China's Lahu minority has for centuries lived in the Yunnan hills bordering Burma. The hills have kept the Lahu safe and secluded but also poor and malnourished. Now forty-six ten-year old Lahu girls are sent to an elite Chinese primary school where they will learn to speak Chinese and enter mainstream Chinese society. Can the girls do well at the school yet maintain their cultural identity?
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We follow labor researcher Zhang Yaozu as he visits laid-off workers in northeast China, once the nation's industrial hub and now due to the privatization of state-owned enterprises called China's Rust Belt.
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The Lao Gai are the largest gulags of our times, providing the slave labour helping to propel China's economy. Rare images smuggled out reveal the brutal conditions inside the camps.
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In the past six years, infant birth defects in China have increased by an unprecedented 40%. This rise is being blamed on pollution from factories. Now green campaigners are taking on the multinationals.
"The untreated waste is pumped out secretly at night", states activist Wu Deng Ming, pointing at a water outlet leading from a factory into a river. "People living along the river have enlarged livers", claims one local. They suffer from: "loss of appetite or cancer and all sorts of terminal diseases". Although strong laws governing pollution exist, these are regularly flouted. "Some local officials give protection to polluters", claims Ma Jun. In an attempt to put pressure on polluters, campaigners are naming and shaming guilty companies online. "We let people know that this company, with such a popular brand, is violated waste water discharge standards". There are also signs that central government is taking the problem more seriously. "The state is very serious about environmental problems", states official Zhou Linbo. Some factories have been closed down. But strong resistance to change still exists. "Polluting factories hire hooligans to deal with people they believe will damage their reputation", claims Wu Deng Ming. Other companies threaten to relocate to Vietnam or Indonesia where; "we can still discharge more of less freely".
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The President of Taiwan's stubborn push for independence has made him China's Public Enemy Number One. But how likely are these tensions to escalate into a military conflict?
"The world cannot sit by idly to see an undemocratic China remove the freedom, democracy and rights of Taiwan's citizens," laments President Chen Shui-Bian. But despite his best efforts, Taiwan's international support is dwindling. Only 25 countries still have diplomatic ties with it. Everyone else recognises mainland China. And since Chen came to power, China has stepped up its rhetoric, making it clear it will attack if it feels Taiwan is moving towards a formal declaration of independence. "As everyone knows, Taiwan is an inseparable part of the Chinese territory," states one Chinese commander. "The task of our military is to defend the motherland and to ensure its territorial integrity." President Chen's problems are further compounded by the deep political divides in Taiwan. Only half the country considers him their legitimate leader. The others believe he is a crook who staged a mysterious shooting the day before the elections, when he was trailing badly, to boost his support. And much as the Taiwanese tend to see themselves as a sovereign country, few want to go to war over it. After all, as one woman says, "Mainland China is so big and we are so small."
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Chinese Director Weijun Chen's charming film takes us into the world of Chinese schoolchildren, learning about democracy for the first time as they try to vote for their class monitor.
Elections are pretty uncommon in China, so when the children in a school in Wuhan, Central China are presented with the chance to choose their own class monitor they don't quite know what to make of it. It doesn't take them long to get into the swing of it, though, and soon all sorts of dirty tricks are going on. Urged on by their parents, the candidates launch elaborate campaigns of bribery and coercion.
After tantrums and tears, it's finally time for the vote, and who will win - the sweet girl who woos her voters with her flute playing, the bully who beats his classmates, or the boy who has the best sweets.
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China's controversial one child policy has stemmed population growth but at what cost? From forced abortions to heavy fines, many have suffered.
"If people tried to have a second child and didn't have any money, they'd have their house pulled down," complains Liu Shuling. She attracted the wrath of local officials and was heavily fined when she became pregnant a second time. "It was very hard," she recalls. "Fortunately, we didn't starve to death." For the past twenty-five years, controlling population growth has been a major priority for the Chinese government. "Unless there is a containment of population, there will be no economic growth, no social stability or social harmony," explains official Siri Tellier. But there's real concern that this policy has created a generation of spoilt children. "They are very delicate. They can't cope with setbacks," states teacher Sun Kaiyun. Demographic growth may have been stemmed but new population problems have been created. The preference for boys has led to millions of female foetuses being aborted. Now, tens of millions of Chinese men face a future with no prospect of a female partner. And that could create the social unrest the one child policy was supposed to avoid.
