, such as ‘touching’ (nine times) or ‘emotional’ (six times). ‘Shock’ was also a response invoked by many viewers (13 responses). Clearly, many members of the audience had a strong affective reaction to watching the films.

This pattern was replicated in interesting ways if we look at the responses specific to the Plastic China screenings (40 of the 131). Ten viewers talked of their shock at seeing the film, far more than in relation to any other film screening. Being moved or touched also came up seven times, while two viewers described feeling ‘overwhelmed’ by the documentary. More interesting, however, is what viewers attached these emotions to, and where they saw them leading. Almost all said they were unaware of the details of the plastic waste recycling business, and that this film brought the issue to their attention; many implicitly acknowledged it as an issue of inequality, particularly in relation to ‘foreigners’ waste’ (female, Asian/British Asian) or ‘our plastic waste’ (female, white) being dumped in the PRC. However, few framed this as a structural problem. While a few described their ‘guilt’ as consumers, it was striking that only one respondent (female, white) mentioned ‘capitalism’ as directly responsible for the conditions in the documentary, and one other (male, white) highlighted the ‘class and materialistic [sic] elements’ of the film as being of interest, over and above its ‘environmental and basic human story.’ Instead, it was precisely this basic human story that engaged many of the viewers. Plastic China’s use of a character-driven narrative focused on children generated many of these emotional responses. Some were quite general: ‘It made me very sad for the individuals’ (female, white); ‘I … had no idea about the suffering of individuals as they processed plastics’ (female, white). Others were more specific to particular sequences or images: one commented, ‘It was very moving and shocking to see the characters literally living in the plastic and still preserve humanity and cultivate hope for the future’ (female, white), while another said, ‘It was shocking to see babies climbing the rubbish tips’ (female, white). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the issue of Yijie’s schooling came up as an issue, sometimes distinct from, sometimes tied up with, environmental questions. As one viewer (female, white) said: ‘In the west we take for granted free access to school, good health care and freedom from child labour, these families considered education to be a privilege to escape poverty – a dream almost’. Another (female, white), more directly: ‘How do we ensure that ALL children are educated to at least 15 years of age?’

No film is an ideological black box; a range of audience interpretations is inevitable. Nonetheless, these responses chime with the claims I outlined in section two regarding the impact of character-driven story forms on documentaries and their reception. These arguments suggest this format highlights the personal or individual at the expense of the structural and subsumes conflict – particularly class-based conflict – into a more emotive, cathartic reception that seeks points of commensurability over difference. In the reactions detailed above, we can see a clear focus on the individual characters, especially children, as the site of an emotional response to the film, and a consequent gradual framing of certain responses around the right of the child as a universal subject to education. These responses are sometimes intertwined with questions of environmental degradation and poverty, but less so with more focused analyzes of the systems that result in these injustices. This is all the more apparent when we isolate those few responses that discussed what steps the viewers felt they should take next. One of the audience members (female, multiracial) who admitted to feeling ‘overwhelmed’ by the film asked, ‘I wondered how as an individual I could help?’ Another (female, white) said that ‘After seeing the movie, I started thinking of ways to concretely help the protagonist and her family … ’. Finally, one (male, white) stated that ‘The documentary has enlightened me; firstly to try to make effort to use less plastic and secondly to write to my MP to raise the issue and try to address it.’

How to translate awareness into action has long been a conundrum of activist or committed documentary filmmaking. Affect and sensation have played their part here, perhaps most famously in Jane M. Gaines’s (1999) concept of ‘political mimesis.’ Gaines argues that committed documentary can be understood as a body genre: a type of film which produces in the viewer’s body an involuntarily sensation of what they see and hear on screen. Committed documentaries thus engage in political mimicry, seeking to shock or stimulate their viewers into political action through their use of sound and image (Gaines 1999, 90–92). In her essay, Gaines is discussing explicitly radical cinema that looks to incite collective political struggle. What is striking about these particular responses to Plastic China, however, is that they too mimic the logic of the film’s character-driven storytelling, but with rather different consequences. Clearly, the film’s attempt to vivify the global plastic recycling industry through the story of two families and their children generated a powerful emotional charge. It seems to have affectively implicated at least some British viewers, producing in them a sense of their own complicity as consumers, and a subsequent concern for the impact of used plastic recycling on those they saw on screen. But, in rendering the scale of this problem through a story that centres children as rights-bearing individuals, Plastic China apparently also generated a politically mimetic response of a similar kind. In asking what should happen next, respondents’ queries rarely rose above the question of what they as individuals should be doing to address the problems captured in the documentary, right down to limiting personal plastic consumption. Where a desire to effect structural change did manifest, as in the final response above, it was through the classic exercise of individual democratic rights within the Westminster system – namely, writing to ones MP. While I do not mean to denigrate these reactions, they ultimately suggest a desire for change directed primarily inwards, to the personal, rather than outwards, to broader society; and into actions that legitimate representative democratic institutions through individual engagement, rather than exploring how the problem of global plastic dumping emerged under these institutions’ very watch in the first place. These viewers’ responses did not translate either into thinking about the possibilities of collective action, or into explicit critiques of global capitalism – which is, after all, the system that sustains both plastic consumption and the inequitable spatial division of its disposal. Instead, as explored earlier vis-à-vis the arguments of Sarlin (2021) and Fernandes (2017), their reactions suggest the empathetic recuperation of audience members into the existing liberal, democratic, capitalist order through discourses of individual participation. As an example of documentary humanitarian intervention, Plastic China attempts to build a global public for environmental change by wrapping character-driven storytelling around the figure of the child in need. The resulting affective response, however, serves to reinforce key elements of the system that produced this environmental crisis in the first place, short-circuiting the impact of the documentary before it has really begun.

