Ai Xiaoming (b. 1953) is a feminist, public intellectual, activist and academic. She is Professor and Director of the Comparative Literature and World Literatures Section in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Zhongshan University, Guangzhou, and programme leader of the university’s Sex/Gender Education Forum.
Since the 1990s she has been active in developing women’s studies curricula and promoting women’s and gay rights. More recently, her role as activist and public intellectual has led her to documentary filmmaking. In 2003, she was translator and director of the first Chinese production of The Vagina Monologues, staged by her students as one of the activities of the Stop Domestic Violence network in China. This led to collaboration with independent documentary filmmaker, Hu Jie,1 in the making of The Vagina Monologues: Stories Behind the Scenes (2004), and her establish-ment of an independent digital video studio in 2004 which aims at empowering marginalized groups by providing media training workshops.
Since 2004, her films, produced in collaboration with Hu Jie, have been screened at festivals and universities in New York, Hong Kong, London, Malmö, and Beijing. They have included:
+ Garden in Heaven (2005), which tracks the case of Huang Jing, a primary school teacher who was found raped and murdered in her home. The documentary follows the attempts of her mother to bring the case to court following a verdict of cardiac arrest by the local coroner.
+ Taishi Village (2005). This film documents an event which became a test case both for China’s claims to democracy and of its media reporting. Taishi village lies on the edge of the wealthy city of Guangzhou. Discovering that village land had been sold to developers by the elected local committee head, villagers petitioned for his recall and the holding of fresh elections.
The film follows their efforts to secure justice, the imprisonment and beating of those who had led the petition, the arrest of the Beijing lawyers who sought to assist them, and the assaults on Ai herself.
+ The Epic of Central Plains (2006). This film follows impoverished families in rural Henan province whose exploitation by the commercial ‘blood economy’ has resulted in wholesale AIDS infection. It traces both the efforts of villagers to secure recognition, medical care and compensation, and the
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work of activists such as retired gynaecologist Dr Gao Yaojie, whose work in the prevention and treatment of AIDS among these rural communities has resulted in her house arrest.
+ Care and Love (2007) again concerns AIDS infection in China. It follows the attempts to establish a ‘Care House’ in Hebei for young people infected with the HIV virus, again through community and civil rights action. It also tracks the developing relationship between members of the Care House community, and their fight for recognition and financial support.2
Like those of other Chinese independent documentary makers, then, Ai’s films are part of a politicized ‘art of record’.3In the face of an official media news and history that seeks to erase cultural memory, her use of local memories and voices offers both a ‘counterhistory’4 and an intervention into contemporary public discourse. Like other independent filmmakers, too, she faces problems of distribution. Her intended audience is that of mainland China, but censorship and state control mean that she must rely on vulnerable internet publication or distribution among activist and academic groups. Overseas exhibition may produce a sympathetic audience, for whom her images function as ‘truths’, but for an activist interested in making radical interventions into public discourse in China, such audiences are both unsatisfactory and potentially dangerous.5
Ai is also unusual among Chinese independent documentary makers in being a feminist academic and literary scholar before becoming a documentary maker. She is acutely aware of the politics of filmmaking, of the problematic nature of claims to
‘make visible’ or ‘give voice to’ marginalized ‘others’, and of the gendering of media coverage of ‘public issues’. As Myra Macdonald writes, ‘The personal and the political, access and exposition, do not inevitably exist on separate planes, or possess inher-ently different claims to legitimation’ (1998: 120). Ai’s attempt to share authorship with her usually female subjects gives weight to their own voiced interpretations, at the same time as her refusal to focus on a single ‘personal interest’ story insists that these are public issues.
In the following interview, conducted in March 2007, Ai talks about her reasons for becoming a documentary maker, her aims, and the difficulties she faces.
How did you get interested in making documentaries?
In 2003, we started to prepare the performance of The Vagina Monologues. Because the students would graduate in 2004, there would be no more performances, so I wanted to have a videotape … so that we could use it as support material for our teaching.
In the same year I saw Hu Jie’s documentary, In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul. Lin Zhao was a woman, a college student. In 1957, like many intellectuals she responded to the call from Chairman Mao to comment on the policies of the Communist Party.
Of course, she criticized many of the policies and the mistakes made by the Party.