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You've heard about China's Cultural Revolution and its sizzling Economic Revolution. But you haven't heard about its other great social upheaval - the Chinese Sexual Revolution - and like everything in that country it's happening at warp speed.
It's China's version of the 60s revolution - on steroids.
China's Sexual Revolution is the world's first glimpse - often using secret cameras - into this forbidden new China. It's a surprising portrait of the Chinese today: the new free love generation that's left their parents in shock; the booming sex industry that's creating an HIV crisis; the new generation of career women and feminists that suddenly wants it all - while millions of men feel left out.
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Documentary about one of the most epic military expeditions ever. Surrounded by hostile armies, Mao Zedong's 87,000-strong Communist Red Army escaped and traveled nearly 6,000 miles on foot, in just one year. Their suffering was huge, and their casualties immense, but in an extraordinary feat of endurance, and despite repeated attacks, they preserved and re-established themselves as a fighting force. For the first time, the survivors tell their incredible stories.
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When it won the Olympic bid, China promised to improve its human rights record. Instead, as this week's Unreported World reveals, things have got worse. In a world exclusive, Reporter Aidan Hartley and Producer Andrew Carter film inside one of Beijing's 'black jails' - which the authorities deny exist - and with ordinary people suffering the consequences of fighting eviction to make way for Olympic infrastructure.
China has spent £19 billion on the Olympic sites, but this figure represents a fraction of the money that has gone into one of the swiftest and most radical urban redevelopment schemes in all of human history. Some 5,000 old neighbourhoods, or hutongs, have been bulldozed to make way for avenues of high rises and up to 1.5 million people have been forcibly relocated. Although many are happy to receive compensation and relocation to new apartments, the eviction packages are not negotiable and many who refuse to move have suffered terrible consequences.
Everywhere the team travels in Beijing they meet desperate and angry ordinary Chinese, many of them elderly, who have been beaten, threatened and intimidated by developers and government officials who warn: 'The sooner you leave the more you win, the longer you leave it the worse you will suffer'.
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Dan Rather visits with the Dalai Lama. The man who calls himself "just a simple monk" tells us the Chinese, who exiled him decades ago, lack the moral authority to become a super power.
More than in any other country, coal is the lifeblood of China's booming economy. Coal-fired power plants provide 70 percent of the country's electricity, and more than 30,000 mines operate throughout the country -- about 20 percent of which are illegal and, thus, unregulated.
China is also the most dangerous place in the world to be a coal miner. On average, 13 people a day die in mine accidents there, and more than 80 percent of mining deaths worldwide happen in China.
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China's sky-rocketing growth and shortage of sufficient resources is forcing China to set its sights outside its borders in a frantic search for oil, but the major oil-producing countries are kept off-limits by the United States, forcing China to do business with the rogue states, African dictatorships, Iran and former Russian states - to get the oil they desperately need. Featuring field encounters, archival footage, news reports and maps to outline the latest threat in world geopolitics.
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As world leaders meet for another round of global warming talks, the focus is likely to be on big polluters like China. The country has recently become the world's biggest CO2 emitter.
Currently, 80% of China's energy comes from coal. Mindful of the pollution these power stations generate, the government is investing billions in renewable energy. "China is probably going to be the world's number one renewable energy country", predicts businessman Mark Kelleher. By 2020, 16% of the country's energy must come from renewable sources. Much of this will be generated by wind farms. "This area has really developed since the wind power station was built", enthuses one local. "When the wind power station came, people got jobs".
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In 1997 the British handed the island state of Hong Kong back to China. But we probably don't remember that two years later in 1999, the Portuguese also handed back their former colony of Macau - a typhoon-ridden dot, 50 minutes by ferry from Hong Kong, with no arable land, not even rice paddies, fewer than 500,000 people and less than a sixth the size of Washington D.C.