In the introduction to their book, Global China as Method, Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere argue that there are three rhetorical frameworks used to place China ‘outside’ the existing global order. One is exceptionalism: the argument that China is inherently and essentially different from the west, associated with right-wing commentary. One is whataboutism, a rhetorical trick often practiced by certain kinds of leftist commentators faced with criticism of Chinese policies. Finally, we have the ‘‘maieutic’ approach’ (Franceschini and Loubere 2022, 2), favoured by liberal commentators. Here, China is perceived as a fundamentally different, authoritarian polity ‘that needs to be further engaged with and coaxed more fully into the institutionalised international order (including both ‘free-market’ global capitalism and global governance institutions) for it to become a ‘normal’ liberal democratic country’ (Franceschini and Loubere 2022, 5). All three approaches cover a full range of political positions. What they share, however, is an ‘underlying assumption of China’s inherent separation and difference, and its status as an external agent of change’ (Franceschini and Loubere 2022, 1).

I would argue that Plastic China presents us with a variation on Franceschini and Loubere’s maieutic approach. The film performs a dual move. On the one hand, China as a space is represented as ‘outside’ the global liberal order, as somewhere that does not respect the rights of children to an education, for example. On the other, the film’s Chinese subjects are represented as ‘like’ the liberal western viewer: individuals striving for similar goals, even if they cannot fulfil these over the course of the documentary’s story. The intense affective response the latter seems to have generated in many viewers in turn directs them to look for ways to bring these subjects ‘into’ that order, in the process validating the values, practices, and even subjectivities of liberal politics. This does not prevent criticisms that seek to situate the documentary’s subject matter as a product of, and internal to, the existing global order, but it does seem to limit their efficacy.

Identifying structures of feeling is notoriously hard. Nonetheless, I term this combination of sentiment, subject matter, and response, ‘worrying about China’. I (mis)appropriate this phrase from Gloria Davies’s (2009) book of the same name. Davies uses the phrase to capture the desire in post-Reform and Opening Chinese intellectual discourse to pinpoint, and seek solutions for, problems that impede China’s perfection as both a nation and a civilization. She names this dynamic ‘patriotic worrying,’ a translation of the Chinese youhuan (Davies 2009, 1), which serves to localize domestic reception of critical thought from overseas. In the CNEX-Sundance documentaries, this dynamic is inverted. China is also an object of worry, but for humanitarian rather than patriotic reasons, and primarily for foreign rather than local viewers. The resulting structure of feeling is a marker of concerns about the country’s perceived difference from the global liberal order, but also a way to effect its successful incorporation into that same system. Chinese independent documentary may be going global – but at what cost?

Conclusion

My aim in this article has been two-fold. First, to trace how a subset of contemporary Chinese independent documentary reaches an international audience while unpacking the multiple assumptions implicit both in their structure and in the spaces that shape their production. As I hope I have demonstrated, the idea of story as a form both commercial and humanitarian was central to how the CNEX-Sundance workshop collaboration understood independent documentary from China could connect with Anglophone viewers overseas. Embedded in this understanding of story were suppositions about the universal subject that manifest in the style and subject matter of these documentaries, and thus in ways that they address the viewer. My second aim has been to unpack that address and its cultural politics; my argument is, in effect, that the response to Plastic China manifests as a type of liberal political mimesis. Here, affect is clearly critical, both as an enabler and disabler of a particular critical reaction. This suggests how we might understand the local screening space as a media environment, one that is also shaped by, and connected to, a space of training and production that is both spatially and temporally distant to the moment of exhibition. But it also illuminates some of the preconditions set if independent Chinese documentary is to ‘go global,’ and the compromises that filmmakers may be expected to make along the way.

