Alternative visions, alternative publics: contemporary independent Chinese documentary as a public sphere

China’s independent documentaries – films produced outside the country’s official state-sanctioned production channels – have been rewriting the rules regarding what can and cannot be shown of China’s contemporary reality on screen for over two decades. Most academic literature, however, has focused on the first wave of independent documentaries made in the early to mid-1990s by former television workers such as Wu Wenguang and Duan Jinchuan. This thesis instead focuses on the independent documentaries that have been produced since the arrival of digital technologies on the Chinese mainland from the late 1990s, by filmmakers such as Ou Ning, Hu Jie, Ai Xiaoming and Zhao Liang. It argues that since the turn of this century, digital technologies have facilitated the rise of an unofficial screening culture in China and a socially engaged strand of independent documentaries that seek to represent grassroots experiences of China’s contemporary reality on screen. Drawing on the work of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, this thesis conceptualises China’s independent documentary culture as an alternative public sphere in which ideas, values and experiences can be represented and circulated that are systematically excluded from the official public sphere of film and television overseen by the party-state. In order to explicate this conceptual framework, this thesis commences with an analysis of the workings of China’s official public sphere. It argues that since the early 1990s, the Chinese party-state has attempted to move away from a heavy reliance on coercion to maintain one-party rule and has instead tried to engineer a particular form of authoritarian hegemony. A central aspect of this hegemonic strategy is the shaping of public discourse in order to propagate certain sanctioned ideas and viewpoints to the widest possible audience, while marginalising or completing suppressing the dissemination of others. It is this state-sanctioned public discourse circulated through the official public sphere that China’s socially engaged independent documentaries question, probe and contest. The main body of this thesis substantiates this argument through a close textual analysis of a range of contemporary independent Chinese documentaries, that engage with a variety of prominent social issues such as urban redevelopment, the representation and memorialisation of history, the spread of HIV/AIDS, the rule of law and debates around morals and ethics. These analyses detail the various ways in which independent documentaries contest state-sanctioned public discourse through both their form and content. The social impact of these films and their dissemination via unofficial channels is also analysed, as well as the ways in which they intersect with other forms of unofficial public discourse in today’s China, especially in the online realm. Through the conceptualisation of various official and unofficial public spheres in contemporary China, and the role of independent documentary culture in the country’s unofficial public culture, this thesis will greatly enhance scholarly understandings of China’s independent documentary cinema, the politicised nature of “publicness” in today’s China, and the particular political role these films are playing within China’s distinctive social, economic and political context.