But now the financial press reports that Macau has actually overtaken the famous Las Vegas strip in the US as the biggest casino magnet in the world.
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China, a superpower emerging at breakneck speed. It's the holy grail for risk taking entrepreneurs. Everyday, hundreds of English businessmen arrive full of hope and expectation. It's a land of opportunity, a place where dreams can come true. This is the story of three men on a mission to make their millions in China.
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Toiling for survival in the mines of Africa, even children are forced to work here. And behind this boom, the Chinese. China needs Africa's Copper and Cobalt to feed its fast growing economy. The Chinese bring work and money, but it all comes at a tragic human cost.
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Documentary offering a portrait of Mao Tse-Tung, one of the 20th century's most controversial leaders. Author and former BBC correspondent Philip Short looks at Mao's life from his childhood and rise to power to his death in 1976. The programme examines the legacy of Mao's rule of China and features exclusive interviews with some of Mao's inner circle, as well as dramatic unseen footage from the period of the cultural revolution.
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The Chinese have come up with a unique way of reforming naughty children or bad students. They're sent to 'walking school' and forced to march up to 800 km across the country.
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The Death Penalty in China is increasingly prescribed as a panacea for social ills. Prisoners with death sentences are paraded through the streets with placards advertising their crimes. We profile Muslims, Christians and artists who have suffered discrimination, intimidation and torture. Tang Boqiao fled after the Tiananmen Square massacre. A former PSB (Public Security Bureau) officer reveals that many policemen use electric batons to inflict maximum misery. In court, lawyers have inadequate time to prepare a defence for their clients. A lawyer speaks out against a legal system with a conviction rate of well over 90%. While foreign companies enjoy cheap labour, Chinese workers have few civil rights. If they complain, they are dispatched to bleak labour camps where they undergo 're-education'. Even foreign businessmen are vulnerable. James Peng was sentenced to 17 years after he argued with his Chinese partner. His fate highlights the dangers of dealing with a country that has little respect for individual life.
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Rapid economic development and population growth are putting severe pressure on water resources in the People's Republic of China. This DVD features Shanghai, Gansu Province, and the Yellow River basin as models of PRC's commitment to developing its water sector. Investments in rural and urban water services and in river basin management are underway.
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In one of the few times in its 5,000-year history, the oldest, most populous nation on earth has opened its doors to the rest of the world. Coupling insightful storytelling with spectacular and groundbreaking photographic techniques, Discovery Atlas: China Revealed brings to life the fascinating and complex contemporary life of this extraordinary country. In today's China, the economics of feudalism and communism are out, while capitalism is in... with a Chinese twist. Old walls are being torn down, and a futuristic landscape of glass and steel is shooting up in their place.
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Younger Tibetans are becoming increasingly frustrated by the Dalai Lama's message of peaceful resistance. They believe it brings them no closer to freeing their homeland.
"I'm calling upon Tibetans to go inside China and sabotage their economic structure," proclaims campaigner Lhasang Tsering. "If we don't struggle for independence, the Chinese won't give us our freedom." Like many, she's angered by the Dalai Lama's policy of pursuing autonomy not independence. Taking inspiration from the Khampa Warriors, Tibetan fighters who battled the Chinese, younger campaigners are switching to more militant tactics. As one states: "After the US occupied Iraq, the people rose up. Do we have to do this? That's what we have to think about."
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Problems with quality control in China have resulted in unsafe products being imported all over the world. CNN's John Vause special exposes medicine from China that kills, lack of control over product quality and problems with Chinese imports in Europe and the US. 60% of recalls in the US are products made in China.
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Mardi Gras: Made in China follows the "bead trail" from the factory in China to Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras, poignantly exposing the inequities of globalization. First-time director David Redmon cleverly illuminates the clash of cultures by juxtaposing American excess and consumer culture against the harsh life of the Chinese factory worker.
