Can citizen journalism work in China? Villagers give their verdict
- Artists recruited the villagers in hope of empowering them, documented local issues they felt were under-reported by the Chinese media
- A film made from their mobile phone footage was screened in Shenzhen, but achieving lasting change proved more complex
On a chilly autumn day, a bus pulled over at Baishizhou, an urban village in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen that is due for demolition, and more than 80 people got off. They quickly divided into seven groups, sneaked into the village through different entrances and began filming using their phones.
Guo Qiwei was one of them: a group of villagers from Xisan, about 100km (60 miles) away in southwest Guangzhou, recruited last November by a dozen-strong artist collective to become “citizen journalists”.
The artists hoped Guo and the rest would film clips of Baishizhou’s residents to be edited together into a movie for their film studio, founded to document social issues.
They hoped the villagers could use filming as a tool to defend their rights when they encountered issues such as the forced demolition of their homes without fair compensation.
But Guo was just curious to learn whether her own village was really such a terrible place to live. The 30-year-old had heard Xisan mentioned on the news only once: in 2008, on a local radio show called Panyu News. It was not remotely flattering.
“The host said Xisan village had the most backwards economy and worst transport in the region,” Guo recalled this September, when the South China Morning Post visited to assess the project’s impact.