Tradition, values, money, poverty, sex, alcohol, fashion, prostitution, marriage ... karaoke.
Welcome to the new China, according to the Discovery Channel's new documentary film, "The People's Republic Of Capitalism."
James Blue, producer for the Discovery Channel's Koppel on Discovery Program and the writer and producer of episode 2, "From Mao-ism to Me-ism," opened the 2nd Annual Salzburg Academy on Media Global Change yesterday afternoon with a sometimes self-effacing and sometimes very serious contextualization of his career, his path to journalism’s highest ranks, and the critical role that journalists play in contextualizing news and of telling “the story taking place around the story.”
A self-described "accidental journalist," Blue's most recent project, The People's Republic of Capitalism, took Discovery more than a year to conceive, 8 months to film in China, and another 8 months to cut and edit. According to Blue, Discovery wanted to do "something big," and there is no bigger story today than the reemergence China, how it is happening, and where the untold stories around the story can be found.
The People's Republic of Capitalism takes place entirely outside of China's most well known cities, Beijing and Shanghai, where most of the reportage surrounding China is focused. Instead, Discovery's team filmed in areas like Chongqing, "the largest Chinese city you've never heard of," says Blue, where a more nuanced understanding of China and China's role in the current global economic landscape can be found.
The People's Republic of Capitalism set out to depict a more accurate and nuanced perspective of China, its role in the global economy, and its own internal struggles as morality, modernity, tradition, and values collide and change. The documentary opens, iu fact, in the tobacco and cotton fields of North Carolina, where agricultural products are produced not for sale in the Mall of America, but in places Chongqing, where the immense purchasing power of the growing Chinese middle class is upending the traditional paradigm of “made in China, consumed in the US.” In fact, as Blue stressed, a key component of the People’s Republic of Capitalism was to show evidence of the nearly complete economic intersection of China and the US, to illustrate that the two economies are “joined at the hip”, and to suggest that despite the political controversies in the US and the protectionist rhetoric of the electoral political season, a strong China is a stable China and a strong China is a preferable China.
“From Mao-ism to Me-ism” opens with a fast paced collage of cityscapes, modern brightly lit cities, up-tempo techno-pulse musical beats, and a picture of Mao on a $100 bill. It’s designed to juxtapose tradition with change, the cultural revolution of Mao’s time with the urban development of contemporary Chinese nouveau-cosmopolitanism, and the still thick red line between increasing social dynamism and open political expression.
For Blue, and for the 59 students and 16 faculty members representing 15 countries and 13 institutions (including 8 from China), the opening message for the 2008 Academy seems clear. The task of the journalist, as reflected in the People’s Republic of Capitalism, is to cut through the ever-present dichotomy of covering the details of important events and discovering their larger meaning – in other words, the fundmanetal goal of not just reporting on event themselves, but providing the context, the subtlety, and the story around the story. In one scene in “From Mao-ism to Me-ism”, a scene that depicts the dimly lit underbelly of after-hour nightclubs in Chungching, the 25 year nightclub manager proudly remarks that “many wheels are greased at karaoke clubs in China.” The karaoke clubs are where money is spent, deals are made, and where the shifting traditions of Chinese society are being remade. It is only appropriate, therefore, that the Academy on Media and Global Change would open with an intellectual wheel greasing of its own, and a contextualization of one of the biggest world changing stories of our age by one of the most well respected TV news producers working today.
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