The film confronts both cultural and economic globalism by humanizing the commodity chain from China to the United States. Redmon follows the stories of four teenage women workers in the largest Mardi Gras bead factory in the world, providing insights into their economic realities, self-sacrifice, and dreams of a better life, and the severe discipline imposed by living and working in a factory compound.
A beautiful historical exposé on the path China took away from God. It is a story reflective of every nation on earth today! For China knew the One True God for the first 2500 years of her 5000-year history. For the last 2500 years they have turned away from what they had known at first.
Narrated in Mandarin Chinese, subtitled in English.
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The first film by an American in China following the Communist victory in 1949. In 1957, after serving in the US Army at NATO Supreme Headquarters in Paris, Robert Carl Cohen was working for the Doctorate in Social Psychology at the Sorbonne when, defying the US State Department's "travel ban," he traveled across Siberia to film throughout China for NBC-TV. His reports were televised on the "Huntley News" & the "Today Show."
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The SARS epidemic may be an early test of the ability of medical science to respond to a swiftly spreading, globalized infectious malady. Frontline/World follows one distinguished researcher to Hong Kong, and China, as he scrambles to help his colleagues around the world grapple with SARS.
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The spring of 1989 saw the largest pro-democracy demonstration in the history of China's communist regime. The following timeline tracks how the protests began in April among university students in Beijing, spread across the nation, and ended on June 4 with a final deadly assault by an estimated force of 300,000 soldiers from People's Liberation Army (PLA). Throughout these weeks, China's top leaders were deeply divided over how to handle the unrest, with one faction advocating peaceful negotiation and another demanding a crackdown. Excerpts from their statements, drawn from The Tiananmen Papers, reveal these internal divisions.
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Ten years in the making, this award-winning feature-length documentary was filmed during nine journeys throughout Tibet, India and Nepal. Cry of the Snow Lion brings audiences to the long-forbidden "rooftop of the world" with an unprecedented richness of imagery... from rarely-seen rituals in remote monasteries, to horse races with Khamba warriors; from brothels and slums in the holy city of Lhasa, to magnificent Himalayan peaks still traveled by nomadic yak caravans. The dark secrets of Tibet's recent past are powerfully chronicled through personal stories and interviews, and a collection of undercover and archival images never before assembled in one film. A definitive exploration of a legendary subject, Cry of the Snow Lion is an epic story of courage and compassion.
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Twelve hundred years ago the people of Tibet developed a comprehensive medical system. They understood how the mind affects the body. They knew subtle ways of changing the body's chemistry with medicines made from plants and minerals. They blessed their medicines in lengthy rituals. And they encoded this knowledge in a series of elaborate paintings called thangkas.
Blue Buddha: Lost Secrets of Tibetan Medicine traces the odyssey of traditional Tibetan medicine from it's roots in ancient Tibet, to a worldwide interest in it's traditional medical wisdom. We meet several leading physicians in India, as the program introduces us to the basic concepts of this ancient system of healing. We also trace the fate of the 77 thangkas that comprise the Atlas of Tibetan Medicine, the great mnemonic device that encodes the entire system of healing. From the snows of Siberia and the Himalayas to the vital culture of Tibet in exile, in Dharamsala, India, this is a stunning high-definition look at where Tibetan medicine has come from.
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This documentary film follows the lives and practices of Yogis in Tibet, people who have spent their lives in rigorous and secret training in order to gain the ability to exert control over their bodies and minds. Living exceptionally isolated lives, Yogis have been relatively unstudied by outsiders in the past.
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(streaming audio & video)
"When the sleeping dragon awakes," Napoleon once said of China, "he will shake the world." In the 20th century, multiple upheavals shook the Asian giant. The rule of emperors gave way to civil war and the Communist revolution, closing China to the world. The doors slowly opened in the 1970s with new diplomatic ties and economic reforms. The crackdown on democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989 barely checked China's growth, and today the world's most populous nation is on its way to superpower status. CBC Archives presents China as CBC journalists have seen it over the decades.
