Rachel Briggs
Director, Hostage UK
Rachel Briggs is Director of Hostage UK, a charity chaired by Terry Waite. It aims to provide support and practical help to the families of hostages and the hostages upon release, and also offers educational services to organisations sending employees to work in kidnap hot spots. For more information, see www.hostageuk.org Rachel runs Hostage UK part-time, and spends the rest of her time as a visiting fellow of UCL where she conducts research on radicalisation. She is also a freelance...
at 9:12am on Friday, 13th October 2006
Shan Song is an underground film maker in Beijing. By day he writes scripts for government-produced TV dramas, by night he makes films through a collective he set up after film school called 22Film. Sam and I met him yesterday to talk about the ways in which independent film making is bringing about social change in China.
The advent of digital cameras and the internet has enabled a generation of young people to make films about themselves, how they live and where they want China to go. They go by the name of '6th generation' film makers. Film is the new poetry, it seems; a way to express yourself and make a statement, although very few of these films ever gets properly produced. This is radical stuff in a country like China, where identity is very centrally 'produced' and where people don't tend to feel too comfortable expressing themselves in public.
But while sites such as YouTube have made this trend widespread in the West, the majority of Chinese still live in rural areas so have very limited access to digital technology or the internet. This technologically-dependent form of cultural expression is therefore leading to disjointed social change and a widening of the gap between urban and rural.
This is important; most of the people we have spoken to so far say that one of the biggest risks to China's development is a stand-off between the cities and the countryside. If rural China does not feel it is benefiting from the country's meteoric rise, there is a danger it will rebel, as it has in the past.
As we left, Shan introduced us to two of 22Film's members, who were editing a film made in an area a few hundred kilometres outside of Beijing. The contrast with the massive, busy and loud city we are staying in couldn't have been starker. A timely reminder of the other face of China.
The advent of digital cameras and the internet has enabled a generation of young people to make films about themselves, how they live and where they want China to go. They go by the name of '6th generation' film makers. Film is the new poetry, it seems; a way to express yourself and make a statement, although very few of these films ever gets properly produced. This is radical stuff in a country like China, where identity is very centrally 'produced' and where people don't tend to feel too comfortable expressing themselves in public.
But while sites such as YouTube have made this trend widespread in the West, the majority of Chinese still live in rural areas so have very limited access to digital technology or the internet. This technologically-dependent form of cultural expression is therefore leading to disjointed social change and a widening of the gap between urban and rural.
This is important; most of the people we have spoken to so far say that one of the biggest risks to China's development is a stand-off between the cities and the countryside. If rural China does not feel it is benefiting from the country's meteoric rise, there is a danger it will rebel, as it has in the past.
As we left, Shan introduced us to two of 22Film's members, who were editing a film made in an area a few hundred kilometres outside of Beijing. The contrast with the massive, busy and loud city we are staying in couldn't have been starker. A timely reminder of the other face of China.
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