Most of the research for this article was completed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenges for transnational media production in China are now acute, and in many ways the question of frictions – what prevents the movement critical for cross-border engagement – is more pressing than how such routes are facilitated, and with what consequences. Nevertheless, reconstructing pathways that are now radically changed is useful, not least in throwing what has been lost into sharp relief. But some questions raised by this study remain as relevant as ever. The pandemic has exacerbated the pressure already faced by independent film practitioners to choose between compromise with the market, particularly at home, or relocation abroad. The question of how documentary changes in response, and whether what emerges still constitutes independent filmmaking as we previously knew it, is the same as that presented to us by Plastic China: is the film an independent Chinese documentary? Does it signify a new kind of independence? Or is it in fact an entirely new format, the outcome of the interaction of new and distinct forces? In turn, the reception of the film raises the broader problem of how and why people overseas worry about China. Reflecting on what this means, the forms it takes, and what structures of feeling are evoked through this process, seems increasingly urgent at a moment when emotion has become more central to political governance, and China’s presence globally both more established and increasingly controversial.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/S001778/1). Interviews and other related research data will be made available to the public at the Chinese Independent Film Archive, Newcastle University, from 31 January 2024. Part of this article appeared in ‘CNEX, Sundance, and the Cultural Politics of Story’, World Records Journal 5 (2021): 77–80. My thanks to the journal for permission to republish these extracts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council: [Grant Number AH/S001778/1].

Notes on contributors

Luke Robinson

Luke Robinson is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities, University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and the editor, with Chris Berry, of Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). His writing has appeared in books and journals including DV-made China, The New Chinese Documentary Movement, Vocal Projections, Screening China’s Soft Power, positions: Asia cultures critique, Film Studies, Screen, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas.

Notes

1 Independent here means documentaries produced outside the formal state-run media system and not submitted to the government regulator – in other words, the censor – for formal approval for domestic distribution, exhibition, or broadcast.

2 Good examples of such events are the International Pitching Session at GZDOC (Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival) and the Pitching Section at Hangzhou’s West Lake International Documentary Film Festival.

3 The trio aimed to establish a platform for ethnically Chinese documentary film directors to capture the enormous changes taking place in mainland China in particular (Chen 2019), while also effecting increased cultural exchange between ethnic Chinese and the world more broadly (Tong 2020, 51).

4 While this article will mostly focus on documentaries and their reception, it is important to note that, as training workshops, these events were also about producing a certain kind of filmmaker. Perez (2019) made that clear when he said that one of the aims of the labs was to encourage directors to appreciate the specific industrial role of the non-fiction editor – common in the USA, but not a standard feature of independent Chinese filmmaking, where the director frequently does all their own editing – and the potential advantages of working with such professionals. Introducing filmmakers to this model of creative production also appears to have also been one of the aims for Ruby Chen, who described the impetus for the workshop collaboration on CNEX’s part as stemming from a desire to stimulate ‘creative talents’ within the region (Chen 2019). Furthermore, the pitch workshops that CNEX runs in Taiwan as part of its Documentary Academy also train filmmakers in the presentation of their work to international industry professionals. This includes how, in effect, to narrativize their projects so as to render them easily comprehensible outside their immediate local environment (Tong 2020, 57–59). While public pitching was not a formal part of the Sundance-CHEX workshops, it seems likely that these principles would have fed into this collaboration.

5 Chen uses this term in English, even when talking in Chinese. She also frequently uses the Chinese word 作者 zuozhe to describe CNEX directors – a word sometimes translated as that classic French term, ‘auteur,’ with all its connotations of individual genius and artistic vision

6 Tong Shan (2020, 52) argues that CNEX’s workshops are part of a strategy to position the organization not just as a documentary production platform, but also as a cultural broker that can catalyze local-global connections and align Chinese documentary filmmaking with the international market.

7 For example, Matthew D. Johnson (2014) sees the emphasis on the personal in Wu Wenguang and Jian Yi’s Village Video Project (2005 – ), which evolved from the EU-China Training Programme on Village Governance, as part of its NGO-influenced aesthetic. However, these films do not follow a character-driven narrative format, instead being structured much more by everyday experience.

8 This is complicated even further in the film by the fact that Kun encourages Yijie’s family to send her to school, arguing that not to do so will leave her illiterate and limit her future opportunities.

9 That this film was also partly funded and produced with European money also indicates that transnational collaborations do not inevitably end in three act, character-driven narratives.