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It started out as China's answer to Woodstock, but it ended like Kent State. Here, using unseen footage and declassified diplomatic sources, we present a previously shrouded story of the battles and deaths of hundreds of young Chinese students in June 1989 -- martyrs for democracy at Tiananmen Square--and the imprisonment of many others. Watch the birth and death of a movement, and learn how the demonstrators changed China forever.
Mao was the 20th Century's answer to Napoleon: a brilliant tactician, a political and economic theorist, and a statesman who ruled a billion people for three decades. In death, he has become divine, worshiped as a god in a godless country. Considering who and what he ruled, Mao, with his Little Red Book, might just be the single most powerful human being who ever lived. We mine formerly guarded vaults and archives to reveal untold stories in a relentless search for the truth behind the legend.
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Filmed over the course of three turbulent years, "China in the Red" is a two-hour documentary that tells the stories of 10 Chinese individuals -- factory workers, rural villagers, and a millionaire entrepreneur -- caught up in China's dramatic, ongoing effort to modernize its economy. Through their intimate personal stories, camera work capturing the unique feel of their cities and homes, and with a soundtrack that includes Chinese rock music reflecting the rawness and energy of a nation in great flux, "China in the Red" offers a view of China that is rarely seen in the West.
"People in the West tend to view China as an impenetrable, alien culture, but we have far more in common than most people think," says producer/director Sue Williams in a behind-the-film interview. "We wanted to show this and the huge changes taking place in China by filming ordinary Chinese citizens over a period of years. And almost everyone we asked agreed to open their homes and their lives and share their stories."
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I first heard about China's independent film movement in 2000, when the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis held a special screening of Jia Zhangke's film Platform. I had spent a semester studying in Beijing a few years earlier and was itching to go back to China any way I could. So I bought a ticket and settled into a seat at the back of the theater, hoping to ease my wanderlust with a cinematic journey.
It took a few scenes before my American eyes, accustomed to the fast pace of MTV-style editing, adjusted to the rhythm of Jia's filmmaking. Each take lasted a minute or more, with the camera holding steady while events and conversations unfolded. It felt more like a documentary than a feature film.
But soon I was wrapped up in Jia's story of the Peasant Culture Group from Fenyang, a troupe of musicians and dancers traveling from village to village in the central Chinese province of Shanxi. The film follows the troupe through the 1980s, a decade of great change in China as economic reforms loosened the government's grip on society and allowed capitalistic influences to slowly spread across the country.
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Frontline/World reporter Serene Fang visits a remote Chinese province, Xinjiang, to investigate growing tensions between the government and the Muslim people known as the Uighurs. Her clandestine interview with a Uighur man turns into a reporter's nightmare when Chinese authorities arrest Fang and her source, confiscate her videotape, interrogate her for 24 hours, and take the Uighur man away to an unknown fate. In her story, Fang reveals the name of the man in an effort to bring attention to his plight.
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The neon lights of modern-day Shanghai are so bright that you can wear sunglasses even in the darkest hour of night: The city, the largest and wealthiest in China, has changed enormously in recent years. Frontline/World reporter Nguyen Qui Duc, a native of Vietnam, is no stranger to the changing face of communism. And he has come to Shanghai because he has heard that young people, especially artists, are no longer accepting the old rules. He wants to see how far they've been able to push the limits.
For a guide, Duc turns to one of China's most celebrated young writers, Mian Mian, who has offered to take him inside her world, the youth underground of Shanghai. Government censors call Mian Mian "a poster child for spiritual pollution," but inside the city's nightclubs, she's a pop diva, queen of the clubs. She's notorious for writing openly about sex, drugs, and rock and roll -- still touchy subjects in China. The government banned her novel, Candy, which only made the "bad girl of Shanghai" more famous and her novel a clandestine best-seller.
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They live crowded together in factory dormitories where water has to be carried upstairs in buckets. Their meals and rent are deducted from their wages, which amount to less than a dollar a day. Most of the jeans they make in the factory are purchased by retailers in the U.S. and other countries. China Blue takes viewers inside a blue jeans factory in southern China, where teenage workers struggle to survive harsh working conditions. Providing perspectives from both the top and bottom levels of the factory’s hierarchy, the film looks at complex issues of globalization from the human level.