Several months later the whole situation changed, and she and many of that generation were classified as rightists, so she lost the chance to study, was sent away, and finally she was sent to prison. In prison, she wrote diaries with her blood, writing about many political ideas. She was sentenced to death in 1967, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution … Hu Jie got copies of the letters and diaries from her friends AN INTERVIEW WITH AI XIAOMING 179
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and other survivors, interviewed them and made a documentary about it. I thought it was a ground-breaking film because no-one dared – dares – enter that taboo area, … and I invited him to show the documentary and give a lecture … At the same time, on International Woman’s Day 2004, a woman graduate was murdered here on campus. There was an internet debate and many students thought it was the woman’s fault. Perhaps she did something wrong and so caused her boyfriend’s fury, so they blamed the woman. So we launched a campaign against violence against women and Hu Jie videotaped the event. And when I saw the programme he edited, I realized it was powerful to use video.
… Then I thought I could invite Hu Jie to videotape The Vagina Monologues … So we put it on stage again, just for the camera, and we started to make The Vagina Monologues: Stories Behind the Scenes, interviewing faculty and students … At that time I didn’t know how to use a camera … From that programme, I learned two things.
One was that a single camera was not enough to make the whole programme; we should have at least one more … And the other was that I was not satisfied with relying on Hu Jie’s camera and his ideas because he was not familiar with feminist thought. We had lots of debates – whether to edit out this or edit in that. He thought something was not good from an artistic perspective; I thought it was very good, powerful. They were points students needed. So that was how I started to do camera and editing myself.
So then you learned to use a camera …
A little bit, a little bit, not a professional camera. Then we decided to make Garden in Heaven … At that stage, when the case was being investigated, the court simply refused to accept the evidence provided by the mother. They didn’t accept that they’d done anything wrong. They insisted on their side, because all the investigation had been done by the police.
That was the young primary school teacher who was, you think, murdered by her boyfriend whose father was an important figure in local government. The police said she died of a heart attack but there was evidence of assault.
She had no heart disease. The second autopsy done by the independent experts from our university revealed that.
So why did you decide to make a film?
Because the police refused to accept the evidence, the conclusions from the independ-ent experts. So I thought: what could we do, how could we continue our activism? I thought at least we should let more people know what happened. We should start to collect evidence and show the evidence to more people as a form of advocacy … And when the court’s first session began, I went with Hu Jie … and I took a camera … And when we came back and I saw the tapes I’d done myself, suddenly I had the feeling that it was good, it was very good. It was good because it expressed what I felt, and it was good because I didn’t have to say, ‘You do this.’ I could film whenever I wanted.
And it was good because I could use the camera to say what I wanted to say.
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particular scene … I felt I was like a student: when you didn’t know how to write you would ask someone to write a letter for you, but if you learnt some words you would think you could write the letter yourself …
So from there you decided to make Taishi Village?
Taishi Village was not planned. 2005 was the tenth anniversary of the Beijing Women’s Conference6so we applied to make a film about what women’s NGOs had achieved in ten years … But that plan fell through … Then in September of that year I heard about the Taishi women’s hunger strike and sit-in. It was close to the university where I teach, so I went to the village in the first week of September … And so you followed that through until the point where you were actually attacked … Yes, that’s how it was made … At first I went with some graduates … But then I thought it wasn’t safe for students to go with me, so I didn’t invite any in the later stages because I couldn’t afford for any of them to be hurt in the conflict. The police asked them to show their papers and then they informed the university. I thought it wasn’t good for them, and they were too young.
And did you come under personal pressure as a result of that?
… Lots … lots … And you were threatened.
I was threatened because of the issues. The last time we left Taishi village their counsel-at-law had already been arrested, and some village leaders were in prison. We were attacked but no-one followed up the issue even after we reported it to the police, and there were some documents that said I was behind the events. They pointed to three names: one was the counsel-at-law who was in prison, one was the young man who was beaten, and one was me. I thought it was totally ridiculous. I was actually just an observer. I felt so frustrated, I felt so angry, because how could a government document draw such a conclusion without any investigation, when actually it’s a total lie? I shot all the scenes in front of the police camera, they videotaped what I was doing. They used their videotape as ‘proof’ that they had not done things, that they hadn’t hurt any people, but what a ridiculous argument. From our video we showed the audience the old granny and the young boy who were hurt and hospitalized.
So did you feel frightened for your own safety, or for your career?
Yes, a little bit. Not for my career. I was warned by my friends to hide my tapes or maybe I would be taken in … I think at that time I had friends, colleagues, who all thought I was a suspect in the event. I called a friend about something to do with teaching and the colleague said ‘Oh, you’ve come back! Everyone said you were arrested!’ I said, ‘Arrested for what?’ This means that in other universities in Guangzhou they had already heard that I would be taken in …
I felt that I was isolated. No journalists would come, no colleagues would call me. They had heard rumours. They even believed the rumours. I called a senior AN INTERVIEW WITH AI XIAOMING 181
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professor … and … asked whether one of our powerful alumni would help me, because I had done nothing wrong. I didn’t have a positive response. I felt disappointed. I thought: this didn’t work, this won’t work. Then a senior law professor in Beijing called me. She offered to help send the film to Central Government, to let them know what happened at the village level …
When you were making it, were you trying to provide evidence to Central Government? Or were you making it to show to a wider audience?
