Recently, a Chinese blogger compiled and released a list of “documentary films buried for being too real”, including 32 works focusing on grassroots realities such as “The Petition”. The video was quickly deleted after spreading on social media. The list has circulated in the cultural circle, sparking discussions and once again touching on the long-standing issue of the Chinese Communist Party’s suppression of real documentary footage.
During an interview with Epoch Times, a film producer in Songzhuang, Beijing, known as Yu Tu, said, “The creative environment in China is very harsh. We have produced many documentaries reflecting the real situation in China, the lives of ordinary people, but every time we submit these works for approval, they are rejected. They (the authorities) want to control everything. Last year, many documentaries produced by independent filmmakers were banned.”
Yu Tu mentioned that these banned documentaries had already passed the review by the Chinese State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television, and some had even entered the distribution stage. Some filmmakers received notifications before release: “They suddenly notify you that this film cannot be aired. We invest tens of thousands, even millions of yuan to make a documentary, they approve it, but after it’s done, they claim the topic is sensitive and cannot be released for the time being. This is just absurd.”
According to the list, the works span nearly three decades, covering topics such as migrant workers, silicosis patients, grassroots law enforcement, migrant populations, historical trauma, including documentaries like “The Three Market”, “The Last Stick”, “Tie Xi District”, “The Petition”, “Cha Guan”, “Human World”, “Please Vote for Me”. Most of these works have been showcased at film festivals or distributed in limited circles, but have struggled to be publicly displayed in mainland China.
Li Hua, a documentary filmmaker in Beijing, told reporters, “This is not an issue of individual works, but a systematic purge of a genre. As long as the camera captures the real life of ordinary people, it is difficult to exist for long.” “The commonality among these buried documentaries is not their ‘sensitivity’, but their recording of reality piece by piece. Once these images are viewed by the system, they will conflict with the official narrative.”
The 32 works publicly listed by the blogger showcase the deliberately avoided side of the authorities. For example, “The Three Market”, a joint production between NHK and Chinese filmmakers, chronicles the daily lives of a group of daily wage workers in Shenzhen, portraying the constant ebb and flow of young labor on the outskirts of the city. “So Working for 30 Years” depicts elderly migrant workers waiting for odd jobs on the streets before dawn. These works vary in subject matter, but all touch upon the same boundary: when reality exceeds the official explanation, documenting reality itself becomes a risk.
Director Zhao Liang’s independent documentary “The Petition” is a landmark work in the history of Chinese independent documentaries. The film, spanning 12 years (1996 to 2008), followed a group of petitioners in Beijing “petition village”, fully documenting their journey from local grievances to rights defense in Beijing, continuous petitions, intercepts, and further petitions, presenting the plight of the grassroots in long-term rights defense without subjective judgment.
Peng Huan pointed out, “The authorities do not want the people to see the hidden side, as it involves the fundamental issue of power legitimacy. In a system lacking open competition and popular mandate, any real record of systematic failures ultimately questions the foundation of governance: does power serve to solve problems or to maintain stability? When real reality is systematically erased, the legitimacy of power loses its realistic basis.”
Similarly, there are “Cha Guan” produced by Zhou Hao, showcasing how grassroots power deals with social conflicts through the daily scenes of a police station; and “Though I Am Gone” by Hu Jie, tracing early cases of the Cultural Revolution, touching the boundaries of official historical narratives.
Currently, the related content introducing the forbidden documentary list has been deleted from the Chinese internet. Mr. Fang, a scholar researching online content censorship, told reporters, “The information control by the Chinese Communist Party has shifted from ‘deleting individual content’ to ‘blocking types of dissemination’. The issue with documentaries is that once they form a sequence, they constitute systematic cognition.”
He said that the emergence and swift disappearance of the list of 32 documentaries indicate that under an authoritarian system, when reality cannot be completely denied, the authorities choose to suppress the recording of reality. In an environment that cannot accommodate true records, images themselves are perceived as threats.