The film which was made without permission from the Chinese authorities, offers an alarming report on the economic pressures applied by Western companies and the resulting human consequences, as the real profits are made - and kept - in first-world countries. The unexpected ending makes the connection between the exploited workers and U.S. consumers even clearer.
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(streaming video)
Newshour correspondent Paul Solman traveled to China in the summer of 2005 to produce a seven-part series on the Asian nation's rise as a global economic contender and America's anxiety that China will overtake the United States as a superpower in the 21st century.
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Poised to surpass the United States as the largest economy in the world, yet facing mounting domestic and international pressure for a fair and transparent framework of laws, China is racing to reshape the rules of society. In the past quarter century, the country has opened nearly 400 law schools, trained hundreds of thousands of judges and lawyers, and launched education campaigns to encourage people to bring their grievances to court rather than taking to the streets. But the transformation is incomplete and the judiciary far from independent. Senior judges are appointed by, take orders from, and receive their paychecks from the one-party state. Hundreds of Chinese lawyers have been jailed in recent years while citizens are taking to the streets in record numbers to protest land seizures, corruption, pollution, or unpaid wages. And China executes more prisoners each year than the rest of the world combined.
WIDE ANGLE gained exclusive access to film in Chinese courts - a first for a Western documentary. Profiling itinerant judges, law students, a human rights lawyer, and ordinary citizens, The People's Court examines China in flux, revealing the lengths to which Chinese people must go to obtain justice and raising crucial questions about their emerging system of law.
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Definitive, insightful and unforgettable -- China: A Century Of Revolution is an astonishingly candid view of a once-secret nation. This powerful program takes a remarkable first-hand look at China's tumultuous history, examining its social, political and cultural upheaval through eyewitness accounts, rare archival film footage and insightful commentary.
Part One: China in Revolution
China In Revolution begins in 1911 with the fall of the last emperor and continues through 1949, highlighting four decades of civil war, foreign invasion and the ascension of rival leaders Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. Rarely seen photos and film footage - among the earliest ever recorded in China - reveal fascinating details of a long-censored history, Hear the facts and meet the people who experienced modern China's most violent era.
Part Two: The Mao Years
From the beginning of his rule in 1949 to his death in 1976, Mao Zedong and his colleagues attempted to forge a "new China" from a country mired in poverty and devastated by decades of war. Yet the Mao years would bring the new Peopl's Republic of China little stability. Rare interviews with Communist Party members and ordinary citizens involved with history's largest political experiment, reveal the turbulence, famine, violent campaigns and purges which destroyed the lives of more than one hundred million people.
Part Three: Born Under the Red Flag
Born Under The Red Flag begins with Mao's death in 1976, continues with the new leadership of Deng Xiaoping, and concludes with the struggle of China's paradoxical goals of economic prosperity and absolute Communist Party control. In the short span of 15 years, China transformed itself into a never-before-seen hybrid of communism and capitalism. And although it has become the third largest economy in the world, the price has been high. Rare interviews and film footage highlight the Democracy Wall Movement, the establishment of Special Economic Zones and the dramatic student protests in Tiananmen Square.
In April 2004, Shi Tao was attending an internal meeting at work. His upper management verbally informed everyone of a publication just received from the Office of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. It was, essentially, a directive on how they should go about reporting the upcoming fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Shi Tao made notes in the meeting and then sent an email - through his Yahoo account - to a friend at a web-magazine called Democracy Newsletter. His intent? He simply wanted to warn overseas democratic movement activists not to go back to China around that time to prevent their arrests.
Seven days later Shi Tao himself was arrested. April 27, 2005, Shi Tao was sentenced to ten years in prison for "illegally leaking state secrets abroad." Unfortunately, this was a typical sentence in a typical case. Like many intellectuals who had been given criminal sentences because of what they said, Shi Tao, 37 years old, may have, more or less been mentally prepared for this outcome. However, little could this journalist have imagined that one of the hands that had thrown him into prison was a company that he had relied on for years in his efforts to create political change - the US headquartered technology company, Yahoo!