Both …
Did you get it to Central Government?
I think we sent it at the end of November. We thought it was OK, the film. We’d seen two hours – there were four episodes – and I sent it by express to my friend. She also suggested I send it to a law institute in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. I sent it there, and Hu Jie took it to Beijing, and friends in different circles and activists interested in the issue of free elections were all involved in distributing the documentary. Friends who have access to the State Council or the different depart-ments of Central Government got back to us saying they had sent the film to high level leaders.
Has it had any effect?
Taishi still suffered injustice, but at the end of 2005 both the villagers and their counsel-at-law were released. We don’t know whether the documentary helped.
However, in Beijing many lawyers and NGO people, and the experts who worked on free election issues made copies and distributed them …
From there you decided to make the documentary about AIDS in Henan Province?
Yes. In December, I got a call from a journalist in Beijing, who asked me to go to Hebei, because there was an outbreak of AIDS caused by blood transfusions. He had published a report, and he sent the report to us. Hu Jie and I had decided that we should make a documentary on human rights issues every year, and we were planning the film for the following year, and I thought that we hadn’t done a documentary on health rights – on women’s health issues. I thought it was a good opportunity, so we went to Hebei, about 300 kilometres from Beijing, to do some exploratory interviews. After eight days interviewing we decided to make the documentary … We did that first trip together but we didn’t have funding, so I went there and finished the shooting in about nine months …
But when I was there I started to think about how the blood had become contaminated, and decided I should trace its origins. So I went to Henan to interview Professor Gao Yaojie, and she showed me the photos she had taken in the villages. I also interviewed the leaders in NGO circles dealing with HIV issues and met the committee for victims of AIDS caused by blood transfusion … I was accepted as an independent observer on the committee and got information about what was going on … They were from different provinces, but Henan was the province where AIDS was a serious problem, so I went to Henan. I went on the days when they had an event, so we caught the event, the protests …
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What was your aim for this documentary? Was it again to raise awareness with Government, or was it to raise awareness outside?
Both. We have sent out more than 200 copies and the NGO in Beijing made 500 copies and distributed them among AIDS NGOs and also among some foundations who fund AIDS activism in China. And we showed it to journalists, and those journalists showed it to their colleagues …
You’re now in a situation where people are trying to buy your footage. What issues does that raise for you?
That’s true. I’ve had calls from friends who said a foreign company would like to buy footage, even pay £500 for a minute … But it’s very hard for me to say yes or no. We are always short of money, but I am afraid that I would be charged with selling information for profit, especially if it’s to a foreign agency, and that would be a dangerous charge against me. It’s a shame that we can’t distribute all our films. I believe that if we could, we wouldn’t need to apply for funding. But we can’t, and no mainland station would currently accept our programmes … I have been questioned about where I got the money to make these documentaries on so-called sensitive issues. There are rumours that I received money from foreign agencies, and that I make the documentaries for profit. It’s designed to threaten people and marginalize my work.
You’re making a documentary now about the Cultural Revolution and the issues that are still relevant today. Do you feel you have now become a documentary maker? Is that the most important thing for you to do now?
Yes. I don’t think that in mainland China there is anyone else like me who has taken up a camera – someone with a strong academic background, and who has very clear ideas about feminism, women’s interests, public interests, human rights, and memory. Documentaries are about memory – the importance of memory for indi-viduals and for social change.
Who do you feel is the most important audience for these documentaries now?
All people … but I think mainly for mainland China people. Audiences outside the totalitarian state have rich resources for discovering what happened in the past. They enjoy free speech, and they can say whatever they would like to say. But in China, especially for those who suffered, who lost their family members and who are still suffering from systematic social injustice, people need a way to understand others’
pain. They have a right to information and to know what strategies others took to defend their rights. I think the ideal audience, who will understand their importance, are those activists like us: lawyers, freelance writers, journalists with ideas for change, and the people in NGOs. And I’d wish for officials in the Government to benefit from
pain. They have a right to information and to know what strategies others took to defend their rights. I think the ideal audience, who will understand their importance, are those activists like us: lawyers, freelance writers, journalists with ideas for change, and the people in NGOs. And I’d wish for officials in the Government to benefit from