China (economy, society, politics, relations to other nations etc.)

[Pox]

On 08/04/2025 at 4:30 AM, PurpleTree said:

Imagine what cool art, movies, ideas etc. could come out of China if there was more freedom.

It still exists, just not as well known.

Check out these directors(list made with ChatGPT), it’s not Taiwanese or Hong Kong cinema:

1. Hu Bo(胡波)

Key Work: An Elephant Sitting Still (2018)

A poetic, bleak, and profound vision of existence in a spiritually hollowed-out world.

Core Themes: Alienation, despair, invisible resistance, moral inertia.

Style: Long takes, minimal dialogue, maximal weight.

Spiritual Kin: Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang.

If he had lived, he might have been the definitive Chinese auteur of the 21st century.

 

2. Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯)

Key Works: Still Life (2006), Platform (2000), A Touch of Sin (2013)

Why He’s On the List: Perhaps the greatest chronicler of China’s modern soul. His films subtly—but powerfully—capture the spiritual and cultural erosion under CCP-led modernization.

Core Themes: Displacement, time, memory, erasure, violence beneath the surface.

Style: Slow, meditative, rich in symbolism and documentary-like realism.

Rebellion Level: A Touch of Sin was censored and banned—it was too raw.

Spiritual Kin: Antonioni, Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien.

He speaks softly, but his silence cuts deeper than most shouts.

 

3. Wang Bing (王兵)

Key Works: Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003), Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007), The Ditch (2010)

Why He’s On the List: The archivist of China’s forgotten souls. His documentaries and narrative films explore repression, labor camps, the death of memory, and state dehumanization.

Core Themes: Totalitarian trauma, truth without embellishment, economic decay.

Style: Long-form documentary realism, unflinching.

Rebellion Level: Extremely high—his work is suppressed and often shown only abroad.

Spiritual Kin: Claude Lanzmann, Chantal Akerman, Shoah, Béla Tarr.

If Hu Bo is a poet, Wang Bing is a prophet.

 

4. Lou Ye (娄烨)

Key Works: Suzhou River (2000), Summer Palace (2006), The Shadow Play (2018)

Why He’s On the List: A stylistically daring filmmaker whose work is visually rich and politically dangerous. Summer Palace depicted the Tiananmen Square protests—banned immediately.

Core Themes: Forbidden love, urban disillusionment, political trauma, memory.

Style: Dreamy handheld realism, nonlinear structure, sensual tension.

Rebellion Level: Banned from filmmaking multiple times.

Spiritual Kin: Wong Kar-wai, Kieslowski, Krzysztof Zanussi.

 

He uses love and longing to pierce through national amnesia.

 

 Li Yang (李杨)

Key Work: Blind Shaft (2003)

A gritty, haunting social thriller about miners who exploit CCP negligence. He exposed capitalist corruption within a “communist” system.

Core Themes: Exploitation, dehumanization, systemic rot.

Style: Documentary-influenced realism with psychological punch.

Rebellion Level: Film banned in China.

Spiritual Kin: Ken Loach, Michael Haneke, Costa-Gavras.

His cinema is a hammer to the State’s polished mask.

6. Zhang Lu (张律)

Key Works: Grain in Ear (2005), Yanagawa (2021)

Why He’s On the List: A Chinese-Korean filmmaker who brings a calm, lyrical sadness to stories of the marginalized—quietly spiritual, gently devastating.

Core Themes: Ethnic identity, loneliness, cultural limbo.

Style: Slow, delicate, soft spoken.

Rebellion Level: Subtle but radical in subject choice.

Spiritual Kin: Tsai Ming-liang, Kore-eda, Edward Yang.

He whispers with gravity—his cinema flows like still water hiding depth.

 

7. Ying Liang (应亮)

Key Work: When Night Falls (2012)

Based on a real incident of a man executed by the state, this is a direct, emotional condemnation of CCP injustice. He was forced into exile after making it.

Core Themes: Surveillance, state violence, maternal grief.

Style: Intimate, stripped-down, intensely focused.

Rebellion Level: Total. CCP threatened his family.

Spiritual Kin: Haneke, Akerman, Andrea Arnold.

He risked everything to bring the pain of one mother into the light.

 

8. Zhang Yimou (early career only)

Key Works: To Live (1994), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992)

Why He’s On the List: Before becoming a director of state spectacles (Hero, The Great Wall), Zhang made visually stunning, humanist critiques of tradition, gender, and political brutality.

Core Themes: Oppression in all forms—gender, politics, history.

Style: Rich color symbolism, operatic framing.

Rebellion Level: His early work was banned and still has bite.

Spiritual Kin: Visconti, Bergman, Chen Kaige (pre-sellout).

A visual poet turned imperial showman—his early films remain timeless.

 

Honorable Mentions

 

Li Ruijun (Return to Dust, 2022): Recent success about rural hardship; subtly critical.

Bi Gan (Long Day’s Journey Into Night, 2018): Hypnotic and formally brilliant, though less political.

Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine, 1993): Only this one film qualifies—pure tragedy, both in subject and in how far he’s fallen.

 

These film directors aren’t just “good under censorship.” They are

Philosophically driven,

Visually deliberate,

Emotionally raw,

Culturally urgent,

and Brave

 

They channel despair into poetry, silence into meaning, and censorship into coded cinematic rebellion. They make cinema that grieves, resists, and transcends.

Edited April 10 by Pox

[Pox]

I just watched “The Ditch” (夹边沟）by Wang Bing last night and I consider it a masterpiece already. Here’s some chat gpt paragraphs to introduce it:

Wang Bing’s The Ditch (Jiabiangou) is a stark and haunting work of cinematic testimony that brings to light one of the most suppressed chapters of modern Chinese history: the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s. Set in the Jiabiangou labor camp in the Gobi Desert, the film dramatizes the brutal experiences of intellectuals and perceived "rightists" condemned by Mao Zedong’s regime. These men—many of them teachers, writers, and bureaucrats—were forcibly re-educated through starvation, exposure, and death.

The historical context of the film is crucial. Following the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956, where citizens were briefly encouraged to voice criticisms of the Party, Mao swiftly retaliated with the Anti-Rightist Movement, labelling hundreds of thousands as enemies of the state. Jiabiangou became one of many sites of unrecorded human catastrophe—out of 3,000 internees, fewer than half survived. For decades, this tragedy was buried under official silence.

Wang Bing, already known for his documentary realism in works like Tie Xi Qu, took an immense risk in crafting The Ditch. Shot clandestinely in the remote deserts of western China, the film was made without state approval or funding—a radical act in itself. Its production defied China’s tightly controlled film industry, where all cinematic narratives must pass through state censors. Wang’s decision to eschew conventional dramatic arcs or emotional manipulation is both an artistic and political statement. The film's slow pace, stark visuals, and minimal dialogue reflect the dehumanization of camp life and resist the spectacle typical of state-approved historical epics.

The Chinese Communist Party’s influence looms large not just in the story but in its very suppression: the film has never been screened officially in China. The CCP’s control over artistic expression means that films confronting historical trauma—especially those implicating the Party—are silenced. Wang Bing’s commitment to unflinching realism, to bearing witness without embellishment, places The Ditch in the lineage of moral cinema, akin to Lanzmann’s Shoah or Resnais’s Night and Fog.

Why does The Ditch matter? Because it retrieves memory from enforced forgetting. It gives voice to the voiceless—not through heroism, but through the stark portrayal of endurance and decay. In an era where historical narratives are weaponized or erased, The Ditch serves as a radical act of remembrance. It is a cinematic gravestone carved for the disappeared, and a warning about what happens when ideology consumes humanity.

 

 

it’s very obscure and hard to find, so I found the best version I could from the internet and put it in a google drive to share with more people. There’s some visual defects here and there but it’s 1080p.

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/1moHdg4qLUGts2yF7E8tNEKhkP3ZFHQIT
 

there’s a mp4 file in there for the movie and a srt file for the subtitles.

[Husseinisdoingfine]

China is building a new dam. Meanwhile in America, our congress couldn't even agree on build-back-better because it was sabotaged by only two Senators.

 

[PurpleTree]

24 minutes ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

China is building a new dam. Meanwhile in America, our congress couldn't even agree on build-back-better because it was sabotaged by only two Senators.

 

That’s s the good thing about being authoritarian. High speed rails too. Things can just move much quicker.

[PurpleTree]

Although some of those dams are highly questionable.

[MarkKol]

There's no way China is not going to be the most powerful country in the next 100 years, the shit they're building over there is crazy, 2x Eiffel tower size bridges, dams, ultra-high-speed rail, EV progress. The US hasn't made anything like China has in the last 10-20 years.

They seem to have healthcare over there as well.

[PurpleTree]

17 minutes ago, MarkKol said:

There's no way China is not going to be the most powerful country in the next 100 years, the shit they're building over there is crazy, 2x Eiffel tower size bridges, dams, ultra-high-speed rail, EV progress. The US hasn't made anything like China has in the last 10-20 years.

They seem to have healthcare over there as well.

China copied Japans and Germanys high speed rail technology. We also have health care in Europe. Actually Europe is building the biggest underwater tunnel between Denmark and Germany. Woww so kewl.

 

Edited April 11 by PurpleTree

[zazen]

Interesting vid about Chinas recent rise in soft power

 

[PurpleTree]

 

[PurpleTree]

If it’s Boeing i‘m not going

 

Airbus>>>

[enchanted]

Any thoughts on this video?..makes China seem pretty good. There's no left vs right political BS for one...

 

[Breathe]

I have always found Kyle entertaining but damn, he has been killing it this last week.

[Breathe]

Money

 

[Norbert Somogyi]

A substack topic of a recent breakthrough of China's first operationalization of such Thorium Molten Salt Reactor