So what exactly were the circumstances surrounding his arrest? And just what part do companies like Yahoo play in China's efforts in maintaining a tight control over their dictatorship?
Download (in 2 parts):We will hear testimonies from individuals who have recently stepped forward to describe the workings of a secret operation in China - organ harvesting. Two informants have stepped forward and revealed that the Sujiatun Extermination Camp has been harvesting internal organs from living Falun Gong practitioners and then disposing their bodies in a crematorium.
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Chongqing, a city of almost 20 million, is expected to grow by another 20 million in the next 10 years. Mr. Wu is the Deputy Mayor of Chongqing. His goal is to house the 30 million inhabitants of his city. Mr. Wu is in charge of developing the world's largest building site, a boom city which absorbs 200,000 migrant workers each year. Chongqing's challenge, like for the rest of China, is to develop every sector simultaneously: real estate, education, research, advertising, fashion, culture, healthcare, new technologies, as well as the struggle against pollution and social inequalities.
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Little known outside China, Chongqing is the world's fastest growing city. The government is spending billions building its infrastructure. But, as this edition of Unreported World reveals, China's economic boom comes at the expense of tens of millions of workers and dispossessed farmers.
Forty kilometres outside Chongqing, Reporter Ramita Navai and Director Nick Sturdee begin their journey amongst the cranes, new buildings and construction work that stretch for as far as the eye can see. Over the last seven years, the Government has spent a staggering 114 billion pounds on roads, bridges and dams to turn an area two thirds the size of England into a vast transport and manufacturing hub at the centre of the country.
Chongqing is being built on the back of migrant labor. More than fifty per cent of the city's population are migrants and half a million new laborers are drawn to it every year. But, as Unreported World highlights, these migrants are forced to endure years of cramped living conditions with no employment rights at all.
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This PBS documentary examines some of the major challenges facing contemporary Chinese society.
Episode 1, "Power and the People," focuses on the Communist Party's rule of China. Topics include government opposition to separatism in the heavily Muslim province of Xinjiang; the Party's efforts to create a prosperous society; the governance of Tibet; the National People's Congress, which puts the Party's decisions into action; the election of a village committee; and corruption in the Party.
Episode 2, "Women of the Country," focuses on the difficulties faced by Chinese women, especially in rural areas (where two-thirds of China's population lives). The episode examines birth planning, marriage, women who live in the country while their husbands work in the city, women in Tibet, the hopelessness of many young women in China, the Muslim women of Xinjiang, and the opportunities and hardships for women in cities.
Episode 3, "Shifting Nature," focuses on pollution brought on by rapid industrialization and on massive water diversion projects that involve resettling the populations of entire towns.
Episode 4, "Freedom and Justice," examines the limits on religious and political freedom of the press, AIDS deaths that the government could have prevented, the displacement of poor people by land "development," and the justice system.
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Episode 1, "Party Games," looks at the complex story of politics in China as it gets ready for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Three extras ripped -- includes a great 10 min doc on "The Great Wall(s) of China", a short look at the 60s Cultural Revolution from that time, and a contemporary travelogue of China.
Episode 2, "Getting Rich." As China has abandoned communistic collectivism, it has grown faster in the last few years than any nation in history -- but at what cost? Shanghai has more new skyscrapers than any other city in the world, but 75% of China's population still lives a rural life, in relative poverty.
Episode 3, "Food Is Heaven." From the steamy kitchens of Canton to the arid monoscape of the north, food is in some respects the very heart and soul of China. But increasing development, some of the world's worst pollution, and dwindling water supplies are threatening China's ability to feed itself. Extras include a short film on "The Forbidden City" and a slide show of beautiful photographs of modern China.
Episode 4, "City of Dreams." In the streets and neighbourhoods of Shanghai, a new dream of China is being turned into reality. A generation of Chinese now live in a style akin to New York, Berlin or Toronto. But for its poorer residents, Shanghai can be a city of despair.
