A hundred years later: Zou Xueping's documentaries and the legacies of China's New Culture Movement

ABSTRACT

One of the ambitious goals of the famous New Culture Movement launched in 1915 was the democratization of cultural production in China. This meant promoting independent and critical works by writers and artists of all sorts. The movement met stiff, sometimes overwhelming, resistance both before and after 1949. Since the early 1950s, socialist state-directed cultural production has dominated, but the legacies and goals of the original New Culture Movement continue to resurface. This essay locates recent efforts of Zou Xueping, a young, female, independent, documentary filmmaker, in the larger context of the century-old determination to foster the democratization of Chinese cultural production. Zou does this by returning to her home village in Shandong to explore the relationship between past and present. On the one hand, she asks very old people to remember the awful traumas of the Great Famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s, while on the other she mobilizes very young people to take direct action to confront a range of problems that plague the village in the present day. Her works asks interesting questions about how independent artists encourage the agency of their subjects and how the democratization of culture stimulates healthy debate and grassroots initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Zou Xueping
• independent documentary
• New Culture Movement
• Great Leap famine
• Caochangdi Workstation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A classic study is Chow Tse-tsung (1967).

2. Early work can be found in Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (2006), while recent approaches are contained in Dan Edwards (2015).

3. The issue of the ways in which historians understand and make use of visual culture is beautifully highlighted in James A. Cook, et al. (2014).

4. My thoughts about these two films are contained in Paul G. Pickowicz (forthcoming).

5. For detailed discussions of the nationwide famine see Frank Dikotter (2010), Cao Shuji (2005), Jasper Becker (1996) and Yang Jisheng (2012).

6. For another recent independent documentary on trash, see Wang Jiuliang's Beijing Besieged by Waste (Laji weicheng, 2010, 69 min). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W73eKAjyNXs

7. For a discussion of an explicit protest documentary see Paul G. Pickowicz (2013, 127–143).

8. For an insightful discussion that covers the activities of independent documentary filmmakers from the late 1980s to approximately 2010 and highlights the determination of many to work in daily life communities in China, see Luke Robinson (2013).

9. 5 and 9 August 2015 correspondence.

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Notes on contributors

Paul G. Pickowicz

Paul G. Pickowicz is distinguished professor of history and Chinese studies at the University of California, San Diego, and inaugural holder of the UC San Diego Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History. His books (authored, coauthored, and coedited) include Marxist Literary Thought in China (1981), Unofficial China (1989), Chinese Village, Socialist State (1992, winner of the Joseph R. Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies), New Chinese Cinemas (1994), Popular China (2002), Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (2005), From Underground to Independent (2006), The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History (2006), Dilemmas of Victory (2007), China on the Margins (2010), Radicalism, Revolution, and Reform in Modern China (2011), China on Film (2012), Restless China (2013), and Liangyou: Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis (2013). He has won three distinguished teaching awards: UC San Diego Alumni Association (1998), Chancellor's Associates (2009), and Academic Senate (2003). He is associate producer of the documentary film The Mao Years, 1949–1976 (1994).