Lately I’ve been meaning to write a piece about my involvement in documentaries in China—not the films that I myself make, but ones that I’ve been asked to host. Now it appears that there is even more of a demand for foreign experts like me to host or participate in documentaries made by Chinese production companies. China wants to get its stories out to the world and tell them in ways that are engaging to international audiences, while also meeting the approval of the powers that be. So far I’ve had a good experience with the docs I’ve been asked to host, and now it seems there may be more opportunities for me to do so in the future.
My first experience with a Chinese documentary project was in 2015, when people from my wife’s TV station ICS (she works there as a presenter) asked me if I’d like to host a documentary about wartime Shanghai. The film was directed by Wang Xiangtao 王向韬 also known as David. Born and raised in Shanghai, Dir. Wang was educated abroad in Australia and he is a very good researcher and writer as well as a director. Together we made the film “World War at my Doorsteps” 战火围城，(click and scroll down to see the film) which focuses on two stories. One was the story of a German Jewish wartime refugee named Ernest Heppner, who spent several years in Shanghai, ending up in the ghetto in Hongkou set up under the Japanese occupation in the 1940s. He later wrote a memoir about the experience, long after he and his wife, whom he met in Shanghai, emigrated to the USA.
The other story in the film was about the American journalist J.B. Powell, who served as editor of the China Weekly Review in the 1920s-1940s, and was well-known for his anti-Japanese stance, which landed him in the infamous Bridge House in the 1940s. Like so many others who were sent there, he barely escaped with his life. A third story was going to focus on the Jesuit Father Jaquinot and his effort to build a safety zone in the old Chinese city area, but it turned out there wasn’t room for that story in the film. Despite the harrowing stories that we told about Shanghai in the wartime era, it was a pleasure making this film. I enjoyed working with Dir. David Wang and with the crew as we filmed on location in various key sites in Shanghai, including the Post Office Building, Suzhou River near the Embankment Building, the Park Hotel and others.
In 2018, I was approached by people from the Jiangsu TV station in Nanjing to host a series of six episodes of a documentary project about the infamous Nanjing Massacre of 1937. The series “Dark Time: We Were in Nanjing” 黑暗时刻：我们在南京 focuses on the stories of several foreigners living in or nearby Nanjing at the time, who tried to help Chinese people in the city during this horrific episode of violence. The most well-known among them was John Rabe, the “Schindler of Nanjing”; his story has already been told, and we focused on some of the lesser-known people, including journalists, doctors, missionaries, businessmen, and educators, who bravely stayed in Nanjing during the height of the massacre.
This was a much bigger and well-budgeted program with several directors and a large crew of around 25 people. For this series, we filmed on sites all over Nanjing, including the former homes of John Rabe and Pearl Buck, as well as the Qixia Temple and a factory site in the mountains. The crew also used a drone to capture scenes from the air including at the wall of the city, on the Yangtze River, and above the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum.
Filming on location in Nanjing
The biggest challenge for me was delivering all my lines in English and in Chinese. In the end, they were able to use the English version for the series which first aired that December, but it was certainly good practice for me to memorize all those lines in Chinese. As with the previous film I participated in, this series was already scripted, and so my role was more as a reader and occasionally an editor than a creator of the content. Nevertheless I enjoyed this role and learned a great deal about the details and the backgrounds of the people we focused on for the series. It is still hard for me to watch some of these episodes since this was such a singularly horrifying event in that terrible war, but I think it was very well done and delivered in a way that didn’t shirk from the grim realities.
Posing atop a building on the Bund with the film crew of our series about Shanghai in 1949
More recently, in spring 2021, Director David Wang once again approached me with another wartime project: 《百年大党——老外讲故事》“上海解放特辑”（ Witness a New Dawn). This time the story was about the takeover of Shanghai in 1949 by the Communists and the People’s Liberation Army. David had recently published a book “Shangahi 1949” about the coverage by foreign journalists of this enormous event in the history of the city, and as a Shanghai historian, I was very interested in the project.
Dir. David Wang giving me some instructions during our filming on site at the Yangshupu Power Plant
Rather than making one longer film, they decided to make six five-minute episodes. Each episode reveals one facet of the event, which would then travel more easily on the internet. Once again, we filmed in many locations, including atop several famous landmark buildings along the Bund and Suzhou River, and at the Yangshupu Power Plant upriver from the Bund. The timing was tight, since the series was meant to be released on May 27, the date that the PLA secured the takeover of Shanghai in 1949. As someone once said, and the rest was history!
Here’s where you can see the episode, each is around 5 minutes long and they are in English:
第一集《解放》 Episode 1: Liberation
第二集《旧上海的末日》Episode 2: The Last Days of Old Shanghai
第三集《“紫石英号”事件》Episode 3: The Amethyst Incident
第四集《为了光明的上海》Episode 4: For the Glory of Shanghai
第五集《第一印象》Episode 5: First Impressions
第六集《上海的新生》Episode 6: The New Birth of Shanghai
While this series is somewhat heavy-handed in its emphasis on this historic moment, it was quite an experience hosting the series and I think the results are pretty stunning, especially since the crew used a drone to capture scenes of the cityscapes from the air. I always learn a great deal about the art and science of filmmaking while working with the Chinese film crews, who are the epitome of professionalism.
Since joining a group of documentary filmmakers on a tour of some of the old Silk Road sites of Dunhuang and Xi’an last month, other opportunities for collaborations are now opening up for me, and I hope to engage in more doc film projects in the future. I also hope that I can contribute my own expertise in the storytelling. China needs to find more ways to tell the big stories about this country and its long and complex history, and the people and government of China are eager to do so. As a long-term resident of China, having lived here most of my adult life now, I’m happy to contribute to these projects as long as I feel that the stories are genuine and truthful and not too laden with the baggage of contemporary politics. But of course that can sometimes be hard to avoid, particularly in the current moment as we celebrate a century of the Communist Party of China.